All Night Long (New Year's Eve)

It opens on about ten seconds of rehearsal and then cuts to the live footage, which is the part worth watching. New Year’s Eve 2019 at Celtic Manor, going into 2020, with twelve of us on stage - the full showband plus percussion, which is one more than we normally carry.

All Night Long is a New Year’s Eve song. It is forgiving, everyone knows their part without thinking, and it is built to be played by a lot of people at once. Nobody has to be clever, which matters at half past midnight when the room has been going since eight.

Twelve pieces is what a New Year’s Eve in a big room is built for. The band becomes the event rather than the soundtrack to it, and percussion on top of a full rhythm section gives the arrangements somewhere else to go - you can strip back to a vocal and a snare and then bring twelve people in behind it. We scale to whatever the room and the night call for, from five pieces upwards, and this is the top of that range doing exactly what it is for.

Celtic Manor has the ballrooms to take a band that size without the stage looking crowded, which is why the bigger lineups tend to end up there. We have played the resort since 2015 and it is fifteen minutes from where the band is based in Newport. There is more from the resort if you want to see the range, from a trio in Merlin’s Bar up to the showband.