The Pillowell Silver Band will have the honour of being the first act to perform at this year’s Coleford Music Festival which gets underway on Saturday 14th July.

The brass band will deliver a 45-minute set of uplifting tunes to kick-off the annual music festival on the Saturday afternoon in the centre of Coleford and their musical director, David Banks, is in no doubt his team of musicians will put on a great show. He said: “It’s was great to be asked to open the festival, which is always one of the best days in the calendar for so many musical groups in the local area.

“We play everything from classical music right through to current day pop songs. Being summertime, and the first performance of the music festival, we’re keen to play some up-tempo songs to create a lively atmosphere. We’re all looking forward to it, it’ll be great to play in front of a hometown crowd.”

The brass band, which was formed back in 1889, currently has 23 players, all of whom are from the Forest of Dean. David continued: “I think there’s nine brass bands in the Forest of Dean which is remarkable when you think it’s quite a sparsely populated area. There’s some cities in the UK that have two or three brass bands, it’s great for the Forest of Dean to have so many enthusiastic and keen musicians. There’s 23 of us in the band at the moment, we’re always on the look out for new members though. We’ve got players age 12 right through to people in their eighties, there’s a great cross section of people in the band, some have been members for decades.

“We rehearse twice a week. We generate our income from performing at weddings and other social events. Throughout summer our diary gets pretty busy which is great for us, we all love playing together. I’m the one at the front who waves a stick in the air, should anything go wrong during a performance it’s my fault!”

The band enjoy the competitive side of music, and regularly compete in competitions. David added: “Every year we go to Torquay for the annual brass band competition. A couple of years ago we were fortunate enough to be named west of England champions which was a massive achievement for everyone involved in the band. We then got to play in the national finals which were in Cheltenham, we ended up coming seventh out of twenty five entries which wasn’t too bad at all.

This year we’ve had our first invite to Pershore to play in the Mid-summer Festival which is something we’re all excited about. It’s nice to be part of a band that is ambitious, we like competing in competitions and testing ourselves.

“Playing in a band is a bit like being part of a football team, everyone has their own role and knows exactly what they need to do. You get one almighty buzz from performing, it’s a real team effort.”