THE TICKETS are a multi-instrumental and multi-tasking acoustic duo consisting of Dave on vocals, guitar and some rather unusual foot percussion, and Nigel combining his vocals with bass, mandolin, dobro, ukulele, guitar and harmonicas. (Liever in het Nederlands? – Klik Hier)
Our large and ever growing repertoire of much-loved Sixties pop classics is carefully arranged to suit our vocals and the instruments at our disposal and helps create our unique and varied sound. Up-to-date compact amplification allows us to maintain the acoustic nature of our performance, whilst providing our audiences with crystal clear sound without ever being too loud.
Like everyone else, we’ve had to put all live performances on hold for the foreseeable future, though there are some encouraging developments now in the careful reopening of bars and restaurants in June and July. In the meantime we’d love to entertain you with our growing selection of recent live stage audio (28 numbers so far) and with the videos below, which we were very fortunate to record in a local studio just before the crisis struck. Read on further down if you want to know more about our surprisingly simple process for live stage recording.
Stay safe and hopefully see you all sooner rather than later!
We start many of our performances off with this Beatles classic:
We’ve enjoyed creating our own uke and harmonica arrangement for this great John Sebastian number:
Our classic blues numbers are often performed using the dobro and the harmonica:
Guitar instrumentals are popular with our audiences, and this Ventures number is always part of our performances:
No Sixties set would be complete without a spot of folk, which usually involves the mandolin:
Hopefully this Roy Orbison song will remind you of less complicated times, when the only thing that worried you was getting the attention of an out-of-your-league partner:
If you’ve watched them all and are still looking for more, have a peek at this compilation from one of our live performances a couple of years back:
Have you enjoyed listening to our large collection of stage audio? It was recorded on the little Tascam digital audio recorder seen standing on the GorillaPod in between us on the last video. We normally only use these recordings as a personal quality control tool, but in their simplicity of “take of the day”, together with the audience and restaurant ambience that the mikes pick up in addition to the stage sound, we think they’re quite fun. Apart from some overall tone and volume tweaking, very little editing is possible on a simple stereo recording, so what you hear is what you get on these numbers.
Above is a screenshot of the selection process, showing part of our first set at an end of year party at a local golf club. Each set usually features somewhere between 12-15 numbers. We routinely play four such sets during a full evening or afternoon’s booking. Listen to all, select what is suitable, and repeat for each performance recorded. Now you get some idea of the scale of the task involved, and why we never got round to doing it in the midst of our busy performance schedule.
The 28 numbers that are already up total 1 hour and 20 minutes of our live music, with our trademark variety of instruments and styles, and there are still more from our many performances and large repertoire that we’d like to add. They’re currently displayed alongside this page (or below if you’re on a vertical screen), but we may have to start a new page at some point as we run out of space or want to provide more info. Click play on any or all of these numbers to enjoy some Tickets live vibe. We recommend using headphones or earpods for the full effect as it’ll give you a sense of being in the audience on the day.
Finally, our news/blog page reports on performances and recording sessions (up to the lockdown), our audiences share their opinion in reviews and you can see if you still recognise us in our (life)long joint and individual musical history.
Let us know if you enjoyed our music!