I was wondering what sort of bands play in your hometowns?
Who do you get for a wedding? Who do you get for a celebration?
Are live bands still doing well?

Ahh, an interesting subject Heather.
As a former musician, I grew up playing in bands at dances, and then spent years traveling and playing night clubs. Unfortunately the live music scene here locally is not what it once was. The general public seems more interested in frequenting places with "recorded" music. What a shame. There is one excellent group in my area though that I try to catch at least once a month. They are much much better than 90% of the big name concert groups that I have seen, but alas, they don't have a "gimmick" so they never made it. You can check out their web site at www.expensivehobby.com

when we got married in scotland, we had a ceilidh band. this is quite common - we found a great band that called the dances. this was important as a lot of guests were coming from other countries and wouldn't know how to do that dances.

the band we called was: 'Robbie Shepherd's Nighmare' - they were fantastic, with a great sense of humour and also made up some dances so everyone had to learn some of them. there were children there and the band were very accommodating of this.

my brother in law plays in a band which does weddings, Christmases and all types of celebrations - they have been going for years and they get booked practically all year around. for a few years they played for Rangers team events, which was very exciting for him as he is an avid supporter. they play chart music, some traditional songs for wedding such as: 'flower of scotland' and the song well covered by Runrig - oops forgotten the name but it is almost always played at the end of the wedding alongside 'auld lang syne'

what about where you're from Bruyere..?

[ 03-12-2002: Message edited by: allynellie ]

In California we had many bands around for any sort of occasion. I played in a couple like Justawful.
I was in a Latin band and the really big Mexican American weddings were real extravaganzas at which you'd have a Mariachi band (ok ok like on Zorro or something) and then you'd have the more modern band go on.
We'd do everything from salsa to oldies but latin ones!
It was fun.

I was in a few oldies groups and we'd play the swing things and big band era tunes for seniors or even shows and stuff.

Here in France, people hire bands for weddings and events.
I know we hired some Swedish group for a big event here and I wasn't terribly impressed.

Oh yes, I also had a medieval or renaissance quartet or quintet going. We did the banquets and stuff, you know where the guys act like Henry the VIIIth?
We even had a real boar's head we trotted out at Christmas. I did malls and weddings too.
I played recorder for that one. And in costume.

Here in France on June 20th it's the fete de la musique. You'll have music all day long all over the country. It's pretty wild sometimes!