Now in its 12th year, The Great Escape’s reputation as leading music biz shindig and new music showcase has been further cemented by major support from the BBC, 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne and Steve Lamacq live-broadcasting Jubilee Square.

And not unlike its Glastonbury coverage the Beeb may well be responsible for the deluge of rain, making for a sodden opening day zigzagging across Brighton – though thankfully with no mud to contend with.

It’s a credit to the festival’s vast and diverse programme that delegates and punters could have infinitely different experiences, though the excellently named Flamingods are good as anyone to warm up Thursday’s evening schedule with an anarchic dose of psychedelia in The Haunt. The Moshi Moshi-signed band have a dusty, lost cassette take on Afro-Asian sounds, complete with Turkish qanun instruments and North African taqiyah caps.

Amid the heaving throng of bodies craning to see band, the sonics sometimes get lost, as if down the labyrinth souks of Marrakech, though it’s all part of the meandering fun. Over at the Sallis Benney Theatre, Toronto sing-songwriter Charlotte Day Wilson entices an admiring crowd up the road for her lush Stratocaster-baked indie RnB.

The Bad Bad Not Good collaborator’s introspective balladry is a welcome remedy to the Beyoncé imitators of X-Factor, though at times she’s just as overwrought.

Backed by some programmed housey beats, she laments her lack backing band but pretty much holds her own, particularly when her stoned reverb-soaked guitar comes to fore.

Showing the breadth of female talent in this year’s programme – as well as the wholesale assimilation of pop and R&B tropes into contemporary indie music – North London duo Ider are next up downstairs at Patterns. The arresting pair swap various ‘80s indebted sound programmes kit, but it’s their pitch perfect twin-like ability to harmonise as one that’s most remarkable.

Taking in moody electro and tropical house, their version of Outkast’s Roses breaths fresh melodicism into the early noughties classic, while their closing acapella track sees them eyes-locked in a psychic street shanty, the sozzled crowd briefly hushed to marvel at the performance.

Finally, the delicate voice of fledgling siren Stevie Parker could well have been swallowed up in the arches and turrets of One Church. But it’s a credit to her songcraft and band that she fully owns the chasmic space, her understated captivating stage presence belying a churning grandiosity. With an album out this week, the 24-year-old Bristolian could well be on the verge of big things, her confessional songs an expansive update on The Xx’s late night tales.