Mark Holub. Photo: Mapex Drums

Drummer Mark Holub writes about the forthcoming Led Bib tour – dates below:

With only a few weeks to go till the tour, it’s got me thinking about our beginnings and the fact that in 2005, we were one of the first ever bands to play in the new Vortex in Dalston, launching our first album there before the club was even properly opened. We had friends run the bar, which wasn’t even there yet, and played on the floor before the stage was built….and looking at the pictures, we were younger….a lot younger!

On that same tour I remember playing one of our first concerts outside of London, which we are returning to on this tour, at St. Ives Jazz Club in Cornwall. We were of course super excited to be playing anywhere at the time, and after the concert a journalist from a local paper asked if he could interview me. It was naturally also one of my first ‘interviews’, so of course the band was all keen to find out what the guy had written during the concert. One of the guys went behind the journalist and looked at his notepad, which only had one line on it, ‘The most avant-garde thing I have ever seen in St. Ives’. Well, hopefully he will come back to this next gig there,our first concert there since 2005.

But, I digress, back to the Vortex and London. The Vortex has always felt to us like our ‘home’ club. The staff have always been supportive of the band and we have seen the club grow from a shell, still waiting to get its liqueur license, to a 365 day a year jazz club, showcasing some of the best new music from the UK and beyond. We recorded some of our live LP here (The Good Egg out April 21st), recorded for Jazz on 3, ran the Dalston Summer Stew there, worked with young people from Hackney, collaborated with Chris Batchelor – the list goes on and on. Now, the Vortex has been so kind as to give us 3 nights (one of which is being recorded for later broadcast by Jazz on 3) to celebrate the release of the aforementioned live album alongside a new studio CD entitled The People in Your Neighbourhood, (REVIEWED HERE)

We are playing a 13-day tour across the UK and the Vortex shows are some of the final ones on the tour, so, we WILL be ready, and can’t wait to see all the lovely Vortex staff and volunteers, and also, of course, the friendly faces of the people who have been coming to our concerts all these years.

It’s funny reading the old reviews for the band, ‘firebrand twenty-somethings’, a ‘horribly young band’ etc etc. That’s not us any more, for most of us, our twenties are getting pretty far away, and that baton has been passed on to the next generation, but the thing that brought us together is the music, and in my mind it’s stronger than ever and we can’t wait to take it on tour.

TOUR DATES

22 April 2014 St Ives Jazz Club, Cornwall
23 April 2014 Broomhill Art Hotel, Barnstaple
24 April 2014 The Hope, Brighton
25 April 2014 Millennium Hall, Sheffield
26 April 2014 Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry
27 April 2014 Fusebox @ The Fox and Newt, Leeds
28 April 2014 The Bell, Bath
29 April 2014 Freedom Principle @ Dulcimer, Manchester
30 April 2014 Dempsey’s, Cardiff
1 -3 May 2014 Vortex, London Album launch residency
4 May 2014 Sounds New Festival, Canterbury