Unfortunately more Covid shenanigans has resulted in us having to cancel this gig at the Diamond in Sutton-in-Ashfield.
Such a shame as we were really looking forward to our trip here.
Covid yet again demonstrates how it’s still proving such a challenge for bands and venues alike.
Take care all
x
Hey folks,
Sadly due to a couple of band members testing positive for Covid, we have had to cancel our gig at the Oddfellows Arms on Sunday 14th November.
We’ll see you again at the next one.
Take care everyone!
Hey…..anybody out there??
Well, it’s been a long strange trip throughout the last, what has it been…18 years? Feels like it. Anyway, we’ve started to dip our toes back into gigging waters again and it feels great.
You may have noticed some obligatory ‘lockdown videos’ we’ve been doing over the last year to keep us busy. If not, please head over to our You Tube channel and take a look if you’d like to see us all looking slightly uncomfortable in front of the camera playing some Steely tunes of various styles!
We have some dates already lined up for 2021 (which we didn’t expect to be doing a little while back), and already have some 2022 dates popping into the diary which we hope to add to over coming months.
Hope that everyone still has the appetite for coming to see live music….the venues really need you guys now. We’d love to see you at some future gigs and hopefully we all remember how the songs go!
See you sometime soon!
xx
Dear Stanfans,
Unfortunately it seems that our enforced hibernation from the live music scene is going to continue for the rest of the year….until who knows when.
It’s an incredibly tough time for the venues, and despite some being able to put on shows with duos/trios/acoustic acts etc, the logistics of accommodating a 10-piece such as our band is just a challenge too far under the current circumstances. So sad to say that all remaining gigs we had for 2020 are now cancelled.
We continue to ‘rehearse’ virtually and will just keep an eye on the ever-changing restrictions to see as and when it will feel appropriate to start approaching the venues and booking up gigs again.
Stay safe in the meantime, and we’ll see you when we’re able to Do It Again….
x
Unfortunate circumstances for our first blog on here in far too long a while…
We’ve been talking about a long-overdue website revamp for a while and so we’ll definitely be revisiting this in the near future.
In the meantime, our hearts go out to all the venue owners who will be seriously struggling over the coming months. We hope they’ll all be able to bounce back and do what they do best when better times come around again.
It goes without saying, we expect not to be playing for a few months but will keep the gig list on here up to date once we know what’s on/what’s off. We’ll miss you all for a short while but hope to see everyone fit, healthy, and ready to boogie on the other side of all of this.
*update 14July – Please do check with venues for any gigs listed here before booking or coming along, as it’s obviously an evolving situation right now.
Stay safe everyone, until we all get to do it again sometime soon…
Love
Stanley Dee
x
..well we haven’t added anything new on here for some time now as the world of Facebook seems to be where we’re interacting with most of the Steely/Stanley community. However, it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t acknowledge the passing of Walter Becker on 03Sep17.
There are myriad tributes and obituaries out there on the internet already. To us SD fans it always seems as if our favourite band are never as widely known as we feel they ought to be. But lots of big-hitters in the music industry lined-up to pay tribute to Walter and to credit his contribution to the Dan catalogue as being a huge influence on their own work.
This one from Rickie Lee Jones was particularly well expressed – read her comments HERE.
Thanks for everything Walter, and rest easy…
…been a long time, been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time.
No, you haven’t stumbled upon a Led Zep site in error but you get the point…..apologies for the blogular inactivity recently but we are still very much here and have been busy doing lots of music-related bits and pieces!
With help from our friends Colin Rogal and John Watt (well when we say ‘help’, they’ve actually done all the work!) we’ve got expertly mixed audio/video from a recent gig which you can see if you click over to our YouTube tab. We think it captures the essence of our Half Moon gig to a tee and we hope you enjoy watching.
Several of the band were a big part of this year’s annual Pepper Show charity gigs at the Pendley Court Theatre in Tring. A very successful week of shows and much money raised for the Pepper Foundation charity, so well done to all!
We still have a healthy amount of gigs coming up for 2016 and are already booking in for 2017 now, so all is going very well in Stan-land!
Keep an eye on our gig list, and we hope to see you at a show sometime soon.
