Sammy Griffin, Live at 'The O2 Academy, Brixton' - 16th July 2011


Sammy Griffin, the 19 year old singer-songwriter born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, has his biggest ever performance tonight. Tonight, we at iTunes are here to check him out live. He is performing a full run through of his latest EP, The Griffin. This EP is considered to be the one that will really help him to break into the music industry.
On the 23rd of June, Sammy went in to SB.TV to do a live set for them – and only a couple of days later, he was approached by major record label Studio 60 Records. He now has a 1 album deal with one of the biggest labels around, and is definitely considered one to look out for.

We are back stage, here at The O2 Academy in Brixton to talk to him before he goes out there and performs to the 4758 people who have come to see him. At the moment he is sat on a stiff wooden chair sucking on a thin yellow straw which is leading to a glass of water. He looks nervous. This is the biggest performance of his life so far. We approach him and he sees us. He looks us all in the eye and smiles at us; his long ginger hair is sitting gently on his head and his eyes are red. He doesn’t look like he has had much sleep but when we reach him he jumps up out of his chair to shake our hands; showing more energy that we had thought he might have.

“Hey, you must be the guys from iTunes! I’m Sammy.” His warm welcome is nice to hear, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who has been working hard to get to where he is trying to get. He leads us over to a slightly more comfortable area of the backstage and we all sit down to have a quick chat.



At this point, we ask Sammy how he feels about the upcoming performance. To which he responds in an almost Eric Quillington like ramble; “Wow, this is amazing! I wasn’t expecting this many people to turn up to this!! 5000 tickets is a lot, I didn’t expect to get even half of it – 4750 is a lot of people!! I suppose a lot of people must like me though… Please Don’t Go did sell 192,000 copies. Wow. I just can’t believe that so many people are here!”

When he finally paused for a breath, we asked him how he felt about tomorrow night, his big performance at the Fans Choice Awards. “Oh my god – I am performing on TV tomorrow!! Ah, that is tomorrow – I’ve got the biggest gig of my life tonight! Tomorrow is another day. Hey that sounds like a good name for a song… Stop. I need to focus on the performance at hand. Breathe in. Breathe out. Okay, I am ready. Let’s Go.”

And with that, he was up out of his seat. He shook each of our hands, gave us a quick smile and then headed over to the drinks table and had a glass of water, before quickly picking up his guitar and another two bottles of water. He stood at the side of stage and waited for the signal to come on. In the centre of the stage, a short man stood with a microphone. “Okay everybody. Here he is, Sammy Griffin!” To which a massive cheer filled the venue.

Edited by user 22 July 2011 08:02:32(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Amy: Well at least there is at least some talent out there, thank the great lord for sending you to us lol, hopefully you'll get the attention you deserve because I like that your actually talented, quite a rarity these days lol. Keep doing what your doing because your awesome. :)

Ryan: Sammy is one of the greatest in my opinion! One of my favuorite artists to just kick back and listen to. I NEED to see you live!

Ryan: Thats something i got to see! Hit me up whenever the venues are announced hopefully ill be able to make it to one!

Part 3

Sammy stands on the stage, calm and collected. The fans continue to cheer from the end of the first song as he takes a sip from one of his bottles of water. He drips a bit onto his hand and rubs his face, leaving the roots of his hair slightly damp. He shakes his head and then smiles again at the audience. They calm down and then he speaks again, “Well, thank you all so much for joining in straight from the start! Now, we have track two. Hopefully a lot of you already know this one too – it was a demo on The Red One. Now we have Behind!” The audience again cheer; for saying that there are 4750 people, it sound far more like 47500 people!

Now Sammy takes a hold of his guitar again and makes a quick strum whilst looking down at his guitar. He looks up as he starts to bob up and down, then he does a second strum as he bobs downwards. Then Sammy stops. He grabs the main microphone and says, “Okay, I want you all to bounce with me. I’m gonna strum a few times until we have got the bounce going right. So all bounce on the strum!” He strums and everyone bounces; he does it a second and third time and the whole crowd is moving in unison. He does a fourth one and then says into the microphone; “Keep bouncing people!” so while the audience keeps bouncing to the tune, Sammy continues to strum and then hums into the microphone; this makes a vibrating noise which echoes around the room.

Now that he has got the audience thoroughly absorbed into the start of his second song, Sammy begins the actual vocals of the song. Now Sammy starts to play a simple tune on his guitar; it increases in pace as the song progresses towards the verse and then when he reaches the verse he again shows how beautiful his voice can be. He now shows off that he can still sing in tune when trying to sing higher notes, performing the first verse even better than how it was performed on the EP.



