C5 Live

My band…C5 (named not for the Sinclair personal vehicle invented just down the road from here, but as less of a mouthful to put on a pub sign than Cottenham Community Centre Coffeeshop Collective) had another pub gig last night, we’re getting around a bit now…but here’s a bit of history.

Back in April 2012 a few of us gathered in the reverberous main hall of Cottenham Community Centre and strummed a few chords and sang a few random melodies at each other. We decided to make it a regular monthly thing, others came and went, guitars, flutes, keyboards, violins. Now, we have a core of about eight of us, singers, guitarists, percussionists. We’ve written a few songs (some quite a few more than others, some using just 1 chord, amazingly), we even wrote a Xmas song pastiche that came out of a Stir-up Sunday jam session in 2014, which was re-recorded by a choir I got to know from Essex. We also practice lots of our favourite songs as covers and some of us have recorded some of those and some of the originals.

From the start, there was always the possibility that we’d sing for an audience in the CCC and I think we did that for the first time midsummer 2013 at the Fen Edge Festival. Since then various incarnations have performed in the CCC for other events, in various pubs (as far afield as Waterbeach, and one of us, solo, in Yorkshire and in France. The C5 with its full current grouping performed en masse in The Chequers in Cottenham on an otherwise dull November evening in the pre-Xmas lull of 2015, and we packed the pub out, I think Moyra and Greg had expected a quiet evening of gentle guitar music…

Our other favourite pub in the village, The Jolly Millers, got wind of our storming success there and Viki booked us for January 2016 and again we had a crowd of 50 or 60 punters, there were even a few tears when we did Life on Mars by David Bowie and Rich hit the electric heights on the guitar solo. Both pubs are hoping for a return visit. We have high hopes of fulfilling those bookings as well as spreading our wings a little further…this week Cottenham, next year Carnegie Hall…or maybe the Cottenham Club?

The current eight pictured (L-R) above are: Jo 2.0, Jo 1.0, Andrea on vocals and percussion, Dave, Adrian and Simon (AWOL) on various guitars and vocals, Rich on electric guitar and wah-wah and Rog on bass (and acoustic guitar). We’re on Facebook and piggybacking on my twitter account DaveBradMusic.

Upper photo by Tricia Bradley. Lower Xmas photo offered by audience member at our Xmas CCC gig.