A new Christmas parade experience for all

So – we’ve never done the Upper Hutt Christmas Parade before, but the organisers had seen us on parade earlier in the year, absolutely loved us, and invited us to lead the 2015 event. How cool!

It’s quite a long route, which is always good because we get a real workout, and the streets were absolutely thronged with people watching the parade. Lovely atmosphere too – we had a great time.

It was Simon-the-German’s first gig with us and it was great to have him there. He plays in a samba band in Nuremberg, Germany, and saw us performing at the Coburg Samba Festival last year. He’s in New Zealand for 6 months or so on his OE, and got in touch the minute he arrived in Wellington. It’s very cool to see how far our reputation reaches these days 🙂

Once we’d completed the parade we wandered through the streets back to the Expressions Art and Entertainment Centre near where we’d started. We’d been invited to do a stage performance in the big hall, which we were more than happy to do.

It’s never easy to tell how loud we are indoors, especially in such a huge sports-hall type space with a massive high roof and some quite substantial reverb going on. I do hope we didn’t deafen anyone. Simon-the-German was doing really well right up until the moment when his stick went right through the skin of his borrowed caixa – oopsie!

It was a great day out for us – it’s always great to discover a new and fab event we’ve never done before, and we’re really pleased to have been invited.

Here’s a video of us on the parade, taken by our surdo player, John: