Tuning up is the bain of the brass banding world. Don’t you just love it when you hear the words “Let’s have a tune up”. The conductor lifts the dreaded contraption off the stand, spends another ten minutes fiddling around trying to get it to work, discovers the battery is flat, replaces them and resets, […]
After the drama and euphoria of playing at this year’s National Finals at the Royal Albert Hall, I chatted with 4Bars Rest’s Iwan Fox, reminiscing banding times past when we both played for Tredegar in the late 80s and 90s, when I could fit into a ‘medium’ size band jacket with room to spare and […]
Have you noticed how inventive conductors can be? They try to make you visualise the unbelievable. They make things up. They lie like a cheap watch. But why? Is it because they think telling porkies is the best psychological tool to motivate and get the band to play better to puff up their own ego, […]
The summer park job season is upon us and I just did my first of the year at the end of May in Bedwellty Park, Tredegar. The grounds are magnificent, the bandstand wonderful, the best place in Tredegar, not far from the large garden shed that the local band rehearse in. It would have been […]
It’s that time of year again when over sixty invited bands prepare for the Spring Festival at Tackpool… sorry I meant Blackpool (Freudian slip). My band, City of Cardiff, got the best deal this year with Hubert Bath’s Freedom, a great piece of music that isn’t as tricky as the other sections. After recalling the […]
Would Lewis Hamilton prepare for a Grand Prix driving his formula one car round a few roundabouts in Milton Keynes? Would Fred Astaire have practiced his amazing tap-dancing routines with Ginger Rogers atop a tin tray on the kitchen table? Would Jürgen Klopp, Manager of Liverpool, train his first team squad for an FA Cup […]
When a brass banding competition or concert approaches, you can rehearse as much as you like, but there is always the potential for something weird to happen before, during or after the performance. My first encounter happened the very first time I stood up in front of an audience way back in the mid 70s […]
After retiring from a thirty-year career in the fire service on those big red shiny trucks, I set up my own fire risk assessment company as cartooning would not keep the cupboard stocked with enough food to hide my starving wife’s and kid’s ribs. As a fire risk assessor, it amazes me how little attention […]
I overhead a top section player at the recent contest… “Drawn last and I won’t be on stage till gone nine. By the time the results arrive, it’ll be tomorrow before I get home.” I smiled, remembering when I first started playing. Someone must have had an evil streak to invent the fourth section. Think […]
Our trusty conductor has just emailed our start up schedule after long Covid Hibernation. My first emotion was total elation, which saw me leaping around the house. After the euphoria had subsided, three questions dawned on me, as it has for most banders. Q1 – Where is my instrument? Is it still in the under-stair […]