One of the more memorable London rooms we’ve played is the Grand Temple at Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden - a December corporate gala that came to us through entertainment agency Sternberg Clarke. The agency had built a full variety bill for the night, and we were the live band on it: our female-fronted Sisterhood line-up, out as a 7-piece with three lead vocalists, female bass and a three-piece band behind.
A stage built over the seats
If you’ve never been inside, the Grand Temple is hard to describe without sounding like you’re exaggerating. It’s the big room in the Art Deco headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England, a mosaic ceiling about sixty feet up, stone on every wall, and a bank of fixed, raked theatre seating at one end. For an event the seats disappear under a flat deck the production company builds over the rake, so you play on a temporary stage laid across what is normally tiered seating. It’s one of the few rooms where the load-in is genuinely worth talking about.
The production for the night was a full hired-in rig - line arrays flown left and right, a serious wall of subs, the kind of system a room this tall and live needs. We ran our own desks on stage and sent the production team a clean stereo feed to put through the house PA, which is how we like to work a big London room: our in-ear mixes and our sound stay in our hands, and the production company own the room. A stone-and-mosaic hall has a long reverb tail, so keeping the stage quiet - in-ears, no wedges - and letting a properly-tuned PA do the carrying is what stops the sound turning to soup.
Sharing the bill
This wasn’t a band-only night. Alongside us the agency had dancers, close-up magicians and a few other acts working the room through the evening, which is fairly typical of a big London corporate gala - the entertainment is layered across the night rather than handed to one act.
For our part we played the way we play most corporate nights: two sets of around an hour, blended together in our own style and loaded with floor-fillers, with the room going from seated-and-fed to a full dance floor under that ceiling. A corporate crowd that’s been in the room all evening tends to go harder than people expect once the first big singalong lands, and the Grand Temple gives that energy somewhere to go.
Photographs from the night were taken by Tom Dingley.
A London room worth the trip
We’re a South Wales band and London is a long way down the M4, but the major rooms are worth the travel and it’s good to cover them - the Grand Temple sits alongside Magazine London in Greenwich, Kensington Palace and the rest of the London corporate circuit we’ve played across our bands.
If you’re planning a corporate event, awards night or gala in London and want a band that’s worked the big rooms, get in touch.
The Sisterhood are part of The Brotherhood family of South Wales function bands, playing corporate events, weddings and parties across the UK. Contact us to check availability for your event.
