The Groove bringing blues to garden

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Rehearsing for the Blues in the Park concert are (from left) Lindsay Smith, Bill Blakey, Brent...
Rehearsing for the Blues in the Park concert are (from left) Lindsay Smith, Bill Blakey, Brent Birchfield and Geoff Davidson. PHOTO: CONNOR HALEY
A veteran Timaru band is bringing music back to the botanic gardens this weekend.

The Groove, comprised of musicians Brent Birchfield, Lindsay Smith, Geoff Davidson and Bill Blakey, will be playing a free concert at the rotunda area of the gardens on Sunday.

The concert, called Blues in the Park, will run from 1.30pm-4.30pm.

Birchfield said the idea behind the concert was quite simple.

"We wanted to do blues in the park, an afternoon where you could bring a picnic with no complications and we would go down and have a play.

"Basically, it’s just if the sun is out. Come down, chill out and we’ll do a few numbers.

Birchfield said they would play a mix of blues and classic rock.

"We wanted to set the scene for ourselves going forward. We have this and then we go to Oamaru, to Scotts Brewing on October 27, and then we’re doing Brews on the Bay."

Smith said it would be great to be able to play at the botanic gardens.

"[The council] have been very helpful in the end. It has taken them a long time to do this though because they used to have the thing where you couldn’t play there because of the hospital."

The band was formed 15 years ago and has been a staple of the South Canterbury music scene.

Birchfield said the music landscape had evolved quite significantly.

"I’ll say this tongue-in-cheek, as an oldish band we probably don’t get the recognition as the good players that we are because we don’t go out late at night.

"We’ve got one or two venues we sort of do and the entertainment’s usually around 2 to 5-ish or 12 to 4 or something like that.

He said it was very different these days.

"There’s no pubs. We used to go into a pub till 1 o’clock at night, then it was 12, then it was 11, then it was 10 and then we were back home in bed.

"We try to stick to the daytime stuff and afternoons. We practice every week, maybe every two weeks — just a few to numbers to keep ourselves up."

connor.haley@timarucourier.co.nz