The first gig of the year is always an exciting event as it’s the first chance to play a mostly new set list – four of the five songs we performed were completely new for 2025!
I’ve been playing with Sax Bandits for two years and it’s always good fun joining the other local Sax Bandits bands to form the larger gig band. On this occasion, we had about 85 saxophonists performing on the main stage of Wrde Up Music Festival in Swindon! We were joined by a professional rhythm section consisting of Steve Lodge on drums and Rory Geisow on bass.
Despite a rainy start to the afternoon, our Hawaiian shirts persuaded the rain to go away just in time for our performance! (That’s me on the left).
The Performance
We opened the set with Knowing Me, Knowing You, a familiar Abba classic to get things going! Aha!
Next up, was the Jump Medley. This has long been my favourite arrangement in the Sax Bandits repertoire as it includes two iconic ‘Jump’ songs, one by Pointer Sisters and one by Van Halen. They always remind me of the feel-good scenes in films like Love Actually and Ready Player One, where the original songs are featured.
However, the Linkin Park Medley is now my new favourite! It blends together a selection of both new and old songs from the band with a unique saxophone spin, including; Numb, Crawling, In the End, and The Emptiness Machine.
Our next song, Ghost Town by The Specials, treated our audience to a nice surprise with an amazing tenor sax solo from guest, Lynden Blades (you may have seen him before on YouTube or saxmadesimple.com). This wasn’t a song I knew before playing it with Sax Bandits, and it’s a good example of how the band introduces members to new music.
We finished our half-hour set with Man, I Feel Like A Woman by Shania Twain which had a great energy to close the set. It also explained the cowboy hats which many of the band members were wearing in readiness for this last song! For me, this was the most challenging song in the set to learn so it was rewarding to hear it go down well with the audience and know that the practice paid off.
The Experience
Our gigs are a fantastic celebration of all the hard work that goes into arranging the songs, practicing individually, rehearsing together, and getting comfortable with the music enough to perform to a real live audience. For many of us (me included) Sax Bandits gives band members their first experience performing in public and it can be a big step in personal musical development.
Co-ordinating this many saxophone players to get set up and ready to play is quite a task, but thankfully one that the Sax Bandits team have down to a fine art. This festival was a great gig experience that inspires our band members (such as myself) to be more confident with their playing and jump (ahem) into new musical experiences!
I’m now looking forward to our second gig of 2025 at Guildford Beer Festival on Friday 19th September – come along and check us out!
You can see all the photos from the day on our facebook page here:
Great post, John. You really captured the experience. I totally agree and enjoyed Wrde Up. So glad I joined Sax Bandits and have the opportunity to play together as a big band. Practices are always great fun too.
Lovely article John. Brings back all the lovely memories of the gig and reinforces how great it is playing with Sax Bandits. We always play such fun tunes and as you say we all get introduced to music we haven’t been familiar with before. The Lynden Blades sax solo was amazing and I have now found his sax made simple videos which are really good at explaining things sax related.