Honey and The Bear celebrate ten years with Shoreham date
East Anglian duo Honey and The Bear – Lucy and Jon Hart – are celebrating their tenth anniversary this year with a tour which brings them to Shoreham’s Ropetackle Arts Centre on Friday, September 13.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. It's lovely
00:06this afternoon to speak to the East Anglian duo, Honey and the Bear, Lucy and John Hart.
00:11I don't know which is the bear, which is the honey, but fantastic to speak to you both.
00:17And you are on a 10th anniversary tour, which is going to bring you to Shoreham, which is
00:21lovely. Tell me about those 10 years. Does it seem 10 years ago that you started performing
00:25together?
00:26It's that weird thing with a 10 year reflection is we sort of remember what we were doing
00:3110 years ago and where it all started. But it just seems like the blink of an eye, really.
00:37We've always really just thoroughly enjoyed all of our musical exploits with Honey and
00:42the Bear. And it's been it's been a really packed 10 years, lots of exciting highlights.
00:47Yeah.
00:48And tell me why it works as a duo. What are you different in personality? Complementary
00:54in personality? What's going on?
00:56Well, I think complementary in personality, really. John is the bubbly, chatty person
01:01on the mic. He's really good at connecting with an audience. I guess we both have our
01:07musical skills that we bring to the duo.
01:11Lucy's really organised.
01:12Are you saying you're not?
01:13I'm just straight ahead with loads of enthusiasm and just let's do it. And then Lucy's like,
01:19OK. I mean, Lucy's got such an ear for detail. She did a recording session before we got
01:27together and the engineer said, oh, it's actually just perfectly in tune. I don't need to use
01:32any auto tune on Lucy's voice. It's just there's so much auto tune that goes on these days.
01:37So, yeah, it's that mixture of forces that, yeah, I need Lucy's collected, really organised
01:47brain just to help sort of, you know, give the structure to all of my zany ideas.
01:54So that's what the honey gives to the bear then, presumably.
01:58That's the honey I can honestly say that, Phil, yeah.
02:02And to mark, as part of the things you're doing to mark this anniversary, you've produced
02:07a very rare cover of a very important song, which you're releasing as a single, aren't
02:12you?
02:13Yes.
02:14That song. And why that song?
02:16Who knows where the time goes?
02:18Yeah. Sandy Denny cover. We started this, well, we started performing it for the first
02:24time during lockdown when we were doing lockdown live streams, which we did 52. And since then
02:32it's just become a regular in our set and people really respond to it well. And we have
02:37fun singing it, especially with the band as well. The band have just added a whole new
02:41dimension to it for us.
02:43It's a very reflective song to reflect what were reflective times.
02:49Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's that hugely pivotal time during lockdown. It seems so long ago
02:56itself right now. But we are, we're so, yeah, it does. A different life. But we're so respectful
03:04for Sandy's original. It's not quite the same as the Sandy original. There's a little bit
03:09of variation in melody, but we love the original. We just, we can't help it as Honey in the
03:14Beer. We have to do something a little different with it.
03:17It always makes me laugh.
03:18You have to, there's no point in covering otherwise, isn't there?
03:20It always makes me laugh. After a gig, I'm always waiting for that person to come up
03:24and say, you're very brave to try a Sandy Denny cover. Like so many people have said
03:29that to me. It's like, tick, okay, someone said it today.
03:34We continually are bowled over with how much love there is for the song, but it's landed
03:39really well with everybody, thankfully. And even with Sandy's daughter tuned into one
03:45of our live streams from Australia and left us a lovely little note just saying, that's
03:50great, guys. Thanks so much. And we saw that as being the go ahead. Okay, it's okay to
03:57play the song. We probably needed that approval to be able to feel like it was okay.
04:02Fantastic timing then to go back to the 10th anniversary. Lovely to speak to you both,
04:08Honey in the Beer. You're playing Shoreham before too long. Really good to speak to you.