A beautiful day near the end of July took us to the wedding of Stuart and Jasmine at Eastington Park, Gloucestershire. We arrived late afternoon and waited for the end of the wedding breakfast and speeches so that we could load in. We were treated to a wonderful waiting area in The Garden Room, which was just so gorgeous - all foxes and woodland in the wallpaper, an upright piano and some extremely lavish sofas. We were also treated to eavesdropping on a little vocal warm up in the next room. We may have crept around the side of the building to outside the wedding breakfast room to hear the most wonderful acapella song sung by family and friends of the couple. 4 part harmony. Delish! I did a little cry because it doesn't matter how many weddings we do, it's always emotional.
For this wedding, we had a brand new shiny drummer to play with for the first time: Owen. He's a brilliant drummer and a friend of our lovely Angus. We also had Shiro on bass. Teebs wasn't able to come because he'd had to go and have a surgery, so we doubled up on guitars and had Angus and Ollie with us. We were also very privileged to have the experienced and artistic ears and engineering of Will and Grandad.
We venue and us had worked hard on the schedule to cooperate with each other and give each other the most amount of time and space we were able to, so although we were tight on time, we all worked together to make it happen! The staff who were turning the room around cleared the area we were playing in first, and the band helped as much as we could with getting the PA loaded in and running cables and such. It was really fun! The DJ was a hoot, and he helped out by playing in the other room whilst we set up, so the guests didn't need to come into the room whilst we were setting up. All very cooperative and helpful!
The guests were all so lovely and we got chatting to quite a few people. When we were ready to start, we called the happy couple in and they had their first dance to 'Love has found its way' by Dennis Brown. Personally, I love that option! Beautiful, loving lyrics but up tempo and fun at the same time. Perfect for this couple! Stuart was a lovely groom and he was having all the fun, and Jasmine was just stunning.
We played for 2 sets and it was rather hot and a lot of fun. Owen played really well and Ollie and Angus were doing all the twanging. It was a lovely night.
One of the most fun aspects of the wedding was one of those pesky decibel limiters. It was one of those with a traffic light system, so the way they work is they measure the sound, and if you're in the green or amber, you're good, but if you creep up into the red, you need to manage everything to come back down, and if you hit the top of the red, you have about 15 seconds before it cuts off your sound. Not an easy thing to manage with an 8 piece band, however, Will was perfect as always and managed it all night with no problems! It really is a bit of magic.
We want to give a huge thank you to Stuart and Jasmine for inviting us for their big day - we had a wonderful time and your guests were a brilliant crowd that really knew how to party!
You can check out the venue here: https://www.eastingtonpark.co.uk/
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