it was a dark and stormy night, and there was this iceberg, see...

So, the Titanic Disaster Band having sunk, leaving naught but a wrack behind, I set up the three piece Lifeboat Band to carry on playing for barn dances and ceilidhs.   The crucial element is that I call the dances and lead the band on melodeon  with another couple of bods bashing away at a variety of stuff behind me.

The usual line-up has myself on melodeon (a sort of accordion that looks like a typewriter but hopefully doesn't sound too much like one), Karen Gedd on bass and  Jon Mayhew (first mate on the old Titanic) on guitar, mandola and whatever else he's found in his shed that night.  Sometimes, just for fun, someone else comes along instead and we have a visiting guest star, but you don't have to pay any more.

It's a bargain, really.

We play mostly relatively small venues - the Albert Hall is not for the likes of us.  We play for churches, charities, birthday parties and various celebratory functions - and generally avoid company events and weddings!  The avoidance of the latter is not for any deep philosophical reason, it's just that in my experience (which now goes back thirty years of playing dances) wedding receptions really need a more formal band structure with a bigger PA system and a separate caller.  The Lifeboat Band was really set up for more informal and jolly occasions (not that a wedding can't be jolly, but you know what I mean...), and we have a lot of fun playing them.

We charge a lot less than most bands on the grounds that there are only three of us!  Most bands charge between five and six hundred quid, which is fair enough as they not only have to sort out the band itself but also have to buy in the caller - we, of course, have the caller built in, strapped securely to his trusty melodeon.  So we charge between two fifty and three hundred for more or less local dances - local being anywhere west of Macclesfield, south of Blackpool, East of Eden and north by northwest, though I may have got muddled up with book titles towards the end of that sentence. But you know what I mean. And we aren't half good!

Contact me, as ever, by email and we'll sort it all out. Good, eh?

PS. I don't wear the oilskins at dances!