Anything but dull and listless.
There’s always a set list and you’ve no idea how hard it is to write one especially if you are Geraint Watkins and you’ve got a hell of a lot of crowd-pleasers to include on it.
As a performer in his own right, Geraint Watkins has a vast abundance of songs and music to draw on. His own published compositions number over one hundred while also constantly jostling for a place on the firm’s paperwork are the countless R ‘n’ B, blues, soul, jazz and other earworms that have been percolating through his system for several decades.
Chums playing with Geraint at the Wheatsheaf in Tooting back in 2011 became the Mosquitoes but he withdrew from doing more of his own live shows following the deaths of a couple of his key men - Bobby Irwin and Neil Brockbank in 2015. Up to that point he had already released a few albums of his own songs and to the delight of his fans, was spending his spare time with this group putting them to the test in the back room of the local boozer until that chapter ended.
Since then, after a few years of recording 2019’s Rush of Blood album and subsequently emerging from the lockdown, Watkins has been frequently seen with a new line up of Mosquitoes and this band occasionally recorded some shows. A selection of tracks from gigs in Cardiff and London will be released as a 10" vinyl album on 20th September 2024. The record is called “Here and There” and it’s a great snapshot of what that version of the Mosquitoes sounded like.
Now…back to that abundance of material. One of the problems of being gifted with such embarrassment of riches is that the vast majority of the songs from this enviable hoard don’t ever get a public airing because of the clamour for the favourites!
Serendipitously, a solution has presented itself. It wasn’t great news at the time, but sax/clarinet man Martin Winning – a Mosquito from the outset, has left the band as he now resides in Newcastle. As a result, a recent run of dates stripped down to a four-piece has encouraged Geraint to try out other stuff…and it’s worked…because guess what…there had to be new lists.
From now on, to make the shows more interesting and varied, the band will remain as a quartet but with special guests at different shows to allow Watkins to dig deep into his music stash to punctuate the indispensable crowd-pleasers that are so deeply etched in the stone of the list.
You think you’ve seen and heard it all before, don’t you?
Nah! Come and see him next time.
