This is their last Towersey Village Festival appearance as the band are moving onto new adventures after over 20 years together.
"A large and powerful body - too complicated to itemise - who have gravitated from a diary filler at Cecil Sharp House Knees-Ups to a first choice, scene-stealing, headlining, barnstorming ceilidh band."
This is how the Committee Band was described in the 1996 Footworks programme, which does, in fact, reflect the band's origins. The Committee Band is a folk dance band which plays for English Ceilidhs. The 'English country music' movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s was the starting point for some members, but the tunes the band plays are as likely to be Italian or Scandinavian as English and arrangements contain elements of all sorts of popular and traditional musics.
The Committee Band first played in January 1985 at the Knees Up Cecil Sharp at Cecil Sharp House in London. The original members (Cathy Cook, Diane Moody, Martin Nail, Mary Panton, Gordon Potts, and the late Dave Roberts) were all members of the committee which organises the Knees-Ups. The original idea was to use the talents of committee members to avoid having to pay for a band. It soon became the practice to invite non-committee members to play and for some years the line-up was somewhat variable. It became a popular fixture at the Knees-Ups, playing with such callers as Eddie Upton, Mick Brooks, and Brenda Godrich, as well as Mary Panton, Gordon Potts, and Dave Roberts from within the committee. The band's first booking outside Cecil Sharp House was for a dance in Hastings in 1988. From 1990 to 1993 the Band played each year for the Drill Hall ceilidhs at the Sidmouth International Festival of Folk Arts, and during this period also settled down to a more fixed line-up (in the process growing to its present size) and adopted Nick Walden as its regular caller. In recent years it has played both at festivals and for many of the regular ceilidhs series in southern England, and has released three CDs. For many years Ian, Hilda, Diane, Gordon and Martin formed one of the resident bands at the Islington Folk Club in London.