Charlie Peverett and David Morrison promote under the glorious name - The Gilded Palace of Sin - now one of the leading lights in the rapidly rising interest in Americana and new country music. I asked Charlie for a tour of The Palace:

"I had been thinking of setting up a club night where I could play all my Grant Lee Buffalo records. There wasn't one in Brighton, or anywhere else for that matter, but that is what I felt the world needed. I didn't care if anyone turned up, it was really the idea of hearing the music loud whilst crying into a pint - my idea of a perfect evening.

Around the time this idea was forming, I was introduced to the redoubtable David Morrison in a Hove basement. He, as it turned out, was also a secret country music lover, contemplating an outlet for his under appreciated record collection. As freaks do, we quickly formed an alliance.

The first night was arranged for early in 2001, in the very same cellar bar where we'd met. Although the original intention had been just to play records, we had realised that a live act might provide more of a spectacle than we could offer (we'd never understood the Fatboy Slim thing). We contacted our first performers through friends. The Arlenes played to only about 15 punters, but everyone seemed to have a good time necking the free tequila and monkey nuts.

The Arlenes put us on to friends of theirs in the London music scene. A month later and we had lured Alan Tyler and B J Cole to the same subterranean venue - and this time there were a lot more punters. Sold-out nights with Jason Ringenberg and Flophouse Junior followed that summer, and we began to recognise the faces turning up to every show. The atmosphere was like nothing else - warm, good-humoured, appreciative. We'd started to use different venues, taking the Gilded Palace wherever we wanted, and the crowds followed.

The performers cottoned on to this, as we started to build close relationships with the acts we were putting on. Some of these were very close indeed - Dave met his future wife Susan Young from Flophouse Junior when she came over to play their debut European show. By the autumn, we weren't having to do all the chasing of acts, as agents and performers started asking us for dates. With the addition of Shaun Whitehouse, a former punter, there are now three of us working in our spare time to make the gigs happen.

What we'd originally conceived as a low-key activity took on a momentum of its own. Before we knew it, we were putting on up to five shows a month, with the majority of performers from the US and Canada. We've had the honour of welcoming many of our favourite artists such Richard Buckner, Mark Mulcahy, Joe Pernice and Laura Cantrell to the smallest of venues, and have watched the rise of the scene's hottest live acts like The Sadies and Menlo Park, who have played to successively bigger audiences each time they've come to Brighton. We've also seen the realisation of one of dreams, in bringing the most vital artist of the moment Gillian Welch to the Gilded Palace.

We like working with other people who live and breathe great music, and who are happy to go out of their way to make a show happen. In Brighton, this includes people like promoter Anna Moulson from Melting Vinyl, while further a field we do a lot of work with Bob Paterson from East Central One agency and Kim Harrison-Lavoie from Monotreme Records.

The success of the Gilded Palace has coincided with a huge upsurge in enthusiasm for Americana, championed by the likes of Uncut magazine and Bob Harris on Radio 2 - though we'd like to take a little of the credit ourselves, of course. It encompasses the most delicate acoustic folk and utterly balls-out rock, meaning that it appeals to a lot of ageing punks as well as a younger audience to whom nu-metal just doesn't do the trick. The Gilded Palace crowd is one of the oddest mixes of people you're ever likely to see at a gig, and we love it.

The burgeoning Brighton Americana scene has thrown up some genuine talents of its own. The sheer quality of the local support acts we have been able to choose from is one of the most unexpected delights of promoting here, and we fully expect to see some worldwide attention fall upon the likes of Caramel Jack, Bare-skin Rugs, The Customers, Salter Cane, Good Morning Captain, Hart Crane, The General Store and others - all radically different bands doing wonderful things with banjos, mandolins and barbed lyrics.

Undoubtedly the 'alt country' spotlight will fade at some point - but I think that its legacy will have huge repercussions on the live scene, as younger audiences continue to rediscover traditional instruments and superb lyrics. Given the incredible number and quality of bands emerging from both the US and UK, it seems unlikely that the bubble will burst for promoters like ourselves, who don't do it for money and like to work directly with the performers wherever possible.