Sizzling Bond girls shimmying into town

Jun 24 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

SOME people like their classical music served up with decorum – dickie bows and concert hall hush.

Others prefer it socked to them by a quartet of glamorous girls with futuristic electronic instruments.

It is this latter audience that the girls of Bond are all too happy to serve.

Bond viola player Tania Davis (that’s her in red) says: "We’re coming up to our 10th anniversary. Our first album came out in 2000 but we were together in 1999."

She reminds me that they began as two sets of friends. She and Haylie Ecker, fellow Aussies, were studying at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London; Gay-Yee Westerhoff, from Yorkshire, and Eos Chater, from Wales, were session musicians performing with many well-known pop acts.

Haylie met the Brits, introduced them to Tania and Bond was born.

"We were lucky," reflects Tania, "because we got a good manager. We ended up signing a deal with Universal.

"Our manager used to manage Vanessa-Mae and had a pretty clear vision for us. But we were all really young, early 20s, so although people were always going on about our sexy image, we were just wearing the sort of things girls that age wear."

Bond have their detractors, as you might expect, but they have thrived, particularly overseas where they have attracted big audiences in Asia, America and the Middle East.

Haylie left the group to focus on motherhood but Tania, a mother herself, says replacement Elspeth Hanson, who performed at the handover ceremony which closed the Beijing Olympics, has settled in well.

Bond has a fruitful friendship with violinist Nigel Kennedy and, at his suggestion, have done a version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. It has been recorded exclusively for Peugeot to launch their new 308CC model.

You can hear it or download it via www.opentoallseasons.co.uk Better still, you can see and hear Bond in the flesh at Town Square in the MetroCentre at 12 noon, 3pm and 5pm this coming Saturday.