Sixties Gold 2021 plays Hastings, Southampton and Guildford

Hermans Hermits, The Tremeloes, Mamas & Papas UK, Marmalade, The Merseybeats, PJ Proby, Dave Berry, Steve Ellis and Gerry’s Pacemakers will be on the bill for dates including Wednesday, October 6 at Guildford G Live, Sunday, October 17 at Southampton Mayflower and Thursday, November 4 at Hastings White Rock.

Sandy Newman, who joined Marmalade in 1973, is delighted to be back on the road: “It has been a very strange year and a half. It has been horrible in many ways. First of all I was like a lot of people that just tried to get through it by giving themselves some kind of regime. For me, it was just walking. I can’t do any violent exercise! But it gets a little bit boring. There are only so many places you can go locally, and even then it was all masks and social distancing so I felt it all went in phases for me. There was the phase of being keen to do something and keep active and then I got a bit switched off to it all especially when the rules just seemed to keep changing.”

As a performer, it was tough: “I got subdued into not thinking about performing. It just became a question of when is this ever going to end. This tour was officially going to be last year, but obviously we couldn’t do it.”

But through Warner Leisure the band did get a few opportunities to perform. In the end, though, it amounted to just three performances since the first lockdown.

“And with this, well, there were restrictions. We had to tell people not to clap and not to sing along and do all the things that you would normally want them to do. A lot of the guys were thinking ‘This is great!’ but I did feel that we were being robbed a bit of being able to do it properly.”