After over 35 years travelling the world, The Nylons have decided to say goodbye to their illustrious career.
To say farewell, the Canadian a cappella group will be embarking on a series of farewell shows. Sidney’s Mary Winspear Centre is one of those stops.
“It’s going to be a good time, I can tell you that much,” said Nylons vocalist Garth Mosbaugh told the News Review.
“We are looking forward to the upcoming Farewell Show in Sidney at The Charlie White… we are going to make the most of it. It will be a celebration and we will go out with a bang. The show will be an expression of our gratitude, to both the music and our Vancouver Island fans,” said founding member of The Nylons, Claude Morrison, in an email.
Mosbaugh said the farewell tour is a complicated beast, as it takes a lot longer than they would have thought to cover all the places they’ve been.
“I’ve taken to calling it the first annual farewell tour,” he said with a laugh.
The last stop on their tour is in May of 2017.
The group will be performing a lot of their older songs, and the Sidney performance will be a Greatest Hits, type show.. Some of the songs they will sing are The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Kiss Him Goodbye and a few other radio hit songs, along with a few surprises thrown in as well.
“You just get the feeling after a while that everything has its time,” said Mosbaugh on their reason for calling it quits.
He said it’s been a great time, but the work is winding down. They can’t get as many gigs as they used to, he said.
“I was saying to somebody earlier, if the Queen was asking for a command performance I’m sure we’d get back together and do it,” he said with a laugh.
After their final farewell, it’s not necessarily goodbye forever.
“Although we are coming off the road, the group is not disbanding and we will continue to work on special music projects,” said Morrison.
Mosbaugh came into the group a little later and isn’t one of the original members. He was auditioning for a show in Toronto called Forever Plaid and was offered a part in Vancouver, but he wasn’t ready to move, so he took a rain check. The casting director, who he knew, said she had a line on something that would suit him well, and he was off to audition for The Nylons.
“So basically, I went to somebody’s apartment with a piano and played a bunch of songs and we jammed out a little bit, and sang, and did some stuff, and I was in,” said Mosbaugh.
The original members of the group came together as four out of work actors who could sing. They put the group together and got a grande repertoire of four tunes and played at a club downtown. Everybody loved their music and wanted to hear them again.
“With the great reaction on their first performance they just decided to take it a little further and within a year of being formed they had a record contract with Static records,” said Mosbaugh.
The extraordinary thing about The Nylons, he said, is that a cappela was invented before they were around, but the group was the first to put a strong rhythmical aspect to a cappella.
Looking back at some of the good moments of his career takes him back to when he first started.
He remembers playing in Idaho for 12,000 to 14,000 people, which he said was a highlight for him in the beginning, as he had never played in front of that many before.
“It was an outdoor concert, just an ocean of people. It was pretty fantastic to feel that kind of dynamic from an audience,” said Mosbaugh.
Opening for Jay Leno in Vegas was also a great gig, he said.
“You know, it’s funny because sometimes the best nights you have as a performer aren’t necessarily the opening for Jay Leno or the most prestigious gigs, but something just clicks and it’s just an extraordinary night where everybody just clicks together,” he said.
The Nylons will selling their recorded material at the Sidney show on Nov. 5 at the Mary Winspear Centre. For tickets call 250-656-0275.
