David Bramwell

'[5] Reviewing the second album, Winter Creatures, Everett True said that Bramwell's music was 'firmly out of sync with current trends, being instead a delicate pastoral exploration of the countryside, coloured with brass and sweet vocals reminiscent of Soft Machine-era Robert Wyatt.

Past talk subjects include Having No Sense of Smell, Marmite, The History of the Martini, Demonology for Dummies, Slime Mould, The Eating Habits of Politicians and The Ontological Argument for God[8] The club has a fortnightly podcast, called the Odditorium.

A typical entry in the 'What's On' section claims that, on 28 December, Brightonians celebrate Poseidon's Day: 'Once a year, 23 Brighton councillors gather on the nudist beach to offer blessings and sacrifices to the venerable sea god.

'[10] Adam Trimingham, reviewing the fourth edition of The Cheeky Guide to Brighton in The Argus found it to be generally well-informed, but complained that 'after 300 pages, the relentless facetiousness is grating...

'[11] For the 2008 Brighton Fringe Festival, Bramwell created The Haunted Moustache, a one-man stage show in the storytelling tradition of Ken Campbell and Spalding Gray.

"[14] In 2016, Bramwell published The Haunted Moustache as a book, "part memoir, essay and scrapbook (which) pays tribute to some of the town's countercultural heroes, past and present.

[16] Bramwell took a sabbatical from his teaching job in 2008 to investigate utopian communities, including Findhorn, Esalen, Freetown Christiania, Damanhur and The Other World Kingdom.

Reviewer Ben McCormick wrote, "Through the pages, as you accompany the author on his journey...you feel like you're meeting a wealth of strange and familiar folk who in one way or another are just as lost, uncertain, bewildered and ultimately seeking some kind of answer as we undoubtedly all are.

The investigation of utopian communities inspired Bramwell to promote Zocalo, an annual event, first held in 2006, in which Brighton people were encouraged to turn off their televisions, and take chairs onto their streets to get to know their neighbours.

"[22] In 2016, Bramwell collaborated with Jo Keeling, editor of The Ernest journal, to produce a new book, The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world.

According to the Ernest journal website, the book is 'a playful re-telling of history told not through the fish eye lens of its victors but through the fascinating stories of lesser-known creative mavericks.

I knew if I was going to make this journey as a pilgrimage it'd have to be along the river Don where I grew up, to search for its lost water goddess and to trace its biological and metaphorical death and resurrection over the millennia.

The story now included a childhood memory of a family visit to Ladybower Reservoir, during the drought of 1976, when the eight-year-old Bramwell saw a ghostly church spire rising from the water.

It symbolises Bramwell's world view perfectly — one where the conventional (a family day out in the Hillman Hunter) exists happily side-by-side with the unconventional (Excalibur!).

This was described by Norman Miller in Bearded Magazine as a 'grand rag-bag of wonderment': 'Six years in the making, it augmented pastoral electronica with spoken word and field recordings to create a unique meditation on northern English landscape, inspired by the path of the River Don....With vocal contributions from Alan Moore, the album touched on topics as diverse as environmentalism and the occult, plus the sort of whimsy loved by fans of someone like Ivor Cutler.

'[27] The band later released an instrumental version of the album, Music from the Cult of Water, its tracks now 'cast as a seamless, shimmering flow of sounds, like the fluid river that provides its source inspiration.