As I mentioned in my last blog, I love live music and going to see bands. Recently in my hometown of Weymouth we had the Quayside Music Festival. This event has been going for a couple of years now and happens on the May bank holiday (as well as another one in August), and was started after the demise of the trawler race festival.
The Quayside festival showcases local bands, as well as bands from further afield. This blog post will contain some of my highlights (or the bits I remember) from the festival on Sunday 29th May 2011.
Due to the logistics of heading back from Oxford that morning and waiting for taxi's, I did not arrive at the Quayside until 1.30pm which meant I unfortunately missed the very well deserved battle of the bands winners: The Replacements and also Maria Greenwood's Hustle featuring Ben from The Lo Numbers.
However, the first band I did get to see were called The Resistance. The Resistance have only recently started gigging, but listening to them it is quite hard to believe. The band blasted out covers such as "Zombie" by The Cranberries and got the whole crowd rocking with "Fight for your right to party" by The Beastie Boys. Also there was a cover of "Bleeding Heart" by Leona Lewis, which on paper sounds like a very bad idea, but they successfully pulled it off and made a song I normally can't stand one of the highlights of the set for me. They also played a couple original numbers which I believe were called Insurgency and Bounce. Finishing with a couple of originals after doing a set of covers was a very brave move as they can go down one of two ways with the crowd. I'm pleased to report they went down very well. They fitted in well with the rest of the set and were very well written and performed. The Resistance are an up and coming band to watch out for, I recommend going to see them if you get the chance.
Next up were Freezer. They feature some of Weymouth's more accomplished musicians and I always think of them as Beaver due to an old band the Bassist / singer frontman used to be in. The band played general crowd pleasing covers such as Boys of Summer by Don Henley, Summer of 69 by Brian Adams, Place your Hands by Reef and Rocks by Primal Scream. They finished their set with Tiger Feet by Mud which I thought was a bit of a strange choice considering the rest of the tunes in the set. But all in all, a very well polished performance.
Now onto some Motown / Soul / Funk with The Amy Mayes Band, fronted by who else but Amy Mayes. Amy has a great singing voice, accompanied with some great musicians including Thomas Hughes on the keyboard who is great to watch / listen to. They covered songs such as Respect by Aretha Franklin, Get Ready by The Temptations, Rolling in the Deep by Adele and finished with "Stay with Me" by The Faces. In case you have not noticed, I have linked a few youtube videos above from the gig.
Last of all to finish off the day were The Stereoironics. The boys were doing what they do best... covering Stereophonics songs. I can't quite remember the whole set or order of songs as I was a bit hazy by then, but they played my favourite "Local Boy" and got what looked like most of Weymouth jumping up and down at the end to Dakota. For an encore they finished off with "Have a nice day', the whole crowd were singing "Baa de baa, ba ba de da baa" etc.
So did I "have a nice day"? I had an awesome day, bring on the next Quayside Festival in August.
A big thank you to Keith Treggiden of The Rendezvous, Danny Adams and all the other people who make this FREE Music Festival possible.
