Author: Chris Wiggins

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Farewell to our MD, Sam Hairsine

Fulham Brass Band are sad to announce the departure of their Musical Director, Sam Hairsine.

Having joined the band in Summer 2023, Sam has led the band with aplomb, including two appearances at each of the L&SC Regional Championships, Wychavon entertainment contest, and the Whit Friday celebrations in Saddleworth, as well as numerous concerts and community engagements.

Commenting on his time with the band, Sam said “Fulham Brass Band are a fantastic bunch of people. It’s a brilliantly run band that still has massive potential and I’ve loved my time as their MD. It’s really unfortunate that our Area contest next year falls on the same day as two of the Mountbatten Festival of Music performances that I’m conducting with the Royal Marines, but it gives an opportunity for someone else to take the reins and take the band onwards and upwards. I’m very grateful to Fulham for our time together and wish them all the very best for the future.”

Everyone at Fulham Brass Band would like to place on record our immense thanks to Sam. He is both an excellent musician and a consummate professional, and under his enjoyable direction the band has thrived musically and organisationally. Whilst we are sad to lose Sam, we prefer to focus on how fortunate we’ve been in making music with him for the past two and a half years, and we wish him well in all his future endeavours.

The process of appointing a successor to Sam is underway, and a job description and information on how to apply can be found here.

Sam’s final concert with the band will be our Christmas concert at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Earl’s Court on Saturday 6th December at 14:30. For more details and to buy tickets, follow this link.

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Fulham’s website through time

To celebrate the launch of our new website, our 2nd cornet and band secretary Chris Wiggins delves into the history of the band website. Chris’s detailed piece reveals how our online presence has moved with the times to keep Fulham Brass Band looking forward while upholding and celebrating its history.

“I’ve been in the band a pretty long time, and, as I have a job in software engineering that has absolutely nothing to do with designing or building websites, it’s fallen to me to look after the band’s website. When I joined the band in 2008, the band’s website looked a bit like this:

It’s only possible to show you this thanks to the Internet Archive’s amazing Way Back Machine, which captures snapshots of websites and stores them before they inevitably change and are lost forever.

It’s too long ago now for me to remember exactly how I was involved with this version of the website, but I took it over from Tom Butler, a player in the band who had just left to emigrate to Australia. At this time, we were a third section band and were using our previous logo, designed by Derek Treadwell, another ex-player. According to our news archive, this version of the website went live in July 2008. The Internet Archive does have a snapshot from before this date, but our website was either extremely primitive back then, or else (more likely) sadly the snapshot wasn’t properly captured and is text only:

This was captured in October 2007 and is the oldest snapshot of the website that exists.

Some time around 2013, I updated things with what I assume I thought at the time was a slick, modern design (perhaps it was for 2013?!):

We’d made it to the second section by this point, and had just been on a trip to Amboise in France to compete at the Concours de Brass Bands d’Amboise, where we won first prize! We competed in a section that had, well, just one other band!

In 2014, I went for a big redesign, and this version of the website has the honour of lasting for the next ten years!

At this point, we were still technically in the second section, but had just won our area contest and were due to be promoted to the first section from 2015.

Why did this version last so long? Well, we actually started thinking about a new website around 2019, planning some of the structure of the site to try to simplify it and target it at the three main groups we see visiting our website: people who want to hire us, people who want to join us, and people who want to come and see us. But, the pandemic happened, and various other interruptions meant that progress was very slow/non-existent.

But, 2023 rolled round and finally renewed impetus made us work hard to get the new website done. A friend of the band who’s a keen photographer came to take photos of us at a gig at Regent Hall. With those in hand we could finally launch the new website. I’ll include a screenshot of it here for people reading this in 2034 and wondering what the old website used to look like:

This version features our new logo, which we had designed for us in 2020 in time for our 125th anniversary by graphic designer and friend of the band, beckyismyname.

Hopefully this one will keep us going for a while. Check back in a few years to see the next one!”

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New Musical Director at FBB

Fulham Brass Band are delighted to announce Sam Hairsine as their new Musical Director.

Emmeline, our chair, commented “the band is absolutely delighted to have Sam on board as our new Musical Director. From our first meeting we knew straightaway that he was the perfect fit as his musical vision and ambition matched so well with the band’s ethos and plans for the future.

Sam brings such a wealth of experience to Fulham having been Director of Music in the Royal Marines and having conducted some of the country’s top bands.

We are sure that the band will continue to grow and go from strength to strength under his leadership and we are very excited for the next chapter.”

We wish to congratulate all of the applicants and thank them, and the band members, for their commitment to the auditions process.

We are very much looking forward to Sam joining us in the band room from September, and you can find out a little more about him in the posts above.