Heal the Last Stand

In harmony - Heal the Last Stand consist of three siblings and a mutual friend

By Laura Dickenson
Fresh from performing at Glastonbury, Laura from Wrexham band, Heal the Last Stand, talks about performing with brothers Joey and Stan and friend Thom, and their hopes for the future

Glastonbury was a blast! Me and Joey, being the eldest, have been to Glastonbury by hook or crook for the last 10 years. We love it! It has a very special place in our hearts. Naturally, our younger but taller brother, Stan, has grown up wishing he could go.

Luckily for him, his first visit last year was as a performer with another Wrexham troubadour, Andy Hickie & his Merry Maidens, after he won a place playing the Alavon Cafe in Glastonbury's Emerging Talent competition.

This year we received an email from the Small World Festival who have a stage in the green fields of Glastonbury, saying they loved the band (presumably they'd heard us through Myspace) and would provide us with our performers' passes for this year's festival. We were blown away and happily accepted.

The first show on Thursday was nerve-wracking. The tent was full as the bigger bands didn't start until the following day. We played well but we knew we had a better show in us.

Saturday's show on the Tadpole stage proved that and we confidently breezed through our final show on Sunday back at the Small World.

We invited performers we'd seen over the weekend to play with us and were told by the Small World staff that we had suitably impressed them and we would be sure to receive higher billing with them in the future. Happy days.

The rest of our festival was spent taking good care of ourselves and avoiding the rain, quite the opposite of previous years but enjoyable nonetheless.

What else are you up to?

We're incredibly busy at the moment because we've just finished recording our debut album; "What Love is..." which should be available in August. First we plan to release a single for free download in the next couple of weeks. We're planning a Welsh tour to coincide with our appearances at the eisteddfod, plus we've been playing away so much we thought it would be nice to play all over our own country as well.

And in September we've been invited to play at the global summit for departments and ministries of peace in Costa Rica. We don't know how we're getting there yet but we know we will.

We're back in Barcelona in October, following the success of our tour there in May. This time we'll be playing all over Catalunya for 2 weeks or more. There's more but I get tired just thinking about it, we're still unsigned so we have to do everything ourselves. It would be so much harder if we didn't have such fantastic friends supporting us, we couldn't do this without them.

What's it like being in a band with your siblings

Writing music with my brothers has been a life enhancing experience. We fought as kids do, when we were young. But having all been musicians in different bands around town for years (Arnie, Mooi, Cream Tangerine), it's great to work with people we know so well. We feel equal, grown up family life is great. The whole family is rooting for us, we couldn't be happier. Meanwhile, Thom [the only band member who's not family] is a longstanding friend of all of ours whose musical skills we value above our own.