Club Christmas Date for Creeping Bentgrass

Saturday 8 December saw us out at Fleetwood Cricket Club playing for a Christmas event for a local classic car club. They were joined for the event by members of the Lancashire Morris Minors Club and a good night was had by all!

House Party at Christmas

Once again over the Christmas period Creeping Bentgrass headed over to Darwen to play at a large house party.

With all the weather that had been going around we were pleasantly relieved to get there without having to wade the car through any floods. What an awful time many people have had at a time of year that should be enjoyable.

Ours at least was an enjoyable night and plenty of the party-goers told us how much they looked forward to it every year. In fact I'm sure there were more people there this year! And we heard from the organiser of the Harvest Festival we did earlier in the year that audience members from that event had been asking for our return too!

A huge than you to our hosts Brian and Christine!

Christmas Music

Happy Christmas everybody from David, John and Bob.

Three Christmas songs from the band for you to enjoy.

Good King Wencelas
A Winters Tale
I Believe In Father Christmas

Large version of the photo: Christmas store

Christmas Performance

On Tuesday we were invited to perform for a staff party and turned up early to set up whilst the party-goers were enjoying a festive meal.

We were provided with our very own buffet and what an excellent start to the session that was for us. The food was excellent and given that the kitchen staff were serving up a couple of hundred full Christmas dinners, was a tribute to them. Wonderful!

The staff came back from the meal and we started off with a new instrumental by Bob and myself; Foot Tapper. Then on came David and we played a few country songs, a couple of Irish charmers and then launched into the dancy numbers.

Lots of compliments, lots of dancing and even a couple of guest singers! Christmas has started - bring it on!

Large version of the photo: creeping bentgrass

Christmas Song Downloads

Merry Christmas to all our friends and followers.

We hope to see you soon and wish you all a happy and prosperous 2008!

We recorded these two songs for the Christmas edition of Sounds Special on the Billy Fury website.

We hope you enjoy them!

A Winter's Tale
I Believe In Father Christmas

Keyboard Replacement

After the unfortunate refusal of my keyboard to play all of the notes it should the other week, I've decided to have an early Christmas present!

It was looking extremely like a duff printed circuit board. The Korg keyboard was not exactly intuitive to use and I'd found it very hard to get to grips with.

The new one is another Yamaha and whilst it's totally different than the old one in terms of controls, at least it's easy to find your way around.

I've managed to get it to play all the backings we use in the band. The only thing I haven't found yet and suspect I may not(!) is how to turn off the bass for when Bob is with us. It may well have such a feature for music recorded on it but there seems to be no way of taking it off the pre-recorded midi files I recorded on the PSR 630. There was a separate control file that had a switch in it for that and the new keyboard doesn't recognise the control file. Could be a lot of work for me!

But the progress I made in just one afternoon was excellent and a heck of a relief after struggling with the Korg.

A Winter's Tale

Yes I know it's only September!

That's the title of the second Christmas song we are doing for the Billy Fury web site this December.

A Winter's Tale was a hit for David Essex in the days when he had hair on his shoulders. Well... so did I! None on my head, but there was some on my shoulders...

I've used the Korg keyboard on this one and it will be our first track using the Korg rather than the Yamaha. Very orchestral and quite different to our normal stuff. Moya! Have you got your Billy alerts tuned in? It will be BILLYant!!!

Christmas Comes Early

I've spent the best part of the day putting together a backing track for our contribution to the Billy Fury website's Christmas Sounds Special.

We are committed to do a couple of Christmas songs for December and today I've been putting together the song "I Believe In Father Christmas" which was a hit in the 1970s for Greg Lake.

It only sounds a little like the original because that's the way I like to do music. I would hate to be thought of as sounding "just like" anyone else!

Anyway it's been a full day. I did a full four tracks just doing the jingle bells! Then there was a backing track of drums, two of piano, two of accoustic guitar, one of glockenspiel, one of trumpets, one of french horns, one of a brass section, two electric guitars - sheesh, I'm getting sick of that song... ha ha!

It now needs one more accoustic guitar, David's singing which I'll double-track, then Bob to put bass and a bit of mandolin on it and hey presto - 4 minutes of Christmas!