On Sunday, we were booked to play at the wedding of Ashleigh and Oliver, on board HMS Warrior. Ashleigh is British, Oliver American, and the two now live in Canada. This was a wedding bringing together two families from other sides of the Atlantic, and we were delighted to be brought on board to play.
We arrived at the HMS Warrior at 10am, just as the Historic Dockyard was opening (after a surreal experience in the car park with the machine that kept giving us money…)
We set up, ready and waiting for the guests to arrive. The guests were treated to a variety of classical requests, a Mozart Divertimento, Dvorak’s Romance no. 1, Elgar’s Chanson De Matin. The bride kept everyone on their toes by being 25 minutes late to enter the ceremony room, so we played calming, gentle music to calm everyone’s nerves! The ceremony was beautiful, with an emotional reading from a friend.
We played Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers and Mascagni’s Intermezzo during the signing of the register, and the couple left to the sounds of Handel’s La Rejouissance. We then moved up to the top deck while guests enjoyed champagne and unrivalled views of the Harbour. We played in the glorious sunshine, but fortunately only for 20 minutes until the end of the champagne toast as it was rather sunny and we had no shade.
We then packed up and moved over to the Langstone Hotel on Hayling Island. The couple had chosen to have their wedding breakfast at this hotel, and we set up in the Courtyard to greet the guests as they arrived to the hotel. I think some of there were (pleasantly) surprised to see us again! For this part of the wedding, we upped the tempo a bit and played a selection of our contemporary repertoire. We could see that some of the guests were appreciating some of our numbers, such as Cantina Band from Star Wars. That’s still one of our favourites!
We did a couple of broadcasts on Periscope while we were waiting for guests to arrive, to get members of the public to select what we would play first. The Beatles were very popular requests, in particular Eleanor Rigby.
Thank you to both of you for booking us, and we hope you have a wonderful honeymoon!