Last night I attended a superb night of live music at Pilton Working Men’s Club in Somerset for the final of the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition. The winning act was Merseyside based psych-pop four piece She Drew The Gun, (pictured above) a band that I recently featured on the blog back in March because of their song Poem – a song for our times that is both thought provoking and goosebump invoking. She Drew The Gun played the song last night and as Neil Meads, music blogger from the long established Music Like Dirt tweeted at the event “She Drew The Gun may have just stolen the @Glastofest “ETC2016 competition live final with this ‘Poem’”. He was right.
That’s not to say that the other 7 acts on the bill weren’t all very good. Glasgow’s R ‘n’ B part dudes Bossy Love deserved their second place just because of the sheer fun they brought to the room and third placed Hattie Whitehead delivered soothing high quality musicianship.
She Drew The Gun's prize is a slot on one of the festival’s main stages, plus a £5,000 talent development award from PRS Foundation, whilst the second and third acts get £2,500 from PRS. Because of the high quality of the acts and performances, all 8 finalists have been given a slot somewhere at the festival.
The judges for the live final included Michael and Emily Eavis from Glastonbury and a variety of music industry professionals. I was personally involved in the first round of the competition, being one of the 40 music writer judges who whittled down the 5,000+ entrants to a long list of 120. Congratulations to Rory Gibb from The Quietus for selecting She Drew The Gun from his allocation of all of the original entries.
The Emerging Talent Competition was, once again, a hugely successful event, run with immaculate professionalism, showing that music competitions can be all about highlighting quality music and not about celebrity and fame in the way that shows like X Factor are.
She Drew The Gun - Poem (Video)
She Drew The Gun - Where I End And You Begin
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