The Royal Tavern is a well known venue for live music with buskers night on every Thursday and live bands every Friday and Saturday. For those who are that way inclined, there is also a karaoke on Sunday night.

For those who frequent the Tavern, some of the members of the band would be instantly recognisable as regular visitors and players on the Thursday buskers night. Two of those would be Derek and Dave –  brothers who are the core of the band and young Kevin who is also a regular face there.
The band is made up of as below:

Dave - Vocals
Derek - Bass/Acoustic Guitar
Kev - Lead-Rhythm Guitar / Bass
Paul - Drums/Percussion
Rob - Lead-Rhythm Guitar, backing vocals
Tony – Keyboards

The band elected to run with 2 sets with totally different feels to them, with the first set being a quiet set and the second being a more up-beat rock set. Besides the brilliantly distinctive voice of the font man Dave, the next thing that hits you is the set list itself. So many bands stick with a full set of safe, well known songs all the way through, but these lads played songs which you knew, but may not have thought of as your first choice. What that did, in my opinion, was to bring about a refreshing change to the Blyth rock scene. 

The first set started with Deep Purple’s “Soldier Of Fortune” which was followed up by a song you probably won’t have heard, called “Angel Of The North”. This song was written by Davie and Derek and fits in nicely with the overall sound of the band.  These openers were followed up with “One” - U2, Hazel O'Conner’s, “Will You”, “When A Man Loves A Woman” (Percy Sledge), “Still Got The Blues” (Gary Moore), “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”, the old Poison classic, “When A Blind Man Cries” (Deep Purple) and ending with “Stand By Me” the Ben E King evergreen. When was the last time you heard that sort of mix? The songs may seem a strange choice but were a pretty good choice in many ways as they allowed you to see the various talents of the individual players.

To my way of thinking, the core of any band has to be solid and be able to work together. That core is of course the drummer & bassist who are in turn lead by the singer. In this case, Dave’s vocals were class to say the least and backed up by a good solid bass man and an exceptional drummer, the core sounded good. Add in an exceptional guitarist in Rob and Tony on keyboard’s and you have the makings of a good band. However, one other shone on the night too. Kev, by far the youngest of the group, is an exceptional guitarist and showed it to the appreciative audience. At only 20, he has all the time in the world to hone his skills and I am certain we will see Kev in front of audiences for a long time yet.

The second set started with Whitesnakes “Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City” and was followed up with “Gimme Some Lovin'” by the Spencer Davis Group with Tony giving the song the right feel with his keyboard skills. We then had Dave giving the evil eye whilst blasting out Elvis’s version of “Trouble” and ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man”. An old favourite of mine came next with “Rocky Mountain Way” the Joe Walsh classic which gave both guitarists the opportunity to play. After a short guitar solo from Kev we jumped straight into “Breaking The Law” (Judas Priest), “You Really Got Me” (The Kinks), “Doctor Doctor” (UFO) and “Black Magic Woman” (Fleetwood Mac/Santana)
The crowd loved the set and the band did an encore with Chuck Berry’s “30 Days” with Rob doing the vocals.

All in all, a bloody good night. There is something for all in this band – some well known songs, some half remembered songs, some keyboards, plenty of guitar riffs and solos, solid well timed drumming (this man didn’t drop a beat or a stick all night), nice solid bass-lines and a singer who will please many an audience with his gravely vocals.  As a personal preference though, there are one or two songs which I personally would be inclined to drop, (Black Magic Woman, 30 days would probably be the first to go in my opinion) and I would definitely change the name!