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!
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 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…
Our Halloween gig at the Walkabout was frightfully good fun. The sound was quite frightful too but we’re told it all sounded fine “out front” so that’s the main thing. The poor sound engineer struggled to overcome the problems with the room’s acoustics and horrendous noise coming from the main bar upstairs but Telsen and the other bands had great fun regardless. Thanks to everyone that came along. We’re now planning a recording session in the next few weeks and so we’re trying to decide exactly what to record. What do you think?
Anyway, here’s Nick and Karl in rehearsals this weekend…
Forgive us, dear reader, for our apparent absence in recent months. After our appearance at The Eyes Have It festival in the summer, the Telsenites have been taking themselves off on much-needed holidays and succumbing to a few illnesses but we’re now back in rehearsals with a renewed sense of purpose.
Not least, we’re working on new material, arranging some recording sessions and even planning a video shoot. So keep watching for news of these as they happen.
In the meantime, we’ve been invited to play at a charity gig at the Walkabout bar on Brum’s Broad Street (and not at Cherry Reds as previously thought). The event is part of Operation Drawstring and raising money for the city’s homeless and Telsen will be onstage at 9pm as main support to Seventh Syndicate.
Occasionally, the Telsenites pop out to “open mic” nights at local live music venues to hone their stagecraft whilst also grabbing the opportunity to perform in front of some new faces. Earlier this month, Telsen made one such expedition to the brilliant Feathers venue in Lichfield where we were met with a very warm welcome despite being the only act that evening playing original music. We had a great evening and managed to film 4 of the 5 songs we performed. You’ll find these on our “Music” page.
In the last couple of weeks, Telsen have played their first two gigs since losing Richard (drums) and Phil (keys) and recruiting Dave (drums). We’ve showcased a couple of brand new (and arguably still works-in-progress) songs – “Pull me out” and “Give me more” . Both seemed to go down really well and are real “stadium anthems”. In fact, we’ve had marvellous feedback from both gigs so we’re all set to take the band onward and upward in this coming year.
We headlined at the excellent Route 44 in Acocks Green, Birmingham again on 27th February with a hastily-elongated set (there was one less act on the bill than planned) and then again at a “thank you for the support” free-to-enter gig at Asylum 2 in Hockley (at Madhouse Studios) on 5th March organised by our very own singist Abi. Great acts on both bills made for cracking nights of live music.
We are mightily grateful to our good mate Colin Dabbs for coming along and photographing our first gig with the new line-up at Route 44. We’ll post some more images over the coming weeks but here’s a couple to start with…
Point a camera at Abi, even mid-gig and this happens…
Image by Colin Dabbs
This is how so many of the Telsen songs come into being – the longstanding creative collaboration between Nick and Karl. Here, they’re bouncing a few ideas around during studio downtime…
TELSEN 