Will & The People rediscover the excitement post-lockdowns

Their new album Past The Point Of No Return came out at the end of November and now they are on tour with dates including The Boileroom, Guildford on December 15; Joiners, Southampton on December 16; and their first Worthing gig, at The Factory Live, Worthing on December 21.

Band members are Will Rendle, his brother Jamie Rendle, Jim Ralphs and Charlie Harman.

Worthing-based Will said: “We all used to live together up in Maidenhead but we started really at Glastonbury. I had a show booked in, an acoustic show that I was going to do on my own. I lied and said I had a band. Me and Jim, the keyboard player, hooked up before and managed to sneak in and we met Charlie the drummer at the festival. We said ‘Would you like to play with us?’ He was aware of the songs and we became a four-piece when another guy that was a friend of Jim’s joined us who just happened to be there. The planets aligned for us and then my brother Jamie joined the band. It was this line-up for about a year and then the bass player departed. Since then we have been the four of us for about ten years now.

“We’ve done it all. We have toured all over the world. We have been signed to major labels and indie labels and our own label. We are now doing other things as well such as branching out as songwriters and producers. We’re starting to work with a lot of young artists that really inspire us. It was something that we had wanted to do and the lockdown was the catalyst for that happening and actually coming together.”

The new album was released on November 26 and was also a product of the lockdown.

“We managed to record the new album in Margate for two weeks in the middle of the lockdown. The studio was offered to us and we had just released an album. We had completely cleared out our closet of all our music and then we got this call through. We thought we’re going to have to write a completely new album and we decided to do it as a concept-type thing.

“We went into the studio with no real ideas, just the bare bones of ideas and we wrote and recorded the whole thing in two weeks. There was a hotel above the studio and we were locked down basically but we had full free rein of the studio for those two weeks and the first track that came out was Past The Point Of No Return which is just a piano ballad that we recorded in the first few hours of going in there. And it felt right. It felt that there is no turning back for us. We have been together for ten years with varied success but we’re all still so enthused by what we do as a band. It is a call to strength really.

“We have all lived in a difficult time and just not knowing how long it was going to last. It really tested us as a band. And I think every group has to have a time when they go through a period of hardship and contemplation before they can rise like a phoenix from the flames. We needed this, creatively speaking, as a band. We are doing other things now, new things and we had just thought ‘What are we going to do as a band?’ but making this album has made us really excited again about recording and about going out there on tour. And this will be our first ever Worthing date!”