The first time I saw Bear’s Den perform was in front of giant crowd, this summer, at the Simcoe stopover for Mumford & Sons’ ‘Gentlemen of the Road’ tour. It was quite the experience indeed as I had never herd of the UK folk-trio until I saw the lineup for the festival. Since witnessing that performance, I’ve been hooked on their music.
This show being the start to the band’s first headlining tour in North America, I was particularly interested to see if they had created any other die-hard fans from that single afternoon performance. My question was answered with a resounding, hell yes!
The place was packed with everyone trying squeeze in as close possible to the stage. Once you picked your spot, that was it, no turning back, which no one did the second Bear’s Den walked out on stage. Applause and yells of pure excitement filled the room until the band started playing, and then…silence. The crowd was so quiet you could hear a pin drop! Everyone was just so swept up in the dream-like guitar playing and mesmerized by the soaring vocal harmonies from Andrew Davie, Joey Haynes, and Kev Jones.
Although the bands’ folk roots lean to keeping the songs a little slower and tugging at the heartstrings leaving you swaying lightly back and forth, they had a few more upbeat songs that got the crowd dancing and singing along. The Bear’s more popular songs like ‘Agape’ and ‘Pompeii’ were great examples of this, along with a newer song of theirs ‘Writing On The Wall’, which had guitar riffs you would expect to hear in an early Kings of Leon tune. The lads on stage were so taken aback by the energy and excitement from the crowd; they couldn’t help but smile and thank us profusely for coming to the show.
Upon finishing their set, the band returned to the stage to roars and chants of “BEAR’S-DEN! BEAR’S-DEN! BEAR’S-DEN!” to perform an encore performance of three songs. The first encore song they performed unplugged; no amps, no mics, the crowd as quiet as they could be to hear the trio, and capture the moment on video with their smartphones. The night ended on a high-note with an entertaining rendition of Drake’s ‘Hold On, We’re Going Home’.
With thunderous applause the night was over, and after a brief breather, Davie, Joey, and Kev came back out to hangout at the merch table gladly signing t-shirts and cd’s with nothing but grins on their faces.
With a sold-out show like that, without a doubt Bear’s Den will be back to Toronto, and when they return I highly suggest you grab tickets. You owe it to yourself to check out this band and their amazing music.
