I apologise that we're a bit delayed with our post, as we've only just been alerted to this thread.

We're concerned about being associated with the Ship band model so thought it best to explain:

LTC is a band like any other and most definitely not an agency or 'franchise'. Although we consider ourselves to be a professional band and focus a lot of resources on advertising - unlike The Ship Band we only target the surrounding areas of London and Sussex where our musicians are based, and charge more for traveling further (as we will actually be traveling rather than using other musicians local to the area).

Something that is true, is that on occasions we do put out 2 bands on the one night, but it is still 'Licence to Ceilidh': which we completely understand can be seen to be misleading, so just to explain: we would consider ourselves to be a collective - all of our players are full time professional musicians of a particularly high standard and so can often have other musical commitments which means they cannot play all of the ceilidhs (for instance our drummers play for some of the top west end shows, like Footloose and Grease) and so over the 10 years the band has been running, through the necessity of using and training up deps (in rehearsals - yes we do have them!) we have built up this collective of high quality, trained musicians who all play regularly with the band, thus enabling us to have two quality, rehearsed bands out at once (playing the same music!).

We're very keen to try and not mislead people with this so that's why we have numerous people on each instrument page on our website. We're open to showing different line-ups throughout our photos/videos on our site and also the many agency sites we're registered on (but do note the familiar faces that crop up a lot!).

We pride ourselves on the quality of all to do with LTC and so have two completely identical sets of top of the range PA, so all the equipment and music is exactly the same on every gig and quality is ensured through all of our equipment as well as players. As mentioned we do spend money on advertising, however over half of our work comes from word of mouth, repeat bookings and people having seen us at other events, which we think is a great testament to the quality of what we're doing.

We don't make a huge amount of money from LTC, but we make enough to get by and provide our friends who are all fantastic musicians with good work (we try to pay our players as much as we can and make sure it's in line with the going rate for musicians of that caliber).

I myself am what you'd call a 'folky': my parents folk singers and I've grown up at festivals and ceilidhs (never missed a Sidmouth yet!). I think the most important thing to note is: that any band that focuses on quality and integrity will be around for the long haul, those that don't are somewhat missing the point of music and thus wont be around for long!

Back to the original post: we're openly a Scottish Ceilidh band, so I don't think we'll be what you're looking for, but would most definitely recommend Cat Kelly, The Flying Chaucers or DanceCupola (derby based - only 2 hours from oxford).

Ali