And for good reason: we’ve got The Great Escape, Brighton Fringe, Brighton Pride, plus venues like the Dome and the Brighton Centre. The list goes on.
But just over an hour away by train there’s a festival which now rivals what our city has to offer.
Victorious Festival has been going in Portsmouth since 2012, starting from humble beginnings in the Historic Dockyard to attracting a reported 80,000 people a day last year.
The line-ups have ramped up too.
This year’s headliners included Queens of the Stone Age, Vampire Weekend, Nelly Furtado and Kings of Leon – a pretty stellar line-up by any measure.
Yet, to quote a cliche, it still feels like something of a hidden gem.
As someone who is from Portsmouth originally, I’ve grown up with the festival as an annual tradition, and seen the impact it’s had on the city in the last decade.
Yet when I told my colleagues I was going, no-one had heard of it – bar the one person I work with who’s also from Portsmouth.
My other colleague Charles (who I would consider to be a music buff) checked out the line up and it got his seal of approval – evidence, to my mind, that it has appeal beyond the ‘Brighton bubble’.
Everything Everything kicked off our Victorious experience on the Castle Stage, in the shadow of Southsea Castle from which it gets its name (in fact, the Tudor landmark was itself used as a stage – the fittingly named Henry’s House).
While slightly smaller than the main Common Stage, this is where I have gravitated to in Victorious Festivals past, as it’s usually where the poppier acts are found.
The Mercury nominees certainly got the Castle crowd moving – including a fez-wearing fellow who was jumping about like his life depended on it.
It was one of several similar adornments we saw that night (along with some crude bucket hats) – the former of which we assumed was in anticipation for Madness later on.
But we hopped over to the Common Stage to see Kaiser Chiefs blast out their hits first.
As Ricky Wilson started clambering up the scaffolding, their number one hit Ruby provoked a guttural roar from the crowd shouting the hook; the mating cry of the millennial ‘lad’.
I Predict a Riot and Oh My God prompted a similar reaction.
Next up were the Friday headliners Queens of the Stone Age, who curiously did one of their biggest hits – No One Knows – early on; which prompted us to head over early to check out Madness.
The ska band is woven into the history of the festival, headlining in 2017 and 2021, and while not exactly my cup of tea, their energy was infectious.
We had a proper knees-up to the likes of Baggy Trousers, belted out Our House and swayed with our arms draped around each other for It Must Be Love.
This felt like a fitting ending, rather then the bemusing encore which saw frontman Suggs put a towel on his head and seemingly imitate a rich sheikh, telling the crowd ‘I’d like to buy your football club’.
It had already been a day of some controversy, with Irish band The Mary Wallopers’ set being pulled after they displayed the Palestinian flag onstage.
The move prompted several acts to pull out in protest and Victorious to issue an apology, which left some of Saturday’s line-up, like Travis, getting bumped up to a more prominent slot.
Pop duo Rizzle Kicks referenced the controversy themselves as they kicked off day two, with frontman Jordan Stephens telling the Common Stage crowd: “Everyone who stands up against ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide, starvation and famine should be respected.”
The Brighton boys were blessed with a sun-drenched afternoon, symbolic of their similarly sunny songs – although Stephens did not mince his words when he described Varndean School and Durrington in a less than positive light.
But it was easy to forgive him as he whirled about the stage like a spinning top to bangers including I Was a Youngster and Down with the Trumpets, horns blaring as you’d expect.
As my friend put it so well: who doesn’t love a brass section?
While the Victorious line-up is skewed towards rock and indie acts, you can probably already tell that I prefer a bit of pop.
So it comes as no surprise therefore that Nelly Furtado was the person I was most desperate to see all weekend.
Her 2006 album Loose was a formative record in my teens so my expectations were high, but she exceeded them with a set packed full of hits and no filler.
I’m Like a Bird proved her distinctive vocals have not dimmed in the last two decades, while Love Bites and Eat Your Man introduced the crowds to her latest attempts at musical male mastication.
But she saved the song which originated this theme for last – and what an ending.
Having already been whipped up into a frenzy by Promiscuous Girl, when the distinctive kick snare and drums of Maneater kicked in, she had the crowd in the palm of her hand – myself included.
When I looked about for my friends, I saw they had backed off a fair amount – I assume so they didn’t get hit by one of my flailing limbs.
I didn’t think it could get much better. But then a remix of the tune with Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction pushed me into a state of near-sonic ecstasy.
Sunday’s performers had big stilettos to fill, or in the case of Massaoke, glam rock platform boots.
But what’s not to like about a singalong by the beach of karaoke tunes?
The exuberantly-dressed band led the crowd at the more intimate Seaside Stage through a catalogue of classics, culminating in the karaoke holy grail: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
Our weary feet had a bit of a rest watching Gabrielle, who has swapped a sweeping fringe for an eye-patch these days and sounded just the same as she did when she released Dreams all those years ago.
But they got a workout for Kings of Leon, who drew a huge crowd for the festival finale, which also coincided with Melanie C’s DJ set on the Castle Stage.
Unsurprisingly, the crowd here was much thinner, meaning we could get up to the barrier.
And while Sporty Spice did not sing, her outfit and athletic dancing lived up to her name as she remixed songs from her back catalogue and beyond to enthusiastic revellers.
Then, before we knew it, the stage crews were clearing away her decks and it was all over again for another year.
As we walked back home, surrounded by thousands of others, we all agreed that the line-up just keeps getting better and better.
It feels like Victorious is on the cusp of a new phase, one which will draw in crowds from Brighton and beyond, not just within the Portsmouth city limits.
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