British band The Heavy Heavy plays Friday at Arden Gild Hall.
The Brits are coming … to Arden Gild Hall.
The Heavy Heavy, a retro rock band from Brighton, England, will play an outdoor concert in the north Delaware community Friday, Aug. 18.
“I would say they kind of have an early 70s rock sound influenced by Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash,” said Ron Ozer, executive director of the hall. “They say their goal is to make records that sound like their favorite records, so you can kind of get that they’re not trying to sound edgy. In that sense, it’s a retro sound.”
The 170-year-old barn that serves as the home for concerts and other kinds of community events has played host to a variety of music in the concert series’ 25 years.
“We try to cover a lot of ground with rock, bluegrass, singer songwriters, world music, jazz and comedy,” Ozer said.
This season will include the Irish quartet Lankum (Sept. 27, $28), Dar Williams (Oct. 6, $45), Suzanne Vega (Oct. 7, $65), the all-women jazz band Artemis (Oct. 13, $34), comic Ophira Eisenberg (Dec. 9, $34). All shows are at www.ardenconcerts.com.
Ozer, who is a trustee at The Grand, said the concert gild’s choices rarely confict with acts that are chosen by The Grand or The Queen.
That’s largely because they both are booking bigger venues, he said.
The Gild Hall itself allows 300 standing or 250 people. It’s outside area will seat 300, he said.
While Ozer handles booking the Arden concert series as a volunteer, he’s paid to book the Elkton Music Hall.
“I have to consider whether it’s going to be an Arden show or an Elkton show when I’m looking at different bands,” Ozer said. “But Elkton has three or four nights a week they want to book, so it’s a lot more than Arden. We can’t do more than two or three a month really because we were just part of a number of guilds.”
They include folk dancing, scholars, lectures, the Writers Gild, and theater groups for Shakespeare and Gilbert & Sullivan.
A good number of Arden’s shows sell out, Ozer said.
Georgie Fuller and Will Turner head the five piece band, The Heavy Heavy.
Heavy Heavy background
He hopes the Heavy Heavy will. Tickets for that show are $23 and selling well, he said. Get ’em here.
Opener Joelton Mayfield starts at 6 p.m. That’s so the outdoor shows closer earlier, since the hall sits in the middle of a neighborhood.
Ozer has seen the band perform at the Newport Folk Fest and says every song is danceable. The band played the Brooklyn Bowl in Philadelphia, and WXPN has been playing a lot of their songs, he said.
Ozer particularly likes the four-part harmonies that show up in various songs.
The five-piece Heavy Heavy is led by lifelong musicians Will Turner and Georgie Fuller. They describe their music as a “reverb-drenched collision of psychedelia and blues, acid rock and sunshine pop” heavy on the sounds of a decade ago.
“I think it’s gonna be a really good fit for our series,” Ozer said “We have a relatively older crowd and this music feels familiar. It doesn’t feel like some of the more jagged indie rock that we might get.”
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Turner said in press materials that their influences include Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, British Invasion pop acts like the Hollies and folk-blues duo Delaney & Bonnie, to name a few.
He’s from Malvern, which has hosted Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and Kate Bush.
“It’s famous for the healing qualities of its water, and there are ancient trees where the Druids used to worship—there’s a sort of magical-hippie aspect to it,” Turner said
Fuller elevates every track with spellbinding vocals and magnetic presence. She has performed at Montreux Jazz Festival as a teenager and has acted in London theater.
Their debut EP “Life and Life Only” contains the first track Turner and Fuller recorded as The Heavy Heavy, a lilting piece of psych-pop titled “Go Down River.”
Their full-length debut is due out in next year.
“The driving force behind all our songwriting is to feel good, and to make other people feel good, too,” Fuller said.
Betsy Price is a Wilmington freelance writer who has 40 years of experience, including 15 at The News Journal in Delaware.
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