Tredegar made a long-awaited return to perform at the Royal Welsh Show in Llanelwedd near Builth Wells this week, giving three 45-minute concerts spots on Wednesday to help entertain the tens of thousands of visitors to the largest agricultural show in the UK.

Easy listening

The band was directed by guest conductor Matthew Rowe, with the programmes deliberately aimed at providing plenty of easy listening music – from the pop of ABBA and the Village People to film music classics from ‘Born Free’ and ‘Brassed Off’ to classic oldies such as ‘Amparito Roca’ and ‘Bandology’.

Thankfully the weather got better throughout the day – although things didn’t look too rosy when the mini-bus picked up a group of players in Cardiff at 7.30 in the morning!

the programmes were deliberately aimed at providing plenty of easy listening music – from the pop of ABBA and the Village People to film music classics from ‘Born Free’ and ‘Brassed Off’ to classic oldies such as ‘Amparito Roca’ and ‘Bandology’.

Band Vice-President Iwan Fox said: “The invitation to perform at the show came directly from this year’s Royal Welsh Agricultural Show Chairman, Brian Jones, and we were delighted to return to an event that we last played at 20 years ago.  

10 year old debutant

Our thanks go to Matthew Rowe for doing such a great job in leading the band, and to the players who helped us out, including 10 year Iestyn Patterson on percussion, who is the son of our solo euph Martyn. It was great to see him enjoy himself with his dad in the same band.

A special thanks though goes to our horn player Hannah Rogers who did so much to organise things for the day. Her input, from making sure everyone had parking tickets to getting ice creams to cool down and then representing the band by given a chat live in Welsh live on air on Radio Cymru was brilliant.”