Hi everyone!
We hope you are all keeping well? We’re conscious we haven’t blogged for quite some time now so we’re looking to rectify that and get back into the swing of things. We’ll be blogging more frequently from now on as it’s a great way to keep you all up-to-speed with what we’re doing. We’ll aim to share a new post every couple of months or so moving forward.
These are certainly strange times for us all. We’d already planned to take a break during the latter stages of 2019 and the first half of 2020 as Becci gave birth to her first child earlier this year. Ivy Rose is an absolute delight and has quite rightly been the focal point for Becci and Chaz since that wonderful day back in January. Having played our last gig back in October 2019, we’d originally planned to get back into the Lux Bay swing of things around May / June 2020, though the horrific Covid-19 situation has clearly prevented us from doing so. Weddings we already had booked this summer have been postponed until 2021 and we’re now looking at a likely scenario where we won’t play an ‘in the flesh’ gig until next year. Covid-19 has decimated the wedding industry and whilst we’re really disappointed with this, we especially feel for our friends and colleagues who are completely reliant on the wedding and hospitality industry to make a living. We hope and pray that things return to some degree of normality sooner rather than later and our ridiculously talented friends can get back to doing what they do best – providing a first class service and creating timeless memories for customers.
Despite having had the best part of ten months off, we have still been working hard and planning for the future and we’d like to share some of that detail with you. Primarily, we’ve decided to take a quite fundamental change of focus for Lux Bay, in that we’ll be prioritising the acoustic / ‘daytime’ side of our offer in future. What that basically means is we’ll no longer be offering the evening ‘party set’ service we have previously provided (i.e. the full-on party sets which we play to backing tracks). We will clearly and gladly honour any existing bookings requiring this, and we’ll still do the occasional evening gig if it is an extra special occasion, though we have quite a few reasons for making this decision. The most important reason is giving ourselves more valued family time. As mentioned above, Becci is loving being a new mum and that family time during the early years is invaluable and cannot be replaced. Additionally, Mick has really enjoyed spending his Friday and Saturday nights at home over recent months and would like to continue to do so. We’ve written in the past about the additional time live music acts spend behind the scenes and this is especially true when performing evening gigs. We mainly play weddings and quite often we’ll be at a venue mid-late afternoon to set-up and soundcheck without interrupting the formal proceedings. In addition to performing live, we also provide DJ services at a number of our gigs. When this is the case, we finish when the wedding finishes, usually midnight-1am. Adding pack-down and travel time to this means we often don’t get home until around 2am-3am the next morning. That’s a whole afternoon and evening spent away from family, whilst such a late night also has a significant impact on the following day, certainly in terms of tiredness and fatigue.
Therefore, our focus remains on weddings but primarily what we badge as our acoustic / day-time offerings. Our strategy moving forward is to continue providing our fantastic packages which are ideally suited to wedding ceremonies; cocktail / champagne receptions; wedding breakfasts / meals; and early-evening acoustic sets (i.e. our ‘bridging the gap’ set). In doing so, we are able to continue doing what we love (providing a first-class music accompaniment to the most wonderful day of our customer’s live) and still get home at a reasonable time to enjoy some quality time with our families. Another reason for doing this is that we believe this is what we’re truly best at and we’re ideally suited to providing these types of packages. We’re also conscious that these packages fit scenarios other than weddings, such as corporate events, and we’ll be tailoring our strategy and marketing to pursue more opportunities like those. Our website and media will change over the coming months to reflect this and we’re also working on adding new songs to our sets to ensure we continually improve and enhance our position as one of the main acoustic acts in the north-west.
We’re also working on other new and exciting ideas at the moment. In the absence of live gigs, a Lux Bay lockdown video will be available very soon. We’re really excited about this and who knows – this may become a more regular feature moving forward. We like the idea of utilising YouTube and social media more than we have done previously and this could well be a great way of keeping in touch with you all and providing you with an opportunity to listen to new songs of ours on a much more frequent basis.
We’re also compiling a wedding music guide for new brides and grooms. Partly influenced by the Covid-19 situation, but also something we believe is necessary and important anyway, we’re aware that many people are currently planning weddings for 2021 and beyond. We receive lots of questions relating to this, such as what type of live music people typically have at weddings, exactly what people need to consider when looking to book live music, and how various elements of the whole wedding experience can be enhanced by having live music. and we’re putting our experience to good use by producing this guide to answer these questions and many more. The guide will consider areas such as the pros and cons of having live music (spoiler alert – we’ll be listing many more pros than cons!), what types of live music will work for various scenarios / types of wedding, and what needs to be considered when looking to book live music. We’re really excited about this as we’re passionate about what we do and have a great deal of experience to share with people. We believe there is much more to booking live wedding music than simply conducting a generic Google search for a band and the guide will reflect this and offer many ideas to ensure people are in a position to book an appropriate music act that will truly make their day a memorable one. The guide, which will be a completely free PDF, will be available by the end of August.
So, there we are! This is what we’ve been up to recently and what we have planned over the coming months. There’s much to come from us in the near future but please do let us know if you have any thoughts on any of the above. We love answering your questions and responding to your comments so please fire away!
Take care and we hope to see you all at a Lux Bay gig very soon.
Best wishes.
Becci and Mick 🙂
