Busy start to our 10th Year

We keep pinching our collective selves at the thought that The Magnificent AK47 have been operating in one form or another since the Ashton Keynes Music Festival of 2008...

Emerging from that event, many participants of the original workshop inspired by the success of the session and the following triumph of the "Sing off" against with the "Divas" the next day, and buoyed up with the idea of continuing, enough blokes managed to keep things going to get through a tough period of the "Early Years".

Luckily we received tremendous support from the Festival, in particular the then Festival Director, Mr Graham Loveday and managed to just about stay afloat in terms of finances and enthusiasm, yet despite only meeting every six weeks or more, we gradually built up a small repertoire and word started to spread about something special happening in our corner of North North Wiltshire.

Little did we know what was about to come as more and more blokes started to turn up, mostly from outside the village, including blokes as far away as Swindon and Stroud.  These injections of new talent and enthusiasm started us on our arc of discovery to where we transcended from being just a bunch of blokes rehearsing in a school hall, to a bigger bunch of blokes rehearsing in the back room of the village pub, and then beyond.

Doubtless, there are many more stories to be told of the newbies and their infusion of new influences on the group, but suffice to say that more will be told in times to come as we generally spend the whole year wallowing in our longevity and many great adventures.

One thing to mention, is the huge variety of places that we have sung, from replica sailing ships to windmills, dark tunnels and grottoes, on cliffs and harboursides and so many other places in between that it is going to take two or three blog posts to cover them all.

Now we have already had three months of this celebratory year and managed to squeeze in a Boot Camp, Recording Session, a new album's worth of material on a new CD, a few other workshops and a couple of gigs and even had a gig called off.

Up coming are many more adventures over the course of the year, including a 10th Anniversary Tour to the Cork International Choral Festival in breezy south west Ireland, a big festival later in the summer and and even bigger event we are organising for the first weekend in October and much more.

So, stay tuned for more news of the pioneers of #alt.mvc