ROB YOUNG
Guitar/5 string banjo for The Two Hats Blues Band + solo projects as Rambling Rob Young
“My last actual physical gig in a venue with people was at The Wheatsheaf in Croston, Lancashire March 2020.
I’m really missing ‘gig night’; obviously the live performance side of things is heavily missed, but it was the whole aspect of the gig night, the camaraderie and the craic between the band members on the way to the gig. The interaction with a live audience is missed a lot, getting home at 2am still pumped with adrenalin and throwing a pizza in the oven to wind down with.
I’ve struggled with motivation to practice new material as there’s no live audience to play it to. I’m still practising but it was all about the live gig for me. The Two Hats Blues Band were semi professional and knocked in about 150 live gigs in 2019, every single weekend out on the road, up and down motorways with a van full of gear. All of a sudden it was taken away. We grafted for almost 5 years to build our steadily increasing social media and live audience following. We’d just recorded original material, made videos and secured a BBC radio live session with interview and the pandemic hit, it was looking so promising. We were starting to secure better slots at blues festivals and better gigs, booking agents were starting to follow us on social media then seemingly over night everything just stopped. That was hard to deal with.
I also miss the social element of working in a busy working band, weekends come around now and there’s no ’the weekend is here’ feeling. The weekends now roll around rather boringly into the next working week.
I’ve been lucky enough to work my day job to keep me me sane all through 2020! I’ve also played a few live sessions over Facebook, open mics etc, this has helped, a virtual audience is better than no audience but not even close to sweating it out in a busy music venue on a Saturday night.
It’s a really tough time for musicians right now and indeed anyone working in the performing arts. I feel that artists and musicians really need their voices to be heard, there’ll be millions of performing artists worldwide feeling like caged birds right now, I only hope things change as soon as possible. A world without live music feels like living in a house with no windows. It’s more than just a band just knocking out songs in a venue, its a release valve for the performers and it also enables the listener to completely forget about the stresses of life for a night. Live music is uplifting, it’s nourishing, it’s social glue. It’s well and truly missed by me.”
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