LIVE: Five Years at Sea
10 years ago this month I started putting Pyrates! together as a band.. This is an email conversation between myself and noted pirate historian Ed Fox on the subject attending the South West Pirate Festival... A festival he organised at Morwellham Quay in Devon.
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Ed: Does your group have a name? If so, what is it?
David: Not currently, we just refer to ourselves as “Pyrates”
Ed: Is there anything in particular that you ”do”? (I noticed on your website that you’re musicians, if you want to bring your instruments and sing some piratey songs that’d be great! I’ll probably bring my bouzouki and a whistle or three) If I can help by providing you with space or anything then I will. If you just want to wander freely being piratical then that’s fine too
David: We don’t really ”do” anything as it goes, *yet*.
One of the reasons I’m getting us along to this is to help us find a direction for the group that isn’t just drinking in bars.
We will certainly bring our instruments!
If we string a kind of performance together I’ll let you know, I’m going to pressgang some other musical types over the next few days and see what becomes of it!
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Pyrates! actually started in 2003 as just a bunch of people going out drinking dressed as pirates.
I had the name but we weren’t a band at the time, as few years down the line I was looking for something else to do as a group, we loved drinking, and still do, but that wasn’t holding my interest alone, I’d been reading about the history and was thinking about re-enacting, I knew nothing about it at the time.
Ed gave me the nudge that caused me to get it going. I hold him personally responsible.
After returning from the SWPF 2006, head full of sea songs, shanties and massive hangover I got to work.
By summer I had the first demos, the band started rehearsing and we played our first show on New Years Eve-Eve: December 30th 2006 at The Globe Inn, Exeter, my local pub at the time.
So here we are, nearly 10 gigging years down the road over 400 shows done!
