Who are Base 43

Base 43 were formed out of friendships started at Knowle Church. Our lead singer and guitarist, Graham Kay, had been playing for about four years (having never played any musical instrument in his life) and was looking for like minded people to start a band with.

In early 2018, Graham met up with Tony Lumb and Wlod Holweger and the three of them formed the nucleus of a band. Tony, like Graham, had only been playing bass guitar for about 18 months and was looking for people to play with (bass doesn't work too well on it's own!!). Wlod, Tony's neighbour, is not such a novice, and has been playing the Accordion for 70 years!!

Later in 2018, the three were joined first by Matt Simpson, associate vicar at Knowle Church on accoustic guitar, and then by Tony's wife Jennie on drums - both of them having only been playing for a few months. Matt has since moved on down to the south coast so sadly had to leave us in 2020.

We've now been joined by Tony Rawlings and his wife Carol - Tony normally playing his 8 string ukelele, and Carol on backing vocals.

We are still growing and learning as we go, but our main principle is to just get out there and play whenever we can. You can spend too long waiting to be good enough and never get there, so instead we just go for it.

We hope you enjoy the music we play, some of it written by Graham, some of them cover versions. We don't make any charge for our music, it's just there for anyone to listen to who would like to.

And why the name?

We searched for a band name for many months, finding that it was easier to learn new music than find a suitable band name!! Having tried various names that didn't really work we finally settled on Base 43.

43 is where we play and practice (at Tony and Jennie's house) and so that is our home base. Hence Base 43.

We are also mostly (apart from our musical maestro Wlod) starting from scratch, hence our idea of starting from 'first base'.