Happy new year from 8-Ball, your favourite Sussex wedding band!

We know we are a bit late on the bandwagon but we hope you’ve had a great Christmas and a peaceful start to 2019.

While we’re sure the new year holds many great shows, stella wedding entertainment and boat loads of stories (and eventual blogs) for 8-Ball we’re going to kick off our first blog of the year updating you on a super cool project we worked on in December.

Normally by the end of November any new bookings are for the year to come and December holds the usual exciting run of corporate entertainment and Christmas parties…or so we thought.

An email came through from Tailored Entertainment saying we’d had an enquiry to record with a musician called Hamza Namira with a track he was working on for the popular Egyptian channel Alaraby TV. The plan was to record the track and film it in one day. We liked the sound of being TV stars so we duly beetled off to Cambridge in the 8-Ball van, bleary eyed from the 5.30am start but knowing a fun day in the studio and potential fame awaited us. We’d been told in advance that Hamza was hoping we could add some lyrics of our own in English so the journey up was filled with us bouncing ideas off each other to hone the verse Rio was going to sing.

We arrived at Headline recording studios at 8am where we met Hamza, his film crew and bagpipe player Tom. Time was of the essence so we hurriedly set up our gear whilst Hamza’s team mic’d us up to capture our thoughts for the behind the scenes content. By 9am we were all set and began working on the track. The decision was made to record it live in the room with minimal overdubs meaning there was no margin of error for mistakes and everyone had to be on their game. The fusion of the traditional Arabic track with the upbeat western pop style took a while to mesh but when it did it was a very exciting moment. With about five takes recorded we knew we had a keeper in the can so all attention turned to the film shoot.

Had it been the summer we could have had a much more leisurely schedule but with sun down predicted for 4pm it only left us about two hours to drive to our location and film our performance. So we shot off to the centre of Cambridge and began setting up in our slot outside Kings College! Crowds began gathering sensing something of interest was going on. With some especially eager tourists filming us walk down the street and unloading the van without any clue as to who we were. As we started playing though it became clear that the track was as good as we thought it was, with the audience visibly enjoying what they were hearing. It seemed that Hamza was a familiar face to many and he graciously stopped for photos with passers-by. The film team did a fantastic job getting enough takes just before the light went. Everyone was exhausted but immensely pleased with the day’s work!

Check out the finished video here (we promise you it is a certified foot tapper): 

We want to thank Hamza and his team for having us and letting us be part of such a brilliant project.

That’s all for now, see you at a show in 2019! Love 8-Ball, x