Skelly - PRESHOW RITUALS

In this Preshow Rituals segment, the soul/pop duo, Skelly, reveals what they do before taking the stage. You can check out the rituals below:

Before a show we love to keep things as chilled and fun as we can. Being siblings, we’ve been jamming and playing together for as long as we can remember and so treat our gigs as just this, like we’re back at our home piano and the audience is in our living room with us. Seb has the same trumpet warm-ups that he’s been blasting out for countless years so I (Emma) have picked up their patterns and tend to warm up my voice simply by doing the same.

During soundcheck we do the usual things of top and tailing songs and making sure we play the loudest bits of the song including any large horn lines, as these are what need to be balanced. We really have always had a connection and understanding between us in terms of phrasing and vibe so really just love performing live together. As much as we love recording in the studio, there’s something so exciting about not knowing what riffs or fun inflections might come out in our sets. We love to make the audience feel super involved and always aim to make it feel like a shared experience of making music together, rather than keeping the constraints of ‘performer’ and ‘punter’.

Having kept the pre-show vibes super chilled and relaxed, after we come off the adrenaline is always pumping away so we always hang around at the end of our gigs and chat to people and also take in any feedback! We’re both professional session musicians by trade, but are new to sharing our performances together with audiences so love to hear about their experience and which bits stuck out for them, because sometimes the bits we aren’t sure about are the parts that are received the best. It is so much fun being able to perform together and we look forward to playing our whole album once it’s all out!

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