NEARFest Rehearsals

Rehearsals have started for our first ever US gig at NEARfest in June, as evidenced by the official press photo above. Now where did Roy get those trousers?

The line-up for this gig will be: Brian Devoil, Dean Baker, Andy Sears, Andy Faulkner and Roy Keyworth. As you know Dean and Roy are already established members of the extended ‘TN’ family and in Clive’s absence we are delighted to welcome Andy Faulkner. Andy is an excellent bass player (best known for his work with the band Jump) who has been working for several months with Andy Sears on his solo project. Both Roy and him were big Twelfth Night fans ‘back in the day’ and used to come and see us at the Marquee in the mid 1980s. How odd that some 30 years later they are now filling the shoes of the musicians they used to watch and admire so much… As we are playing NEARfest as a 5-piece, Andy Sears will be playing a lot more guitar and keyboards to fill out the sound: the 90 minute set will cover all our albums from Fact & Fiction through to XII – and include plenty of solid gold Twelfth Night classics! So far, rehearsals have gone very well and we are all fired up for NEARfest. The venue is the Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on 23 June 2012 – please do let us know if you are coming to see us, particularly if you are travelling from the UK. More information including the full weekend’s line-up can be found at www.nearfest.com

STOP PRESS: We have just arranged a ‘secret’ warm up gig in the UK. It will be at The Peel on Sunday 3rd June (yes the Sunday of the double Bank Holiday). We are planning to play the same set as NEARfest but under the name of ‘XII’ – rather than ‘Twelfth Night’. Tickets are £12 in advance and on sale now from www.houseofprogression.webeden.co.uk. As it is a Sunday the evening will start and finish early to enable people to get home in good time. This means will we probably be in stage around 8:00pm. More details to follow…

More Gig News: ‘Summers End’… As we mentioned in the last newsletter (Feb 12) we enjoyed ourselves so much at the Cryptic Clues gig in January that we decided we would like to do some more… So we are delighted to announce that we have accepted an invitation to headline the Saturday night of this year’s Summers End festival – which is being held from September 28-30th 2012 at Lydney Town Hall in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. This is a great honour for us as Summers End has become the UK’s biggest prog festival over the last few years, boasting a great line-up every year. We will be playing as The Cryptic Clues this time but with the same line-up as for the Jan 14 Peel gig namely: Brian Devoil (drums), Andy Revell (guitar), Clive Mitten (bass, guitar, keyboards), Mark Spencer (vocals, bass, guitar, keyboards) and Dean Baker (keyboards). We are planning a special show for what will be our biggest UK gig for a number of years, with our set consisting largely of early material, culled from the Live at the Target, Fact and Fiction, and Live and Let Live albums. As the promoters are saying: “with Änglagård (from Sweden) in the special guest slot, this will make for a day not to be missed!” Ticket details will be confirmed soon and will appear at http://www.summersend.co.uk/ in due course. They should be available early in May.

Posted May 2nd 2012