And then suddenly, it’s a whole new year!
I think it’s safe to say that the band have never been tighter, more creative and keener to share our brand of Indie Rock with the world. We’ll soon be posting details of our two festivals booked for this summer, including a return to the fabulous The Eyes Have It festival in Duffield, Derbyshire in July.
We’re also trying to line up some gigs for the coming months. Watch this space.
Oh, and we have some new photos. Here’s one, taken in our studio…
As if to prove you can’t keep a good band down, TELSEN have recommenced rehearsals to prepare for two festivals scheduled for July. But first, here’s our first official photo of 2021 (including, you’ll notice, “new” drummer Luke, who’s been with the band for almost two years but only had the opportunity to play a couple of gigs with us)…
Right. Those festival dates:
Saturday 3rd July: “The Eyes Have It” Festival, Duffield, Derbyshire. Main stage. Supporting the legendary Steve Harley. You might be aware we’ve played here several (4? 5?) times before and it is truly a highlight of the TELSEN calendar. Click here for more information and tickets.
Saturday 17th July: We’re still waiting for full details about this event but it will be in the West Midlands. TELSEN have been asked to do an acoustic set on Friday 16th July and then a full set on the Saturday but this is all yet to be confirmed.
What we can tell you is that apart from storming, re-energized renditions of those classic TELSEN songs, we have a few new songs fighting for their place in our set list that we feel have the makings of future classics.
We’ve put together a limited edition 4-track live CD to take along to The Eyes Have It festival next month where we’re supporting the 80’s legend Hazel O’Connor (Friday 6th July). The tracks were recorded at last year’s TEHI festival by our good friend Quentin at Silk Purse Videos. We hope to be selling these for £1 a pop at the festival but let us know if you’d like to reserve one.
It’s not too late to come and see us TEHI. This is our favourite festival and we’d love to see us there.
Next stop – t-shirts!
TELSEN are delighted to welcome Jeff Wilday as our resident tub-thumper for our forthcoming events, including our much-longed-for return to TEHI Festival in July.
Jeff replaces our original drummer Richard, who had to take a recuperative sabbatical due to ongoing hand issues and eventually decided to step down. We’d like to wish Richard all the very best and we’re glad to hear his injury is showing a great deal of improvement.
Before making this announcement here. we sneaked in a little mid-bill 40 minute set at The Asylum 2 in Birmingham last month which went down very well.
We don’t think it will be long before Jeff is up to speed with the rest of the TELSEN back catalogue and perhaps even emerges from a cloud of rhubarb-and-custard-flavoured vapour long enough to have his mugshot added to the website.
For the moment, here’s the first ever photograph of the new line-up (Jeff is second from the left betwixt two other grumpy blokes…
Well, that’s our favourite festival done and dusted for another year. “The Eyes have It” 2017 was roughly double in size to last year and four times the size of 2015. Headliners this year included the Blockheads and Climax Blues Band -and TOYAH, who we were delighted to be main support for on the Saturday night and who turned out to be really lovely and a total professional.
Our set seemed to go down very well and there are rumours (actually, slightly more than rumours) that we’ll be back next year – our FOURTH consecutive appearance at this wonderful event.
Telsen would like to thank Simon Clark and his amazing team for a fantastic weekend and his continued belief in our little band of noisy West-Midlanders.
Thanks also to Quentin Clark of Silk Purse Videos for his excellent video footage, which we’ll be posting here, a track at a time, for your delectation.
Here, to get the ball rolling is “Cowboy”, a newish song from mid-set that we’re especially pleased with…
We’ve been a bit lax regarding updates here but quite a lot has been happening of late. Our lovely drummer Dave Eley has moved on to pastures new (the bad news) but luckily the original Telsen drummer Richard Battye has returned to his sweaty drum stool (the good news).
And just in time too – we’ve been practicing hard to bring Richard up to speed with the newer songs before we play our biggest (and, sorry, favourite, gig this year) – “The Eyes Have It” Festival in Duffield, Derbyshire on Saturday 8th July.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – this is a fantastic friendly little festival, and we’re fortunate to have played there every year since it started in 2015. This year though, the ante has been upped and numbers are set to be considerably bigger than previous years, not least because of the bigger names that organiser Simon has lined up for each day. Friday’s headliners are none other than The Blockheads, on Sunday it’s the Climax Blues Band, and on Saturday we’ll be warming the stage for 80’s icon, Toyah! This is going to be a cracker.
If you’d like to come along, there may still be tickets available although we understand that the campsite may now be fully booked (but call to check). Telsen are onstage at 9pm.
Nick, Abi, Karl and David would like to take this opportunity to wish Dave Eley all the very best in his future musical projects. Thanks for the beats!
We hope you haven’t mistaken the lack of activity on this site for our: abduction by aliens, signing by a major label, band split, death in a mudslide etc…
Truth be told, we’ve been busily enjoying ourselves. But also securing gigs, recording a demo, writing new material, nailing down our live set, and planning world domination one gig venue at a time.
The end of 2016 saw us travelling slightly further afield and one gig alone led to two more bookings for 2017. There’ll be more gig announcements (including festival news), photos, and finally some studio-recorded demos right here very soon so keep looking.
But for now, here’s a nice photo(by our good friend and official photographer Colin Dabbs) of our Nick in the recording studio…
TELSEN 