page_title: David Bramwell
section_title: The Haunted Moustache
hierarchical_section_title: David Bramwell / Stage shows / The Haunted Moustache
caption_attribution_description: David Bramwell performs Sing Along a Wickerman at Bom-Banes
context_page_description: David Bramwell is a British writer, musician, performer and broadcaster. For BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, he has made programmes on diverse subjects, including Ivor Cutler, clapping, time travel, and the murmurations of starlings. He is the founder and host of Brighton's spoken word night, the Catalyst Club. Bramwell is also a singer-songwriter with his band Oddfellow's Casino.
  Bramwell was born in Scunthorpe, moving to Doncaster at the age of six, where he lived until he was eighteen. After 'four long years studying geography' at Coventry Polytechnic, he moved to Brighton in the early 1990s. He describes the impact of Brighton in his book, The Haunted Moustache: 'For a northern boy in his early twenties and still wet behind the ears Brighton was overwhelming. I'd stumbled on an exotic seaside town that welcomed me with open arms....To top it off, Brighton was almost comically eccentric.' Much of Bramwell's work documents and celebrates the eccentricity of the seaside city, as he strives 'to keep the spirit of Brighton alive and through his work across a multitude of platforms.'
context_section_description: For the 2008 Brighton Fringe Festival, Bramwell createdThe Haunted Moustache, a one-man stage show in the storytelling tradition of Ken Campbell and Spalding Gray. It was directed by Nicola Haydn, who described it as "an affectionate tale of old Brighton from someone who was really there." Paul Levy, writing in Fringe Review, described The Haunted Moustache as "a piece of writing genius and a performance that doesn't always sit comfortably as either theatre or storytelling. However, it still manages to hold the audience in thrall."
  In 2011, The Haunted Moustache was dramatised for Radio 3's Between the Ears. It won a Sony Silver Award for best feature, and was followed by further Bramwell programmes, all produced by Sara Jane Hall. She described the making of The Haunted Moustache on a BBC blog: "When David Bramwell, presenter of The Haunted Moustache, first pulled out a box containing an unlikely inheritance – a small waxed moustache – I decided not to ask if it was real, or how much of his tale was true. Remarkably neither did anyone else.  It was a game between us – don't ask, don't tell –  and the final programme was a riddle for the listener – soothed by David's haunting music."
  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." Laura Lockington reviewed the book in the Brighton and Hove Independent: "Bramwell takes us on a roller coaster ride of discovery, from deep Doncaster, to outlandish Brighton in the 1990s....I expected this book to be funny (and it is) and full of quirky stories and facts (it really, really is) but I hadn't expected to feel the full ache of nostalgia for a city that has all but disappeared."
caption: David Bramwell performs "Sing-Along-a-Wickerman!" at Bom-Bane's on 31 March 2010
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D40", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "iPhoto 9.4.3", "Image DateTime": "2010:03:31 17:17:09", "Image ExifOffset": "200", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/15", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Unidentified", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "800", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2010:03:31 17:17:09", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2010:03:31 17:17:09", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "18/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "18", "EXIF SubSecTime": "10", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "10", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2069", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1363", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "27", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Soft", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}