November 2019
In all the excitement of this year, we have totally neglected to put another blog out since JANUARY! Absolutely ridiculous! However, this will be sorted RIGHT NOW.
It's been a hell of a year for the Bandits, with a bunch of great gigs and some pretty big changes in the band too.
Firstly, we're super excited and proud to introduce (to anyone that hasn't seen him already) the man, the myth, the guitar LEGEND...Mr John Symonds!
John has joined this year and taken the sound to the next level with his brilliant playing. We've also been able to add a load of new songs to the set - a recent favourite is Place Your Hands!
In February, we played our first pub gig in ages at Molly Malones in Taunton and had an absolute blast! We were a little worried because (in case you hadn't noticed...) we're a bit loud and thought we might blow people's faces off if confined by walls and a roof...HOWEVER it turns out that walls and roofs make the Bandits sound pretty banging. We played a couple of sets and had everyone dancing through the night. Thanks very much if you came along that night! Since then we've been going back and forth trying to find a date for a return but struggled to line up our diaries BUT the exciting news is we have got it sorted now and have confirmed a gig there on 29th February 2020!
A bit later on in the year we were really proud to be invited to play at the Glastonbury Fringe Festival Launch Party, supporting Tankus The Henge (great band)! That was really fun and a beautiful setting in the ruins of the Abbey.
In June we returned to Home Farm Festival, which has become a real favourite of ours - such a great atmosphere there and all in aid of a brilliant charity. This was particularly fun for us as we were able to camp over and enjoy the rest of the bands together. We stayed until the very end to see the amazing REEF perform on the Sunday afternoon - absolutely worth every minute! When we got back it was time to air out the gigging gear - as good as the silver suit looks, it is pretty warm!!!
We also played at the brilliant Curry Rivel Live again, this year taking to the stage just before the headliners The Haus Band (another brilliant band!). We love this festival and have always been looked after so well there so this year we decided to film the set and put out a video to showcase how amazing this place is! Have a look at the video below:
Video credit: Keefikus Entertainment
We were really excited to play a bunch of other brilliant gigs through June and July including Exmouth Pride, Teignmouth Airshow and Exeter Festival, where we played just before the amazing Joey The Lips, as well as NessFest in Shaldon and the final Port Eliot Festival (super sad!! Such a good festival, hopefully will come back sometime in the not too distant future). All totally awesome gigs in different ways and great playing to so many people at each stop.
We then got to play at Watchet Festival, which is probably the biggest stage we've played on so far and we had an amazing time! We were really lucky to be looked after so well by the backstage team and even got to share a dressing room with actual HOT CHOCOLATE!!!!!
Then we had a little break from gigging because of a wedding in the band so we all had a big knees up and celebrated Dan & Helen's wedding day with them, which was absolutely beautiful!
And that, more or less, brings us up to now!
In these last few weeks of 2019 we have Taunton Winterfest, Totnes Christmas Market and Newton Abbot Christmas Market to make up our annual Frozen Snowballs Tour!
We're fortunate enough to be lining up some great gigs for next year with some new festivals on the horizon, which gives us lots to look forward to as we move towards 2020!
Thank you so much for all the support over the last few years, for singing and dancing with us, for coming out on cold nights to see us, for sweating in the sun with us and for all the likes/shares/comments on social media.
Here's to a brilliant new year!!