The Square - Sunday 10th July 2011

Following on from the excellent early afternoon session, The Musiclab staff and the staff at The Square had a quick break before welcoming the next set of students and their friends and families to The Square for the day's second session.

Kicking off Session Two we had Rhys, Reece, Luke & Troy with Nicholas guesting on sax. The guys kicked off with Low Rider and did really well, taking to the stage without the fall-back of having their tutor on stage with them. They followed their groovy opening tune with Punk classic Anarchy In The Uk with Troy not only powering the song along with some tight and agressive drumming, but taking the lead vocal too. It's not an easy thing to do, but Troy pulled it off with high energy and plenty of attitude. Luke then took over on drum kit and Rhys on vocals and we were treated to versions of Brick In The Wall and Back In Black to wrap up an excellent opening set.

Next up, we had Damon, Lydia, Joe & Jonathon who opened with All My Life, quickly followed by a favourite from The Musiclab Live - February 2011 - a rocked up version of George Michael's Faith, showcasing some excellent guitar work by Damon and Lydia. It was really impressive to see how much these students had improved in the past 5 months since the last performance and this improvement was very much in evidence in Motorcycle Emptiness, with more lead guitar work from Damon, aided and abetted by Joe, whose confidence has really improved over the past couple of performances as he looks so relaxed on stage now. Jonathon provided the accurate and inventive grooves on drums on which this performance was based and showed his excellent understanding of dynamics on Stacked Actors and his playing really helps to gel the rest of these young musicians into a cohesive group.

A hard act to follow, but next on stage were The Labrats with Josh & Bob blasting through a mini-set featuring Albie, Tess, Rhys and James, playing No Faith In Medicine, Red Morning Light, Teenage Depression and Hate To Say I Told You So respectively. Excellent work all round by these students including a confident debut performance by Tess.

Following on from this, we had Nicholas back on stage with his Sax for Baker Street, joined by brother Chris, who provided some nice dynamics and slick drum grooves, we also witnessed some accurate rhythm guitar playing by "the other" Chris, a nice vocal from Josh and Damon, lending a hand on bass.

Nicholas then switched from sax to guitar (matching Yamaha Pacificas with Chris!) for a gutsy and powerful performance of Crazy Train, followed by a version of the Queen classic Under Pressure.

Next up were Nathan, Nathaniel & James. They kicked their set off with School with James showing what he can do on the drum kit, before he switched to bass for Go Your Own Way with Ben coming in on drums and showing a massive improvment since the last performance. Sometimes things just click for a student and this has definitely happened lately with Ben and he put in an excellent performance on this song and also End Over End. Nathan and Nathaniel were excellent throughout and it was so good, we even think we might have seen Ben smile!

Closing session two, we had another short set from Labrats Bob & Josh with guest 'Rat Toby leaving the safety of the drum stool to provide guitar for Roxanne featuring Tess on drums. After a slightly shaky start, Tess got into the groove and did a great job with a tricky song / drum part. Next up, we had a solid performance on Come As You Are by Albie who added an excellent fill at the end of the song. The final song saw Rhys (again, excellent on vocals all day), take to the drum stool for Time - a fitting end to the show and as Bob said...."Who's this on guitar? Rhys! Who's this on vocals? Rhys! Who's this on drums? Rhys! Who's this loading the tour bus?!!!

Part 3 coming soon......