Last updated: June 15, 2026
Article 3 — The Sabbatical Files
If you’re just joining, this is the third post from my UK trip to see Ren and The Big Push. I started with arriving in London and my first steps into Brighton, then wrote about a week of intimate live shows.
There is a version of Brighton you see when you arrive as a tourist. The seafront. The pier. The restaurants with their menus facing the ocean and their prices facing London. It is beautiful, and it is real, but it is not the whole story.
The whole story takes longer to find. It lives in the Lanes, in the narrow cobblestone alleys that wind through the city center with no particular logic and no real agenda. It lives in the pubs, in the corners of parking lots that look unremarkable until you recognize them from a video you have watched forty times. It lives in a fish and chip shop on the seafront where a man named Mohammad was, on the afternoon we visited, clearly having the worst shift of his career.
I will get to Mohammad. He deserves his moment.
The City Itself
Brighton welcomed me in a way I did not entirely expect.
I am someone who tends to feel like an outsider in most places, at least at first. New cities take time. But Brighton did not make me work for it. The interactions I had, whether with other Renegades, with locals, with people I met entirely by accident, had a warmth and an openness to them that I kept noticing and kept being grateful for. It felt like a city that had long since decided it did not care much about who you were before you got there. You were just here now, and that was fine.
The seafront is genuinely lovely. I spent time just sitting near the water, watching the city move around me, which is one of my favorite things to do in any place I visit. Brighton had this push and pull to it. The bars and pubs could get packed, especially in the evenings, full of energy and noise and people who clearly came out every night of the week. But there were also these quieter pockets I kept finding and returning to, corners of the city that let me slow down and just exist for a while. Brighton made room for both, and the city has layers, and I was glad to find them.
Genesis: Finding Ren’s Music Video Locations on Preston Street
I should tell you something embarrassing, or maybe just funny: I had been staying in my Airbnb for a couple of days before I realized where I was.
“Genesis” is one of Ren’s songs. The music video was filmed on the streets of Brighton, on Preston Street. The corner where it meets the seafront. A fish and chip shop where he starts rapping and then spills out into the street, and the camera follows him, and everything has this kinetic, alive quality to it. I love that song.
My Airbnb was literally on the corner and the front door can technically be seen in the music video for a split second.
I genuinely did not connect these two facts for approximately two full days. And then something clicked, and I went back out and stood on the corner and looked around and felt a little ridiculous and also completely delighted. I did not eat at the fish and chip shop (I had already eaten) but I did take a photo at the entrance.
Along King’s Road there are these concrete seating structures with wooden pallet tops, simple benches really, the kind of thing you walk past without thinking twice. In the Genesis video Ren hops up on one and walks along it, then hops onto another, with the kind of casual ease that suggests he has done it a thousand times. I attempted to recreate this. I will not be sharing all of the footage. What I will say is that Ren does it with grace and I nearly contributed to the local A&E statistics. It was funny. I was fine. The video exists.
The Tales: Where Ren Filmed His Most Powerful Storytelling
Here is where I need to slow down a little, because what I want to talk about next means something to me beyond the geography.
Ren has built, over years, a body of work that goes beyond individual songs. He is, at his core, a storyteller. He writes characters. He gives them lives and conflicts and voices. He performs all of them himself. Some people have tried to label what he does. “Bardcore” gets thrown around, and honestly, for the Tales at least, it fits as well as anything. But I stopped trying to categorize him a while ago. He seems to operate from his own rulebook entirely, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. The genre conversation is less interesting than just following wherever he goes next.
Within that body of work is a series of interconnected pieces that Renegades have come to call the Tales, beginning with “The Tale of Jenny and Screech.” You can explore the entire Tale universe through this YouTube playlist, which includes the Instagram stories he released alongside the official songs.
I want to be honest with you: those songs are not easy. The subject matter is heavy. I am not going to summarize the storyline here, because I do not want to flatten it, and because you should experience it yourself, in the way it was meant to be experienced. What I will say is that musically, lyrically, and in terms of pure vocal and acting ability, what Ren does across those tracks is something I did not know a person could do with a guitar and a voice. It stopped me the first time I heard it, and it has not stopped stopping me since.
It’s pure brilliance, in my opinion. I’m obviously a fan, so take that for what it’s worth, but to me he’s a musically creative genius.
This is the part where I need to say something about Ren’s work that goes beyond the music itself, because if you have only listened and never watched, you are getting half the experience at most.
Ren and his team treat the visual component of a song as equally important as the lyrics and the music. The videos are not afterthoughts or promotional tools. They are part of the art. Sometimes the video carries story that the song alone cannot hold. There will be a moment mid-song where the music drops away entirely and something is acted out, a scene, a confrontation, a quiet revelation, and then the song picks back up and you feel it differently because of what you just witnessed. It is theatrical in the truest sense of the word.
Through my Patreon membership I have gotten access to a lot of the behind-the-scenes content, and it has only deepened my appreciation for what goes into all of it. What strikes me most is how involved Ren is at every level of the creative process. He is not handing off the visual side to someone else and checking in at the end. He is in it. The concept, the direction, the performance, the details. Everyone around him is equally locked in, and the BTS content makes clear how much hard work the whole team puts into this. Watching it, you start to understand that what you see in the finished video is not accidental. Every choice was a choice.
Which is why standing in the actual locations matters. You are not just visiting a street. You are stepping into a frame you already know.
Most of the Tales, if not all of them, were filmed in Brighton. Parking lots. Small alleyways. Places that do not look like much from the outside.
Using the Ren Maps, a community-built Google Maps collection of filming locations across the city, I found them. I stood in those parking lots. I walked those alleyways. I am aware, on some level, of how this must look to a passerby. But I think most people, if they were honest, have a place in the world that matters to them because of what it represents, not what it looks like. These were those places for me.
Christina, a fellow Renegade who had been to Brighton before and has been involved in helping build and maintain the maps, was enormously helpful in tracking some of these down. The Renegade community operates this way constantly. Someone knows something, and they share it freely, and someone else benefits from it, and the whole thing keeps moving forward.
The Druid’s Head: Where Vincent’s Tale Begins
More recently, Ren released “Vincent’s Tale,” a sort of continuation, different characters and storyline but all within the larger universe he seems to be creating, with references to the earlier tales along the way.
The opening of Vincent’s Tale is set in the Lanes. Ren walks out of a pub called the Druid’s Head and moves through the narrow streets, in character, telling the story as it begins to unfold. I walked those same streets. I went to the Druid’s Head. I had a pint of beer and some food and sat with it for a while.
There is something particular about sitting in a place where a story was told. The location does not change what the story means, but it adds a dimension to it. A texture. You understand, in a physical way, what the light was like and how narrow the street was and why the camera moved the way it did.
I also, while in Brighton for the Big Push shows, got to meet the actor who plays Vincent in the Tales. He looks like a dead ringer for Vincent van Gogh. Although the story isn’t really about van Gogh, Ren has named all the Vincent’s Tale songs after famous van Gogh paintings.
I think he was a little taken aback by all the Ren fans approaching him in Brighton after the Brixton show. He was genuinely kind, easy to talk to. I have a photo with him that I will include below. I managed not to embarrass myself too much, which I consider an achievement given that I have probably watched these videos more times than is entirely reasonable.
I love most of Ren’s catalogue for various reasons but what he does with this particular project is breathtaking. His storytelling within a song, the way he conveys emotion through the whole experience, is something I’ve never really seen anywhere else.
The Brighton Dome
The Big Push has played the Brighton Dome before, which is a large and architecturally striking venue not far from the Royal Pavilion. It was not part of this particular tour, but I walked past it and made a point of stopping. If you spend enough time in the world of a band you love, even the places where things happened that you were not there for start to feel relevant. It is a way of filling in a history you arrived at late.
The Royal Pavilion: Brighton’s Most Photographed Landmark
Speaking of striking architecture: the Royal Pavilion is one of those buildings that stops you in your tracks.
It sits in the middle of Brighton like something that was placed there from a different world. The design is Indo-Saracenic, originally inspired by Indian Mughal architecture and completed in 1822 for King George IV. From the outside it looks like a palace that belongs in another hemisphere, all domes and minarets and improbable grandeur.
I was gifted a ticket to go inside. I did not end up using it, mostly due to timing. But the ticket is valid for a year, and I am returning to Brighton in August for the summer festivals, so I will go then. From what I understand there is a museum inside, along with rooms that retain much of the original Regency-era design. I am genuinely curious.
The Church of St. Bartholomew: The Swan Song Filming Location
The Church of St. Bartholomew was another stop during my time in Brighton. The Big Push used it as the filming location for “Swan Song.”
The church itself is striking, tall in a way that seems almost out of proportion with the streets around it. While we were there, someone was playing the organ, and the sound filled the entire space in a way that is hard to describe if you have not stood inside a building made for that kind of acoustics. I understood immediately why they chose it. Not just for the sound, but for the architecture itself: the soaring lines, the stained glass, the way the light filtered through and shifted across the floor as we stood there. It felt like the kind of place that was built to hold something larger than the people inside it. Standing there, I could absolutely picture why a song like that needed a setting like this.
#SaveMohammad
I need to close with this, because it has become one of my favorite memories from the entire trip, in the way that minor disasters sometimes become the best stories.
A few of us decided to grab lunch at a fish and chip shop on the seafront. Standard enough. We found a table, looked at the menus, ordered. And then we noticed the manager.
I do not know if he was the manager or the owner. What I do know is that for the entire duration of our meal, every complaint, every order issue, every problem that arose in the entire establishment was directed at one specific member of staff. His name, which we learned quickly, was Mohammad.
Now, to be clear: I have no idea whether any of it was actually Mohammad’s fault. For all I know, Mohammad had been causing chaos all morning. What I do know is that the manager, an old-school, loudmouth type, not threatening, just very much the kind of man who has opinions and shares them at volume, had decided that Mohammad was the singular answer to every question being asked that day. Every complaint, every order, every hiccup in the flow of the universe: Mohammad. It had an almost absurd, theatrical quality to it by the end. Like watching a one-man Greek chorus who had identified his protagonist.
By the midpoint of our meal, we had collectively and quietly decided that we were on Mohammad’s side. By the end, we had a hashtag. #SaveMohammad. A movement of four, which is a very small movement, but movements start somewhere.
I hope Mohammad has found better employment since. If you happen to be reading this, Mohammad: you were the best thing in that restaurant, and you deserved more.
What Brighton Became
I did not expect to feel about Brighton the way I ended up feeling about it.
Cities surprise you that way. You arrive with a plan, or a loose idea of a plan, and the city has its own ideas. Brighton had its music video corners where the Tales were filmed and its cobblestone lanes and its seafront and its slightly chaotic energy and its genuine warmth. And it had the Renegades, scattered across its streets for weeks, converging and dispersing and converging again around shows and dinners and impromptu walks and all the small moments that end up being the ones you remember.
I will be back in August for the summer festivals. I already know I will feel something when I land back in Brighton. Like returning to a place that has decided you belong there, even if you are only passing through.
Next up in this series covers the Chalk Show in Brighton and meeting Ren
Tags: Brighton, Ren, The Big Push, Genesis, Vincent’s Tale, The Tale of Jenny and Screech, Renegades, UK sabbatical, travel, live music, The Lanes, Royal Pavilion, Druid’s Head