A Wedding Band for Bristol - Twenty Minutes Over the Bridge

Wedding bands Bristol - a South Wales band over the bridge

Bristol is closer to us than most of Wales is. From our base in Newport it is twenty minutes over the old Severn Bridge - less than the drive to Swansea, less than the drive up the Heads of the Valleys road. When we quote a Bristol wedding it is a local job, not a touring one, and that shows up in what it costs you.

The Brotherhood are a five to eleven-piece band playing weddings across Bristol and South Gloucestershire, and we have been working both sides of the Severn since 2015. A lot of our Bristol diary comes the same way our corporate work does: from people who think of Cardiff, Newport and Bristol as one patch, because they are.

Bristol wedding venues

Ashton Court Mansion

The council-owned mansion in 850 acres of deer park on the Long Ashton side of the Suspension Bridge, and the Bristol venue we have played most. It is a genuinely good room for a full band - the proportions carry a big lineup without the sound turning to mush, and the estate gives your photographer the whole afternoon.

Because it is council-run rather than a hotel, the timings and the licence are set rather than negotiable, so it is worth pinning down your finish time before you fix the running order with us.

Tortworth Court

Twenty minutes north of the city, ten minutes off J14 of the M5 - a Grade-listed Victorian Gothic mansion in thirty acres of South Gloucestershire estate, now run by De Vere. The evening is in the Westminster Suite: a big flat-floored modern room round the back of the old house, up to 280, floor-to-ceiling windows onto the grounds, no fitted sound limiter and a level load-in straight off the car park. Ceremonies and smaller receptions run in the 1874 Orangery.

With hotel rooms across the estate, most of your guests can stay over, which does more for the last hour of the dancefloor than anything a band can do.

More on playing weddings at Tortworth Court →

The city-centre hotel rooms

We know Bristol Harbour Hotel on Corn Street and the Mercure Bristol Grand off Broad Street from corporate nights rather than weddings, but the rooms are the rooms and what we know about them holds. Both are city-centre buildings where guests finish the night upstairs or a short walk away instead of arranging coaches, and both have in-house AV teams we have worked alongside.

City-centre load-ins are their own skill, and we treat them as part of the plan: we agree the access window with the venue up front and set up earlier than we would out of town, so it is all done before anyone arrives.

Clifton and the northern edge

Mansion House in Clifton is the Lord Mayor’s official residence and available for private hire - grand, but not a big room. It rewards a smaller lineup mixed properly far more than a large one played quietly. Berwick Lodge at Henbury is a Victorian country house on the northern edge of the city, close enough to the M5 for a straightforward load-in while still feeling out of town. Thornbury Castle, further north towards the Severn, is the real-history option, with the access constraints that come with a genuinely listed Tudor building - worth confirming equipment routes early.

What size band suits a Bristol wedding

The 5-piece Brotherhood - two vocals, guitar, bass, drums and keys - is the lineup that fits most Bristol rooms, including the city-centre hotels where floor space is the real constraint. Six-piece adds sax. Eight-piece and up with brass is for Ashton Court and the Westminster Suite at Tortworth, where there is enough room to justify it.

We run in-ear monitors instead of floor wedges and DI the guitar and bass to the desk rather than putting amps on stage. In a Clifton function room that is what makes an eight-piece physically possible; in a listed building it means less kit to carry through a door that was not designed for it.

If you want something other than a party band, The Sisterhood is the female-fronted lineup and The Apple Tree Theory covers the acoustic folk and reggae end for ceremonies, drinks and more relaxed evenings.

How the evening runs

We usually play three sets: a relaxed opener of around thirty minutes that carries your first dance and any other formal dances, then two fifty-minute sets that do the real work. DJ playlists run in the gaps and after we finish, so nothing goes quiet between us leaving the stage and the lights coming up. Timings flex around your day rather than the other way round.

Getting to Bristol from South Wales

Newport to central Bristol is twenty minutes over the old bridge; Cardiff is about half an hour. Tortworth and Thornbury are much the same up the M5. We treat all of it as home patch and do not bill it as out-of-area travel, which is the practical reason a South Wales band can be better value in Bristol than a band coming out from Bath or Swindon.

Further afield, our Bath wedding band, wedding bands Somerset and wedding bands Cotswolds pages cover the rest of the South West run, and wedding bands Cheltenham covers the town at the top of the M5. Back over the bridge, start with wedding bands South Wales. We also play corporate events in Bristol.

Book your Bristol wedding band

Planning a wedding at Ashton Court, Tortworth Court, Berwick Lodge or anywhere else around Bristol? Check our availability for your date.