The Artefact Christmas Party

This year the Artefact Christmas party happened at South Birmingham Studios as the new home of Artefact is still being built as part of Stirchley Community Development. Hopefully,  Stirchley Community Development will be finished in 2025. As part of the Christmas Party, the Artefact House Band was asked to participate in the Christmas Quiz, hosted by local Stirchley Celebrity Seb. We were asked to do the music round. We were given a list of 10 famous songs to play the intro of We planned to play them without rehearsing. We also prepared three Christmas songs to play, with an experimental twist. We rehearsed the three Christmas songs but not the intros for the Quiz.

The Quiz itself

The list of songs that we played included Hotel California by the Eagles and Girls Aloud’s Sound of the Underground. I vaguely knew 8 out of the ten songs and tried to briefly familiarise them, but I didn’t learn them properly. The exception was the intro riff to Thunderstruck by AC/DC, which I practiced an abridged version of as it is difficult to play on a keyboard. At least one member of the band had learnt the melody for the songs and so they made the songs recognisable, mostly. A majority of teams got at least five with one team getting nine out of the ten, which meant we succeeded in making the songs recognisable.

We also played the three Christmas songs we had practiced. My keyboard was not structurally important to the performance of the Christmas songs, allowing me to improvise within the keys of the songs. Sometimes I played a melody on top, or bass notes, or played block chords following the guitar. The highlight was Hark the Herald with a lovely Clarinet solo from temporary Artefact House Band member Alisa, before we deliberately played it in an unorthodox way, with different tempos and vocals that were very different from the way it is usually sung.

On top of our contribution as the Artefact House Band, there were also lovely performances from the Georgian Choir and the rest of the Artefact Quiz was as abstract as ever. The Quiz was very well attended and shows that Artefact remains an important part of the Stirchley art community.