Last year was one unlike any other and forced an 150-year-old institution to rethink how it could continue to flourish.
Whitburn Band marked its 150th anniversary and while it wasn’t the celebration members hoped for, the band still stood out with online performances which garnered praise from around the world.
Its collection of online performances attracted over 200,000 hits and were lauded by BBC Radio 2 DJ Ken Bruce and Classic FM, while an entire concert was held online which raised £1200 for the West Lothian Foodbank.
Chairman, Charlie Farren, said the band had to adapt during lockdown and while members managed to put together an impressive programme of work, they are eager to get back to performing in person.
He told the Courier: “We’ve been very limited in what we’ve been allowed to do. We can’t meet at all, we’ve not played in the band hall since March last year and the only way we’ve been able to meet is online via Zoom.
“What would happen is we would choose the music, send the parts out to the players and from there we would be sent a click track so that we’re all playing at the same time.
“That gives us the speed of the music, we record listening to the click track, that’s why you see us all with headphones in.
“Then we email that to Ryan Bradley and he puts the whole thing together and it goes online from there.”
Looking to the immediate future, Charlie says everything will rest on the current restrictions being eased, but the band will still perform in upcoming online competitions.
He continued: “We’re playing in the Cory Band’s online competition and that will take place in March. This time it’s only open to bands in the UK and we’ve been invited to compete in the Fife Brass Band Association’s online competition in April.
“So we’re looking at the possibility of looking at that if time allows us, because we have to be mindful of what the individual members’ lives are like with their jobs and family given the current climate. We don’t want to impinge on their time when it’s already tough going.
“After that we’ll just really have to wait and see. Currently the first competition of the year has been provisionally booked for the beginning of July, but we haven’t had confirmation of that and will obviously depend on how the rules relax as we go forward.
“The difficulty is people need to plan competitions, because you need to choose the music the bands are going to play and the bands need to book the conductors who are going to take them to the competition.
“You have to plan a rehearsal schedule all round about that and none of these things can be done in any shape or form until we know what stage the relaxing of the rules are at.”
Charlie said after nearly a year away from the rehearsal room, the band is eager to get back to playing face to face again. He said: “Everybody’s keen as mustard to get back to a level of normality but we’re not silly enough to not recognise that as even rules begin to relax, we’ll not be able to go straight back into getting a 30-piece ensemble together to rehearse.
“It will need to be gradual and initially section by section and increase that possibly to a half-size band then gradually increase the numbers to the full-sized band for rehearsals, but hopefully sooner rather than later.”
