We’re not just a wedding band!

admin | July 22, 2011 | 0 Comments

The band which is due to perform with Amanda Brunker at Oxegen on Saturday has hit back at suggestions that it’s little more than a wedding band and has just a dozen fans on Facebook.

Gitano will perform on the Vodafone stage at 2pm on Saturday afternoon, with former Miss Ireland Ms Brunker stepping in following the withdrawal of Jessie J.

JOE caught up with Gitano’s main man Francisco Garcia, who hasn’t been best pleased with some of the criticisms which have come his band’s way over the past few hours.

Far from being a film made in the Philippines, Argentina or Spain, a type of jeans, a guitar accessory or an entire Spanish race, it turns out Gitano is a band with a proven track record around the world.

They’ve released not one, not two, but THREE singles across the globe over the past six weeks – and, as Francisco tells us, not many Irish bands can say that.

“We’ve been signed by massive labels like EMI and Virgin in Germany, by Nervous Records in New York and by Cafe del Mar in Ibiza, the world’s biggest chill-out label. We’ve played at Oxegen before, in 2009, and we’ve also had a number one in the British dance charts recently, so it’s not fair for people to call us a wedding band.

“Have a bit of respect. We’re not a wedding band. Of course, we play weddings, we play anything that earns us money. There’s a lot of big money in weddings. We could be playing at The Residence in Dublin one night and a wedding for seven or eight thousand euros the next night.”

Neither are Gitano the Oxegen festival’s equivalent of a Billy-no-mates. It turns out that our rakishly-stetsoned investigative reporter was wrong to point JOE readers in the direction of a particularly friendless Gitano Facebook page earlier today.

“That’s not our page,” said Francisco. “Gitano doesn’t have an official Facebook page, that page is just a bunch of punks who play on the street. I put everything on my own personal page, or on gitano.ie.”

Francisco is also unhappy at people having a pop before they’ve even heard the band. “If you listen to the music and you want to express an opinion, whether you think it’s good or you think it’s crap, fair enough. But people have been saying stuff and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

So what about Ms Brunker? How did that connection come about?

“I know Amanda a long time,” says Francisco, “and we’ve been talking about doing something together. She has a high profile and always gets a lot of publicity so we were delighted to do something together at Oxegen.

“She has a good voice for the kind of music we do. We play house, so we don’t need somebody with a very soulful voice, but Amanda’s voice has a good, sweet texture, so it works great for us.”

Here’s a YouTube video, although as Francisco tells us there are 15 bands around the world called Gitano, we can’t be entirely sure whether this is the lads who’ll be playing at Oxegen at 2pm on Saturday.