Tubesnake

Over the last few weeks our advertisement for a full time guitarist drew interest from around a dozen players and led to a couple of house meets and a four song audition at our gig at The Angel in Durham on Saturday 22nd March. Our dep guitarist, Stuart Dawson, stood down at the start of the second set to allow one Martin Craggs to show us his stuff in a ‘live’ situation by playing on four of the songs currently in our set. Guess that could be classed as a baptism of fire for Martin rather than holding the audition in a practice hall but it gave us all the ‘real feel’ and we were very happy to ask Martin to join the band. Martin has played in folk, rock, pop, jazz and blues bands at venues and festivals across the UK and Europe and was a member of the award winning Maggie Ross Band. He is classically trained and works as a freelance guitarist and teacher at NMC (Northern Music Centre) in Newcastle. In the four weeks since that audition at The Angel, Martin has been getting up to speed with a list of forty songs we currently still use in our set and played his debut gig with us yesterday at the ‘Easter Takeover’ Rock Event. This was hosted by The Hut Rock Venue at Crook FC where we shared the billing with Black Rose and The Kieran Johnson Band. The new line-up is officially on the road and although, for now, it’s all about settling in and tightening up what we currently run with you can expect new material to be introduced in the near future to cement and define this tenth line-up of Tubesnake.