Back in November we played at the Half Moon in Putney (one of our very favourite regular venues) and we were fortunate enough to be able to have it filmed for posterity! The extremely nice and generous Colin Rogal had offered to round-up his trusty crew and record the gig for us. You can see more about Colin’s day job on his website www.rogal.org and as luck would have it, he’s a big Dan Fan and volunteered to help us jazz up the website content a little.
You can see a clip of that evening by playing the YouTube link embedded in the website. We’ll be adding more to this once some mixing and editing has taken place but we think this clip gives a really good flavour of what goes on at a Stanley gig!
Hope you enjoy it…….and thanks again Colin and crew!
And so we’re approaching our last gig of 2015. What better way to round it off than at the Half Moon in Putney on Sun 22nd November, where we’ll also be recording the gig for posterity! Hopefully we’ll have quite a few friends and regulars joining us to make sure it’s a good one. And if you’re in such good voice as usual you may even hear yourself on a track or two!!
Looking back over the year we’ve had some great gigs. It’s been particularly nice to play some outdoor gigs over the Summer, and on the whole the weather was very much on our side. Hopefully we’ll be able to repeat some alfresco Stanley activity next year too – ahem, Emily Eavis if you’re listening……
We’re also looking to try and add some new venues to our list next year, so if any of you people out there can recommend any of your personal favourites please let us know.
Thanks as always to everyone who has been to see us this year, and especially those who have shared your nice feedback with us, either in person after a gig or via the usual social meeja channels. It really makes our day when you take the time out to do that.
Hope to see as many people as possible at Putney on 22nd to help us round of the year’s activity in style!
cheers!
Stanley
Looking around the gig guides up and down the UK (and indeed overseas) it certainly is a credit to Steely Dan, that there are so many of us ‘tribute’ bands out there having fun playing their wonderful songs. I’m sure you’ve all been in the same situation as us, when you list Steely Dan amongst your listening favourites, only to be met with the fairly typical responses of:
a) Never heard of ‘em.
b) Weren’t they the ones who did ‘All around my hat?’
c) Weren’t they the ones who did ‘Stuck in the middle with you?’
Yep, we’ve heard them all!
So it’s always a constant pleasant surprise when we turn up at gigs to a room full of people who obviously know all the SD back catalogue in great detail (arguably more so than us sometimes!) and who get such a kick out of hearing the music from their own CD (and probably vinyl) collections brought to life in some way. And, in the regular absence of Donald and Walter from these shores I guess it’s the only option we have!
From our own experience in going to see some of the other excellent SD bands out there (Nearly Dan, Stealing Dan and Don, Gas in the Car, to name a few) there’s also some room for manoeuvre in how you can interpret the original tracks. The Stanley approach has always been to try and stay as close as possible to the studio versions, while some of the other bands take those originals as a base and have fun re-interpreting, improvising and putting their own stamp on it. It’s a testament to the original tunes that they work just as well whichever way you want to treat them, and also a testament to you Dan fans out there who have ears that are possibly a little more open than most and appreciate the music from all angles!
I think from a muso perspective, the reason why there are so many of us SD tribute bands out there is because there is just so much to get our teeth into. While we won’t deny the sheer joy of bashing through a raucous Johnny B Goode now and then, it’s really great to be able to delve into the harmonic richness of those SD tunes and try and get our collective heads around the genius of how those guys managed to come up with that stuff in the first place!
Also, thanks to the fairly low public profile of the band it is a huge relief that there is no expectation from the gig-going public for us to have to try and look like the people whose music we’re trying to replicate!! Having said that, a pair of Denny Dias dungarees might just have to make an appearance at a future gig…….just to properly keep up the whole ‘tribute’ thing!
So, there you are. A rambling piece of nonsense I grant you. But all in all I guess this is just a thank you from the band to Steely Dan for giving us all this great repertoire in the first instance. And thanks to you who come and see us and the other Dan-bands out there, for letting us have a chance to get up there and enjoy playing it to people who truly appreciate it.
Stop Press: Due to several requests, it may well be that ‘All around my hat’ makes an appearance in 2016.
Cheers!
Stanley
