Portsmouth folk-rockers Bemis to play Wedgewood Rooms for first time since 2020

The Guide Award-winning band hasn’t played at the Southsea venue since a charity event they hosted there in February 2020.

Frontman Gareth Howell says: ‘We can't wait to get back up there and play at The Wedge again.’

The show won’t quite be the same as they planned for last December, as Gareth explains: ‘Some of the people who were going to play then can't play now, so it's pretty much the core band – which is still seven of us!

‘One of the nice things I'm looking forward to is that besides the standards people are going to expect, we're also going to play the new single. It sounds like it's straight out of the ’60s, like a Neil Diamond song, and I really love playing it.’

The band is planning to go in and record its 10th album soon as well.

‘We've got about 20 songs to pick from for the next album. The only difference this time is that a lot of the band are really up for playing the songs live for a while before we record them. We're going to put a lot of these songs in the set first first and try things out with them. We've never done that before – normally we've recorded them first and then put them in the set.

‘I wrote a song called Bring on The Summer, which I wrote during lockdown, because we were all feeling like we couldn't go out, which is just a big kind of funk jam, which will be cool to thrash out live at gigs.’

And Gareth reckons the closeness of the band, not just musically, is really paying off.

‘One of the things that's been good for me personally is that the band have been such a tight unit, in that we've all stuck together through difficult circumstances, every member of the band has been here for ages. We've had a reputation for line-up changes, and that's not really happened lately!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​’

After this the band is looking forward to a summer of festival including Victorious and Guilfest: ‘We've got about five or six which is really nice to look forward to.’

They play The Wedge on Saturday, July 2. Tickets £7. Go to ​​​​​​​wedgewood-rooms.co.uk