Box Of Tricks

Box Of Tricks (a South Derbyshire band) performs regularly actually within the historic kiln itself at Sharpe's Pottery Museum in Swadlincote

Box of Tricks has been going in one form or another for many years. Its founder member is Graham who is a wonderful guitarist and singer! (Though he often protests that he isn't even a musician! - What rubbish).

We don't take ourselves too seriously - but we do take putting on a show seriously.

People often ask what type of music do we play /sing. Well we cover all sorts of styles and types of music. We've been as far back as Bach and as modern as Cliff!

In producing our shows we 1st decide a theme and then pick songs that we both like that conform loosely to the them. We then search for the words, music and chords - which is not always as easy as it sounds! We've even been known to spend 2 or 3 hours with youtube working out chords and lyrics. We then type it up and try to work out the best key to sing and play it in - sometimes with some hilarious results.

Now we choose the rhythm and instrumentation for the number. Now this can provide much opportunity for discussion given the pallet of sounds the Tyros 5 affords us!

Tempo is key and some nights we've rehearsed numbers a great number of times just altering the tempo by 1 beat per minute up or down - it really does make a difference - No Allegro, Presto or Andante for us!

The Tyros 5 then needs to be arranged and set up for the number and this can take a number of hours to get just right!

To top it all we like to supplement the number with visuals. For this we team up with the Magic Attic Archives. They have a wealth of wonderful photos of the local area surrounding Swadlincote and so we spend hours searching the archives for appropriate photos. We then supplement these with photos found on the internet.

The result - well even more work to put them together into an exciting and interesting show.

We are very fortunate to have been able to acquire a set of computer controllable lights and so the final touch is creating the light shows for each of the numbers!

We rehearse usually once a week but more in the run up to shows. Although practising isn't confined to when we are together as band of course!

The shows include funny monologues (sometimes with sound FX).

One thing that the band is known for is our "Swaddy Songs". These are songs written especially about Swadlincote and it's heritage. Not the posh stuff - but things like Coal Pickin, Bost Im Kill Im You Got im Jack (Bodell - the local boxer), 50 Shades of Grey and of course the Song about the bus - The 712 to Measham!

We currently put on shows within the Kiln at Sharpe's Pottery Museum. There's usually a great bar (with great prices), a terrific raffle and good company. We have a laugh and people usually are shouting for more at the end of the night (which is very nice).

We hope to see you and we'd like to thank all of supporters.