On 2nd June 2018, XO Party Band joined Clare and Hugo for their wedding at Tanner Warehouse in Bermondsey, London. A brilliant venue, incredibly fun evening and a great couple – thank you so much for having us! Congratulations to the new Mr and Mrs Brookes.

The Venue

This was our first time at Tanner Warehouse, and what a cool venue. We can see why they have awards such as ‘Best Wedding Venue 2016’ and ‘Best Unusual and Unique Venue 2017’ from the London Venue Awards – the venue has plenty of character, and is super cool for something a bit different to other venues. 

The space is brilliant – one large open warehouse room, for the dinner and into the evening, which is ideal to have everyone together. The space is exclusively for the wedding party, with a bar, plenty of space for decoration and then a live band later on – of course. 

Tanner Warehouse has the room for up to 150 guests for the wedding breakfast, then a few tables can be moved slightly to make room for the dance floor – which was packed for Clare and Hugo’s evening reception!

The Set Up

We arrived at the venue at 3:30 – quite early, as we wanted to have plenty of time to play with and set up before guests arrived. As everything was in the one room, we had to save on precious party time. We stopped the van outside the venue to unload all our gear into the space, then moved the vehicle to parking nearby. With everything in the room, we began to build our evening set up – we like to think we have quite a slick operation, with everyone getting on with their own jobs.
Once everything was in place, we finished the setting up ritual with the sound check. Every venue is different, meaning different sound and we always want to sound our very best for the audience, but also so that we’ll perform better!
With everything up to scratch, we tidied up, and the place looked awesome.
We made ourselves scarce before the guests arrived, and arrived back at the venue a little while before the evening began.
The space was cleared for the dance floor, Clare and Hugo cut their beautiful wedding cake, and it was time to party!

The First Dance 

Everywhere – Fleetwood Mac

Mr and Mrs Brookes had chosen the classic Fleetwood Mac song ‘Everywhere’ for their first dance. I’m a massive fan of the band, and love this song, so it was a treat to get to perform it!
Clare and Hugo took to the centre of the dance floor, surrounded by their friends and family for their first dance as a married couple. The guests raised the roof to congratulate them, and after a little while the couple encouraged everyone to join them. The floor was packed with people singing along, especially going for the high notes!
A brilliant song choice, and a beautiful moment for Mr and Mrs Brookes’ first dance.

Live Party Band

We had two sets of live music to play this evening, and they were both full of floor fillers. We continued after the first dance with ‘Ho Hey’ by the Lumineers. We find this goes down perfectly after a first dance as it gets everyone singing along, and it’s a lot of fun. The couple had requested a few classics – we played ‘Moondance’ by Van Morrison, followed my some Motown favourites.
We followed that by going into part of our Disco Medley, with Pharrell’s ‘Happy’, ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ by the legendary Stevie Wonder and ‘Disco Inferno’ by The Trammps, which never fails to bring out some brilliant dance moves in the crowd. A few more tunes closed the first set – ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘I’m a Believer’ and ‘Superstition’ left the guests wanting more, and we were about to ramp it up a level for the second set.

After a short break, we were ready for our second set of the night, and so were the crowd! We had been asked to play a Bruce Springsteen song, as the couple were massive fans. So we began the set with ‘Born To Run’ and wow – the floor was packed with people screaming along. 

We tried to keep the energy going, and played some more classic rock songs, like ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ by Rainbow, ‘All Right Now’ by Free, and of course, ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey. The rock was amazing, but it was time for some modern party songs, and we delved into a selection of our party medley. 

‘24k Magic’ by Bruno Mars is always so much fun to perform and we love going from that into Beyonce’s famous hit ‘Crazy In Love’. We also played our version of ‘Shape Of You’ by Ed Sheeran and Whitney’s classic 80’s hit ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, amongst others.

Unfortunately it was coming to the end of the night, so to was time to crack out ‘Mr Brightside’ by The Killers. There was no way the crowd would let us finish there, so we succumbed to an encore and ended perfectly with Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. 

We had so much fun with Mr and Mrs Brookes, and all their guests – what an amazing crowd! Thanks for partying with us, congratulations and best of luck in your newly married life!