Baby Band Music Festival: Music event aims to introduce the magic of live music to children at Lotherton Hall


The festival will be the biggest single day event ever staged at Lotherton Hall and promises an experience that transcends generations – proper music, great bands, and absolutely no nursery rhymes.
The Baby Band Music Festival is born out of the success of the Baby Band music classes and gigs, which are the brainchild of husband and wife team, Peter and Charlotte Hill.
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Hide Ad“At the heart of Baby Band is the belief that music is for everyone, regardless of age. Our mission is to introduce the magic of live music to children from the earliest age possible and create moments where families can bond over the joy of a shared beat,” explains Charlotte, who started out as a primary school teacher but became disillusioned with the education system, and so ‘ran away’ to London where she became a nanny for some high-profile families.


“It was amazing but I’m not really a London girl and so I went back to Yorkshire where I went to the university in Leeds.” She nannied in Yorkshire for a while before going back to working in schools. During this time Charlotte and Peter went through a huge four-year fertility journey and finally had their daughter Matilda in the midst of Covid.
“Matilda was born at home – if we’d been at hospital my husband couldn’t have been with me. The craziest bit was that we had been trying so long for a baby and then we had her and we were on our own, we weren’t able to show her off to anyone which was the really sad part of it.”
Charlotte says this experience definitely influences how she is with Baby Band. “I’d come up with the idea while I was nannying but never really went anywhere with it. When I applied to go part time at work and that was refused I made the decision to hand in my notice and Baby Band was reborn in 2021.
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Hide Ad“When I was nannying I went to lots of baby classes and they really weren’t great – the music ones in particular. I kept thinking I could do a better version of this.” Charlotte has always loved music having played in brass bands since she was a small child. Baby Band ‘version two’ is about to celebrate its third birthday and Charlotte says they have learn a lot in that time and adapted what they do.
“When we first started it was similar to a school environment and focused very much on the children having a brilliant experience, but now it’s all joyous and all about the parents. I think that’s the result of me being a mummy. The children will have a great time if their parents are having a lovely time as well. Parents are the focus of our classes.”
Baby Band, which runs classes in 14 venues and four nurseries across York, Selby, North Leeds and Wetherby, launched the first Baby Band franchise in January this year, with plans for a further three by the end of 2024 and 20 in total by 2026 across towns and cities in the Yorkshire region.
“We use different genres of music to plan our classes. This week it’s been punk music but we’ve done folk, musicals, ‘90s boy bands. We have live musicians come in once a term so the children get to experience what that live element of music feels like. It’s all about feeling the joy of being part of something musical.”
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Hide AdCharlotte only uses actual full-sized instruments in her classes. “It was really important that they sounded and felt like real instruments so that transition to school isn’t such a mighty jump. No plastic instruments allowed!”
The children, some just weeks old, join the classes. “Because it is about the parents it is all very personal. Some have brought babies who are just a few weeks old. Although we tend to say four to five months is a great age to start and the Baby Band classes go up until they are three years old.”
They are taught three musical concepts: pulse, dynamic and tempo. “They have no idea they are learning these things in class,” says Charlotte, who runs the business with husband Peter, a secondary teacher and musician who composes and arranges catchy tunes for little people to sing, alongside his job as a Head of Performing Arts and Music in York.
They have just launched preschool classes called I’m With The Band. “We were seeing drop off at around two and half years and I think it was about the name. So I’m with the Band is aimed at slightly older children who get to be in the coolest band. They sing into pretend microphones – it is the next stop in learning how to be in a band.”
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Hide AdIt was doing both those classes that led to the idea for the Baby Band Festival. “We wanted to get all the parents and children from all the classes together and so we started doing gigs at the weekends. We wanted it to be like the type of thing we would go to before we had children but on a Sunday afternoon so you can still have a pint watch really good bands but you bring your children along.
"They’ve been so well received we do two big gigs a year – an Easter one and a Christmas one and now the big festival in the summer.”
In the summer of 2022 they decided to do a pilot version of the Baby Band Festival, followed by their first big one day event in 2023.
“This is our second event at Lotherton Hall. Organising it is a complete job in itself but it brings me so much happiness doing it. There are a lot of good family type festivals out there but we feel we fill a niche – we want it to be your baby’s first experience of a festival, but all while making sure mum and dad have a great time,” says Charlotte.
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Hide Ad“It’s about creating memories with your family and friends but all with music as its centre. We have some great local bands. We’d love to make it into a two-day event at some point so people can camp over.”
The event, runs from 11am-6.30pm, and includes an artisan market filled with local crafters and makers; and a wide variety of children’s activities from dance workshops, forest school to circus skills sessions and an array of food and drinks will be available.
www.babyband.co.uk