04-06.01.2007

Bands: 

Friday night - Verbal Warning and Soasis, 

Saturday night - Verbal Warning and The Really Hot Chilli Peppers

What more could you want?  A choice of 30 real ales with names like ‘Ginger Helmet’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Drunk’, plus a large selection of Perry and Ciders and, to top it all off, live music to drink to.  The Derby CAMRA Winter Beer Festival 2007 was on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.  I went on Friday and Saturday and tried several of the beers including the 2 already named above.  Ginger Helmet was my absolute favourite and sadly sold out early Friday night. 

While drinking on Friday, we were firstly entertained by support act Verbal Warning who warmed up the audience extremely well with there own tracks and some punk covers.   We were then entertained by Soasis, an Oasis cover band.  Having seen Oasis and not really enjoyed them, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to enjoy these.  I can say that they were foot-tappingly ok to begin with but about half way through I started yawning.  At the end of their set, people were seemingly just applauding out of politeness.  I guess if you are a big Oasis fan then you’d like these.

On Saturday, we returned again to the scene of the crime and found that Verbal Warning had returned also, doing yet another warm up set with enjoyably different music from the night before.  Leaving the crowd wanting more we were then introduced to the Really Hot Chilli Peppers.  Yes, you guessed it, they are a Red Hot Chilli Peppers cover band, and a pretty good one at that.  A very entertaining covers band with lots of personality and plenty of energy.  Definitely a band to go and see, however, I did feel they could do much better than just Chilli Peppers covers as they do have a lot of talent.

Conclusion is Derby CAMRA Beer Festivals are great – can’t wait for the next one.