LIVE EVENTS
As well as staging the weekly GT Open Mic Nights and Showcase Nights in Guildford’s town centre, the GT Live Sessions also produce a set of larger annual events. One Winter’s Night is a concert held at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre every January. One Spring Afternoon is an outdoor festival event that takes place on two stages down by the lake at The University Of Surrey in the middle of May. (One Summer’s Day was a one-day one-stage festival that took place in the courtyard garden of The Guildford Tup in July. These summer events currently do not take place). All of the GT Live Sessions events raise money each year for local and national charities.
We’re thrilled to confirm that tickets are now on sale for One Winter’s Night 2025.
”A number of trains of thought came together in the origination of the One Summer’s Day project. I started running the GT Open Mic Sessions at The King’s Head two years ago, and after a while I realised it was turning into something really quite unique. I was staggered every week at the extraordinary musical talent I was witnessing. Night after night these young singers and songwriters would turn up and bare their souls, performing their allotted three song sets to an audience who would sit quietly and listen in awed appreciation. It was magical, and it continued to be, week after week.
So I decided we should try to take it further. The talent was so strong I wanted to somehow provide a larger stage from which these composers and performers could reach a larger crowd. At the beginning of this year, while these ideas were still embryonic, Guildford received the news it was dreading and we finally knew that there would be no Guilfest in 2015. In a way this was the catalyst. I could never dream of trying to fill the hole that the mighty Guilfest would leave behind. But I decided that if I could find a suitable venue, and if a decent number of my Thursday night players were up for it, we should try to create a small but perfectly formed one-day mini music festival. Luckily for me The Tup agreed to host it, and the first ten acts I asked all said yes. So that was that. It had to happen.”
Gavin Thomas 2015