Splendid Gentlemen

So it’s been quite some time since our last blog. As I sat 2 and a bit years ago, in the fancy offices of our website designers, having it explained to me that a blog that you don’t use is worse than not having a blog at all, I protested that I love writing and would be blogging constantly. Faux pas on my part. So, if you have missed our awful blog, then I heartily apologise. Welcome back to the fold, friend.

You might also remember our last blog, The 7 Deadly Sins of the Cheesy Wedding Band, landed us in quite a bit of shit, as you can imagine. My girlfriend said, “Definitely don’t post that!”, my parents said it was unwise and the guys in the band didn’t think it was my best idea. But I thought it was funny, so post it I did, and I kind of got a bit of a laugh at the reaction. That was, until about a week later, when I was on a night out with members of about 4 other bands there. The subject of our blog came up in conversation. So as I sat there, facing a table of folded arms and unimpressed looking faces, I squirmed like a worm on a hook. 

Lesson learned….almost. This will never be a schmoozy, cheesy, generic Wedding Band blog. There’s plenty of them if that’s your thaaang but it’s not here. I kind of feel it’s our job to bring a bit of satire to such a polished industry. I kind of want us to be the Marilyn Manson in the group of X Factor Finalists. 

But, did we predict the death of The Cheesy Wedding Band? In the 2 years since that blog, the wedding industry has changed beyond recognition from our humble beginnings. Matching Suits? They’re almost gone and now everyone is in jeans and T-shirts. The Cheesy band name? Not recently. New additions to our field have pretty original and cool names. Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing in absolutely every video you’ve ever seen? Not seen it in a while. Even the compulsory 65 year old keyboard player, Dougie from the Rotary Club who used to be in every band has hung his keyboard coloured tie up in the wardrobe and has been replaced with a sleek, good looking 20 something year old. Having just turned 33, I’m starting to worry, am I the old guy now? Videos have got sleeker, bands have gotten cooler and setlists have some pretty decent songs in them now. 

Some would say, The Cheesy Wedding Band is a dying breed. We should be rejoicing right? 

Well…kinda.

Have you ever really liked a new band, you went to all their gigs, bought all their albums and saw them in a club 6 times before they even had their first single out, but then they have a breakthrough single and suddenly everyone loves them? It seems like overnight they become ‘everyone’s new favourite band’. Suddenly the people you don’t like much, but have on Facebook anyway cause you kind of get a kick out of getting annoyed at them (Don’t even lie to yourself. You know you have those people too.) are uploading videos of them dancing and singing along to Your Band and suddenly that special, close feeling that you had about a band that was just yours suddenly feels cheap and tainted. 

Showing my age here, but it kind of feels like when I was in school and all of a sudden, for a short while, the kids that gave me a hard time for being a teen goth suddenly started listening to Limp Bizkit and System of a Down. Or when Nirvana, the cool alternative band appeared on Top of the Pops. 

I shouldn’t complain. What we do is now officially “In Vogue” and we’ve been hitting way over 100 weddings a year for the last few years. But the thing I always thought was cool about our band was that there was maybe only 3 or 4 other bands doing our thing. We had a little scene within a scene. We’ve worked closely with the other bands for years. If we can’t play your wedding, we know a few bands, and we love what they do, and know that if you liked us, you’d be sure to like them too. We’ve helped each other out over the years and all of us are much busier bands because of our relationship to each other. 

I’ve always felt the secret to our success has been that we have never had any interest in being a “Wedding Band’. When we started out our highest ambition was to play The Scotia Bar in Glasgow. We built up a name and reputation for ourselves and our first ventures in to weddings we’re people who had seen the pub band and wanted to take that vibe and bring it to their wedding. People then saw us at weddings and word of mouth has got us to where we are now. But we never had any intention to “be a Wedding Band”, so we managed to keep that “Band” vibe, and we’ve always just done our own thing. 

It became apparent early on that there was actually a niche for this. We branded ourselves the Anti-Wedding Band some 9 years ago now and for years have liked being “The Alternative” to the mainstream, providing people with a soundtrack to their wedding that they never thought they could have. It’s been a beautiful and rewarding journey to fill part of this void, along with our comrades in the other rockier wedding bands. Bands like 3 Card Trick and The Lockhearts who have always felt like Brothers in Arms to us as well as best friends. 

But now I find myself in a crisis of identity. “Anti-Wedding Band” and “Non-Wedding Band” have become industry wide terms and you’re seeing increased cases of previous advocates of The Cheese getting behind adverts mocking the Cheesy Wedding Band. Rock music has become the selling point of videos and bands who would previously have been covering ABBA and Amarillo are singing Foo Fighters and Green Day. Can we still be the niche alternative to the mainstream if the mainstream becomes the thing we’ve always done? We don’t want to become just “another anti-wedding band”. 

When our Boutique has gone High Street we need to put some serious thought in to how we proceed next. We should hopefully have some new media for you in the next couple of months and we hope that in your minds, dearest Splendettes, we still stand out as something separate from the Wedding Industry as a whole, that’s there just for you. 

We’d very much like to still be the small, underground band, that you come to see in the small club, that you feel like we’re “Your Band” and that you feel like we have a close and personal relationship. You will always be our Splendettes and we will always be, defiantly, Splendid Gentlemen.