Glass Onion celebrate 20th anniversary with town gig

A much-loved Sleaford rock band packed out a town venue and rattled the window frames as it celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special free gig.
Glass Onion - 20 years old!Glass Onion - 20 years old!
Glass Onion - 20 years old!

Glass Onion saw at least 100 fans old and new rammed into The Barn, a newly converted venue at Watergate Yard in Sleaford, on Saturday December 21 to mark an amazing two decades in the music business.

Despite a brief spell when the band was put on hold as members settled down to have families, pursue other projects and a couple of members moving on, the group are still going in their latest line-up.

Forming back in 1999, they reached the heady heights of supporting Status Quo, The Bootleg Beatles and Wishbone Ash in open air gigs and have released copious original material during their lifespan.

Following their quiet spell in the late 2000s, original members Chris Clark and Jon Hill, along with Andy Taylor (who had joined in 2006) returned to crank up their amps once again. Former ‘Nightvision’ drummer Daryl Hocking joined at the start of 2014 to complete the current line-up.

The band generally play “catchy and commercial” original songs as well as their own interpretation of the occasional cover.

Chris promised to dust off a few of the really old Glass Onion songs for the occasion, such as I Can Breathe, Trashed and their music video single, Don’t Be Afraid, but also delighted the wall-to-wall supporters with a few covers by bands such as Radiohead.

Chris commented: “We were very keen to hold the celebrations in Sleaford, seeing as it all began here, 20 years ago. The local crowd have always been good to us, and kept us going (somehow) for two whole decades! It seems unreal that it’s been that long - we’ve been a band since the last century!”

The gig almost had to be cancelled as Andy had been ill but rallied for the performance.

Chris said their Status Quo gig in front of 6,000 people still goes down as one of his highlights but they now plan to be more selective with their gigs, catering for their local fanbase.

“Sometimes you need that bit of luck to make a break through and we struggled to translate our live sound to an album. We went through a few guitarists at the time and weren’t musically gelling. We now do it more for the love of doing it.

“Annoyingly, we are a better team now than ever, but we are working hard at other things and this is more a hobby.

“We want to play at places we enjoy, where people appreciate us. We’ve been to some venues where no-one seemed to sit and listen to a band.

“We might make another music video - that was a highlight for me too. That was five years ago and we loved doing that.”

The band had called in lots of favours and jam packed the video to Don’t Be Afraid with children’s Tv characters from the 1970s and 1980s.

Commenting on the anniversary gig the band said: “Thank you so much to all you Glass Onion fans that came out to see us at Watergate. What a way to celebrate 20 years!”

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