They’re brilliant, bloody brilliant!

For as long as I’ve known my husband – and I knew him for a dozen or so years before we eve even imagined going out together, he has been involved in music. His dad was musical and played in various venues where they lived, and as soon as husband was old enough to hold a drumstick and could knock out a decent rhythm he accompanied his dad. Growing up he was in several bands – or groups as they were called then, and he toured all over their area, and further afield, and I love his many hilarious stories of those times. He moved on to art college and music of various sorts still occurred and eventually he headed north as a teacher and found the opportunity to play in every sort of musical group, from pit orchestra to jazz, to night club trios to rock, and then to the wonderful world of the brass band. All through these experiences he not only made great music he made great, lifelong friends.

Along the way he and I got together, married and had a family and then we moved from the north-west to the south west, and obviously the music continued. He was a founder member of what started as a pub band, Celtic Shambles – Celtic the genre and shambles the way they played! In fact they were very good, and great fun to watch. It wasn’t long before he joined a rock band which went through various transformations and is now the very excellent Lemon Sharks. Once he was able to give up the day job, various other musical opportunities occurred as well as the band, he started to  play bass ukulele in a group which comprised a number of our friends plus others, and from that emerged a shanty band, the Beach’d Buoys which I mentioned recently.

There are ten Buoys in the band with various musical experiences behind them, but the key to it all is having fun and enjoying themselves, but also practicing and singing well enough to entertain an audience in order to raise money for a local children’s hospice. They take their music seriously, practicing twice a week,  but there are plenty of laughs too. They play plenty of gigs in the immediate area and further afield too – and last weekend, as I described on a previous post, they took part in the Mevagissey shanty-fest along with forty or so other bands. I’ve seen them sing many times, but last weekend I thought they were really good, so tight, so together, having a good time themselves and exchanging banter but not to such an extent that it excluded the audience (which does happen with some musical groups!) One of the other bands was in the same venue while they were playing, and I heard one of the chaps keep saying, ‘brilliant, they’re brilliant, bloody brilliant’! And I have to say I agreed with him!

One of the venues was in a very old building, husband had to stand between the beams! I love this pair of pictures: