News

An artist directory created by two entrepreneurial Trinity Laban graduates fifteen years ago now helps to promote almost 3,300 acts, making it one of the UK’s biggest facilitators of music for parties, weddings and other events.

Last Minute Musicians – a service that enables event planners to research and book solo musicians and bands – was launched in 2003 by Chris Walmsley and Adam Hughes, who met while studying jazz drums and piano at Trinity Laban.

Visitors can browse musicians’ profiles, read reviews, listen to audio, watch videos and contact a rapidly growing selection of the best musicians, bands, DJs, entertainers and related companies – including a large number of accomplished Trinity Laban graduates.

Last Minute Musicians hosts listings for performers in an extensive range of genres, ranging from string quartets to traditional Jewish Klezmer bands, Bollywood to bagpipes. The site also hosts information on lighting designers, recording studios, sound engineers and much more.

LMM receives some 60,000 enquiries a year and 75,000 visitors a month, and regularly connects high-profile clients such as John Lewis, the BBC and Coca-Cola with entertainment for corporate events. Last Minute Musicians also represents a number of bands itself as an agency, and can provide a full event-planning service for clients.

The organisation’s founders publish regular useful content for performers on their blog, from guidance on applying for visas to perform overseas, to an analysis of 2,500 party set lists to determine the most popular pop and rock songs covered by bands.   

Explaining why they created Last Minute Musicians, co-founder Chris Walmsley said –

“We played at some weddings with our jazz trio whilst studying at Trinity Laban and thought, how can we get more gigs like this for ourselves? That was the beginning of the idea – to generate work for ourselves. Then we started to get gigs for our friends and it just expanded from there.

“Our business was formed whilst studying and for the first couple of years our musicians were almost exclusively other students. Without Trinity Laban this company would never have happened!”

Chris and Adam booked acts to play at the London 2012 Summer Olympics, and one of Last Minute Muscians’ bands also played at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle earlier this year. They’ve noticed a distinct trend over 2018 for Great Gatsby-style and other vintage acts, along with a recent upsurge in festival-style weddings, with acoustic groups and bands with a sound similar to Mumford & Sons proving popular.

Trinity Laban students can find out more about Last Minute Musicians and other performance opportunity resources here or register with LMM here.