Last Friday we had the absolute pleasure of being asked to provide some acoustic music for the wedding of Zophie and Anthony, who selected the incredible Hawkstone Hall as their salubrious location.
Hawkstone hall is nestled in the Shropshire countryside and the grand appearance from the drive in, to the gorgeous, lush appointments inside just ooze class and refinement from every stone. It’s such a privilege working as a wedding band in Shropshire when we get to experience such beautiful buildings and locales, and it’s a real pleasure when we bump into amazing suppliers like I Do Weddings Liverpool, who were in the process of dressing the wedding chapel with the most beautiful floral arrangements we’ve ever seen: acres of white roses adorned the aisle and altar, while ornate candles marked the end of each row, burning softly and silently in anticipation…
Anthony and Zophie wanted an acoustic duo to perform acoustically during the Chapel wedding ceremony, and selected some beautiful songs as a backdrop to the proceedings. As always, we covered the 20 or so minutes before the arrival of Zophie, Anthony’s bride with some acoustic background music from our ever changing repertoire.
This early part of the day is often a great place to sneak in old classics like All I Have To Do Is Dream by The Every Brothers and A Kiss To Build A Dream On by Ella Fitzgerald… before gently segueing into the chords for the song that will carry the bride up the aisle to her future husband. In this instance it was the incredibly beautiful Eva Cassidy arrangement of Songbird by Fleetwood Mac to which Zophie would make her entrance, preceded by her beautiful bridesmaids in matching olive green. Her timing was perfect and we later discovered that she had been listening to our acoustic cover of this song to time her entrance. It worked perfectly!!
Listen to Zophie’s Aisle song here:
Once the time came for the happy couple to sign the register, we struck up into the bride and groom’s next choice of music: I Love You, Always Forever by Donna Lewis. Zophie and Anthony saw our acoustic cover of this classic 90s pop ballad after we uploaded it to our Youtube Channel, a couple of months back, and instantly fell in love with our arrangement. We really couldn’t ask for a bigger compliment than this, and it was an absolute pleasure to perform this live, and a joy to look out at the assembled guests and see a few smiles of recognition form those who were around at the time this song took over the world for a hot minute 🙂
Listen to Zophie & Anthony’s signing song request here:
Actually, a couple of days before the wedding, an anonymous customer bought a copy of this acoustic cover from our Bandcamp site and we’re almost certain it must have been one of these two sweethearts!
At the end of the ceremony the happy couple selected a second instance of Songbird… but this time it was to be the early Oasis hit of the same name: A delightfully simple and evocative tune that had just enough bounce to send off the bride and groom with a spring in their steps. Unfortunately there was no time to film a little video of this one before the day’s proceedings (damn you British traffic!), but it raised a smile on the faces of all present, so there must have been a healthy number of oasis fans attending.
Once the guests had all made their way outside for the confetti photographs (we managed to get one, too!!), we headed off at our next port of call, which would be an outdoor drinks reception in the hotel’s beautiful courtyard, situated just off the main building and positioned to grab the maximum amount of sun throughout the day – a fact that we later came to regret upon realising we’d left the house that morning without sunscreen. 🤣 So there we were: two acoustic wedding singers in short sleeved shirts with no sunblock thinking ‘well, how hot can it be? I mean, this is England after all’… Cut to an hour later and our arms, necks and faces are beginning to pink up, our mouths are dry despite two of the guests taking it upon themselves to keep us supplied with water (thank you so much, mystery couple), and we’re approaching the finale of our drinks reception music. We’ve just got to get through our last couple of songs before we can sneak back to the shadows and press a couple of ice cold cans to our poor little faces… goodness it was a scorcher!
We had such a fun time with the wedding guests, we really didn’t notice until near the end, so we sang our little hearts out and resigned to deal with the consequences later – which is why, as we write this, our faces are slathered with pure, 100% Aloe Vera gel, and our core temperatures are just about back within safe levels!
….and then just before we set off, we spotted these amazing barn doors and HAD to sing a little monsters and men tune, wind and all!
Thank you so much, Anthony & Zophie, for inviting us to be our acoustic wedding singers – congratulations to the both of you!
Some photos of our afternoon at Hawkstone Hall…