This year I was invited by the Scott Cunningham Band (SCB) to go with them to the UK for an annual music festival in Cornwall, England called CreationFest. The SCB serve as the ‘house band’ if you will, playing just about everyday, whereas other bands that perform are normally there for a day or two.
Scott and his band (7 people total) are some fun people to hang with. I’ll say, it made the 2.5 weeks away from my family much more bearable. We had fun joking around with each other, exploring the Cornish coastline, hiking, cliff jumping into the Atlantic, chasing sheep (no one was able to catch one in order to win a free dinner on the band), devouring boxes upon boxes of Cornish clotted cream, met some great folks, and oh, right, we played some music! Quite a bit of music, in fact, at times 2 or even 3 sets in a day.
People travel from around Europe and the US to come to CreationFest, and this year there were around 8,000 people camping and enjoying it. We played for 6 of the 7 days in multiple venues, so it got busy at times.
Joel (lead gtr), Desmond (keys), myself, Scott (vox & gtr), Rileigh (vox), Joel (bass), Madison (acoustic & vox).
Soundcheck / view from the drums.
Joel & Scott.
Drumming for Tom Read on Day 4.
Dorking around, Hawaiian style.
This is the drum set I was using out there. I brought my Vessel aluminum snare and Istanbul Cymbals along with me. So glad I did!
Scott has had a handful of female vocalists in the past, but over the past few years his oldest two daughters have joined the lineup and brought a really unique flavor to this band. Such a sweet thing to see this family dynamic happening on stage. Madison (16) and Rileigh (14) are both great singers, and they compliment each other amazingly. They wrote a song together called “There May Be Tears” that was a huge contribution to SCB’s last album (‘Come Away’). Madison writes a lot on her own too, and actually wrote & sang about half of the songs on the album.
CreationFest was a special time in the sense that although Madison has been performing with the band for a few years, she had her first headlining concert on Thursday night at the festival. And to give you an idea of this first solo performance of hers at 16 years old, it was a 40 minute set in front of 2,000+ people. Crazy. She is a natural to say the least and she totally killed it!
Madison between songs.
After the festival, I had a few days with the band in London to be a tourist before I headed home to teach drum lessons in San Diego. I had hardly any expectations of this city that I’ve never set foot in. But I must say, London is amazing. Such fascinating history, buildings, culture, people, etc. Naturally, for someone from the US, I am blown away by a building that’s older than 200 years old. That’s old, you know!? Or learning about kings and queens, wars and armies. Really cool. We were there walking around til late one night and loved seeing the city at that time. Might I add, that with all of this rich history, why didn’t England catch on to the whole culinary thing that was so prevalent in other parts of Europe? For example, I had a coleslaw & cheese sandwich one day. ????? It was nearly unbearable. Haha!
Big Ben.
Here are a few miscellaneous pictures from the trip—–
Many a moment spent in this thing.
Sheep and rolling hills! England for ya.
OH YOU KNOW, just some pristine English coastline. No big deal.
When Scott conquered England.
You gotta have the weird toilet shot, right?
You tell ‘em. And thank you for making germiphobes everywhere happy.
That’s it for today. If you’d like to hear some music from this fine band, you can visit http://scottcunninghammusic.com/