The guitar continues to get faster and Sammy shows real skill here with his guitar playing skill. He has only been playing the guitar for about 7 years and is showing how much time he must have devoted to it with the pure skill and raw talent he possesses. He sings a brief pre-chorus, which helps to get the audience hyped up for the chorus; and when it comes around, again they are singing every word! This song was on his previous EP as a demo, so all of his older fans have heard this time and time again.



Sammy then stops playing and gets the audience to join in with him, he says “Alright everybody, I want a ‘choir’ effect from you guys! So left hand side,” he points to one side of the audience, “Give me an ‘OOO’ when I raise my hands. And the right hand side…” he gestures towards the right “I want you to give me an ‘AHH’ sound when I raise my hands.” He smiles at the audience, and then continues speaking, “Okay then, three… two… one…” and then he lifts his arms to signal for the audience to start with their harmonies. He presses down on the foot-pedal and records the harmony; he also slowly beat boxes in tune to what the drums would have been in the recording for the EP.



Now he drops his arms and the audience stops; and their choir effect has now been recorded along with his beat-boxing. This leads Sammy into his second verse, which is much the same as the first one. He finishes the verse and presses down on the pedal to add to his beat-boxing, thus giving the effect of a faster drum beat as he progresses into the final chorus. The audience – or should I say loyal fans – are again singing with him; so far tonight he has barely spent any time singing alone. Sammy has the audience firmly wrapped around his little finger.

The song finishes with an acapela ‘pre-chorus’. The song finishes to the cheers of 4750 adoring fans…

Edited by user 26 July 2011 07:44:02(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

OOC: You're doing an amazing job! I liked a lot how detailed and easy to read is the RP! Something I could never do I guess, lol! :)

Hayden: Freaking amazing!

Isabel: Yes great show :) You perform like natural.

Part 5

Sammy hangs the mic back on its stand as he stands there taking the applause from the audience. He is now on track 4 of 5 from his EP; the songs on the EP should all be relatively well known bar one, as three of them have – in some form – been on other EPs, and one was released as a single.

He takes a quick pluck at his guitar before retuning it very quickly and then plucks again. Content with how his guitar sounds he prepares to sing the next song. “Okay everybody, we are now on track four!!” he says as he quickly wipes the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his hoody; “This one was also a demo on the previous EP, so if you can remember it try to sing along! It is a little bit different to what it was as a demo, I added like three more lines in on the rapped verse.” He laughs slightly, “and that is like the only difference…” he now nods as jumps up and down on the spot once or twice. “Okay, here we go!”



Sammy takes a quick strum at the guitar allowing the chord to echo out. Then he waits for it to come back around and just after the first strum can be heard again he strums again making a different chord, allowing it to echo out to the same point as the previous one. And then finally he does the same one more time but with the first chord again just after the second. As this repeats itself, Sammy plucks out a tidy rhythm which is then repeated with the chords he has played as he now grabs the other mic and drops a slow beat down.

The music all stops now as Sammy begins to pluck a slow tune on his guitar, the song seems to have some sort of meaning to him as it is visible on his face now that he feels some sort of connection to it. Maybe he wrote it about someone in particular; but whatever it is, it shows that Sammy is a real person. His emotions are expressed beautifully as he sings the first verse.



Now Sammy presses the play button on his loop pedal and the music which he built up before the first verse kicks in as he sings the chorus. It is slow and controlled, and as he reaches the last line of the chorus his voice flickers a little, again suggesting that he has an emotional tie to the song – these make for the best songs.



He now increases the pace of his plucking rhythm as he raps the final verse of the song. He misses the pedal to turn of his self made backing music and instead decided to leave it on. It doesn’t really make much of a difference as a live performance is never exactly the same as recorded tracks. Sammy plays it cool pretending that he meant to leave it on, but from where we are sat it was obvious that he was going for the pedal.



He now leaves the music playing as he talks to the audience, “You all know the last line right?” a large proportion of the audience make sounds of agreement. “For those of you who don’t, it is ‘Because I Love You’. So I want you all to sing that one line at the end of the song with me. Shall I tell you why?” he asks the audience, to which he gets a massive response, “BECAUSE I LOVE YOU!!” he shouts back. The audience all cheer and scream as he starts to play the final chorus of the song. He gets to the final line and that one line reverberates around the whole venue, echoing into the night.

Edited by user 28 July 2011 05:15:25(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

"Thank you so much Magie, that means so much. Yeah that song does, or at least did mean a lot to me..."

- Sammy

"Thank you very much Isabel"

- Sammy