Arts / Biggest headline gig yet for local band as Clickimin beckons
ONE of Shetland’s most popular bands have announced a headline gig at the Clickimin in the run-up to Christmas – marking a big milestone for the group.
First Foot Soldiers will perform at the Lerwick venue on Saturday 14 December, with tickets for the “festive spree” on sale now.
Support on the night – which is for ages 16 plus – will come from pop-punk covers band (the) 3310 and Steven Robertson, who is noted for his comic versions of well-known tunes.
The gig will mark a sizeable milestone for First Foot Soldiers, as although they have played to large crowds in the past including at the Tall Ships, Rising North and Glusstonberry, it will be the biggest show they have put on themselves.
Folk can expect some festive tunes at the December gig, while the band said they will also bring along some friends to “help us try to pull off some bigger songs we’ve never done before”.
The roots of the band stem back to 2010, when Arthur Nicholson (vocals/guitar) and Chris Thomson (keyboards) teamed up after returning from south.
They quickly recruited Robert Balfour on drums/vocals as well as Joe Watt on bass, who has since been replaced by Shaun Strachan.
“Myself and Chris were in the same year at school before we moved south for uni,” Nicholson explained.
“We’d played in bands in Shetland when we were younger, but never in the same one.
“We got back in touch in the summer of 2010 and found out that coincidentally we’d both already decided to move back to Shetland in September of that year.
“I knew he could play piano, guitar and sing, so I asked him if he wanted to start a band before we’d even got home. I’d played in bands with Robert when we were at school and for a brief time when we both lived in Edinburgh, he’d played bass and guitar – but we couldn’t find a drummer, so we persuaded him to do it.
“Joe Watt was our original bass player, but for over 10 years it’s been Shaun, who has really come into his own over the years – he started with us when he was 15.”
The band have always focused on rock and pop songs released pre-2000, and Nicholson said there tends to be around 50-odd tunes in their general gigging set list at any given time.
“We learn as many as we can to keep things fresh for us and the audience, but we must have gone through well over 100 songs over the years,” he said.
“Some don’t land and get scrapped after a few airings, but there’s a few surviving songs from our first ever gig.”
One part of the setlist which they say has “grown many arms and legs” over the years is the First Foot Soldiers medley – an impressive concoction featuring segments of many different songs from different genres, seamlessly sewn together.
“It started after seeing that lots of other bands played Folsom Prison Blues, so we thought it would be fun to add some songs in the middle, in the same style,” Nicholson explained.
“Many of the songs were tried on the fly during gigs and if they got a good response we kept them in. We started with three, now there’s over 30, so it’s usually just shy of half an hour long.”
So what have been some of the band’s highlights over the last ten-plus years? Nicholson says the 2023 Tall Ships springs to mind – “we could hardly take in the amount of folk that were there” – but also when the group played Queen’s classic Bohemian Rhapsody at a busy folk festival in 2012.
For Thomson, an early highlight was a “First Foot Soldiers and Friends” gig the band put on in 2012.
“We played Money (Pink Floyd) with Norman Willmore and Hotel California (The Eagles) with Brian Nicholson among many other guest appearances that night,” he said.
“It was always something we wanted to do more of, so I’m looking forward to playing some big tunes with our special guests in December.”
As the foursome look towards their biggest headline gig to date, it appears the popularity of First Foot Soldiers looks set to only continue.
When asked what the secret to the success is, Thomson said it is a “simple formula” – “play great music and play it well”.
“There’s a lot more that goes into it, but for me the support we’ve had over the years both from audiences and from folk like Fiona at High Level Music is a big factor,” he added.
“I think we’ve also been helped by many of the classic songs we play being brought to younger audiences in recent years through movies, adverts and TikTok.
“We’ve got a strange knack of learning tunes just before they get popular again, a recent example being Hooked on a Feeling, which we learned just before Björn Skifs opened this year’s Eurovision with it.”
Nicholson also suggested it has been a quick 14 years since the band first got together.
“As long as we still enjoy it and as long as folk still want to come to listen, dance and sing, we’ll keep doing it,” he added.
Tickets for First Foot Soldiers at the Clickimin on 14 December, priced £25, are available online or via High Level Music in Lerwick.
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