I’m sure this is the same answer most people got when we all went into lockdown, and for us in Trailblazers we were pretty uncertain as to what we could do as a quartet when weekly rehearsals together were no longer an option. I’m sure we can all agree that there’s nothing more frustrating as learning a new piece of music only to be denied singing it by a global pandemic, right!? Well we certainly weren’t going to let that stop us! Fortunately, we had an opportunity to sing together again by creating our virtual rendition of “Bring Me Sunshine” (arr. Dan Wessler) for Meantime Chorus’ June virtual concert.

Trailblazers: 1 - COVID-19: 0!

Literally the day after the concert, two of our partners in Avalon quartet notified us about a friendly competition run by Make Music Day UK, that they’d just entered into. The criteria? Put forward the best cover version of the Morecambe & Wise classic: “Bring Me Sunshine”! Make Music Day UK is a series of events that take place on the 21st June, which involves turning hundreds of public areas into live performance zones where musicians can perform to audiences across the country, but given the lockdown making this impossible this year, they took to the internet to bring musicians together! As one of thousands of groups that have been affected by not being able to sing together, we really believe in the work that the organisers of Make Music Day UK are doing to ensure music groups are staying active during these socially distant times. So though we were surprised and chuffed to have been chosen as runners up in the competition, we were mainly just excited to have another outlet to share our music!

The winners of the competition were a group called the “Totally Sound” run by “Reel Youth Media” and they completely smashed it! You can check out their submission here: https://makemusicday.co.uk/bms-winner-2020/.