I noticed in City News last Sunday an item in which Brighton and Hove City Council's cultural committee declared its support for Norman Cook's concert and, moreover, announced its crucial importance for Brighton's image as a happening place in its European Capital of Culture bid.

We should congratulate our committee members for their imaginative foresight.

Indeed, all those cultural studies seminars they undoubtedly attended in their student days have paid off, at last, in practical application.

For a fraction of the cost of the Baltic Exchange, a recently opened art gallery costing £46 million in an obscure, provincial, northern town, our council has upstaged Gateshead with a magnificent spectacle, a veritable postmodernist collage of recycled packaging and pure sound. (Some might use the words "litter" and "noise pollution" but these terms are elitist, value-laden and to be avoided.)

Well done, lads - oh, sorry, I should write "persons" - after Saturday night, the prize of European Capital of Culture is surely in the bag.

-Peter Seddon, Head of Fine Art, University of Brighton