About US
We're Ultimatum. A Band formed by best friends. We started about a year ago now, rehearsing whenever we could find a spare moment, with members of the band having work and education commitments. So much so that our first gig we played we hadnt practiced as all four members of Ultimatum, only ever 3 or less at a time!
I know right! How young do we look there! but from humble beginnings come great things as they say. soon after we realised we had something, something to hold on to. the sense of passion and fun which we try to encapsulate in our choices of covers, in progress originals and our energetic live gigs. That sense that anything is possible if we work hard enough and long enough at it.
Our love and desire to play music was heavily influenced by all of our involvement with the Harlow Rock School. As some of the oldest and longest members currently attending Rock School, we'd learnt over the years the skills and techniques we needed to perform as a great band, such as teamwork, compromises and friendship. Straight after our first gig we started working on some new songs for our setlist which at the time only consisted of a few songs we knew each other knew how to play just to get by. We had the mentality of having an entirely new set for straight after our next gig, which just so happened to be one of our biggest gigs, Linkfest 2014. We only played 3 songs as a part of Harlow Rock School but that was enough for us, we'd had time to rehearse and learn our songs back to front and we were ready to rock!
After That performance we completely restarted our setlist to give ourselves a fresh start. Recently we had started exploring our influences and each put forward songs to cover, this resulted in our current set list which has all kinds of music, but we only play the songs we find enjoyable and hope the crowd do too. We had the mentality that if the crowd saw how much we enjoyed what we were doing they were more likely to have a good time! Thats our aim as a band to have a good time, hopefully go places but always enjoying ourselves whatever happens!
Now how did Ultimatum start? Well its a funny and long winded story but we'll try to shorten it down for you guys. Basically after his old band broke up due to musical differences, Aidan Drew, our guitarist, approached Rylan Elven about forming a band with him singing. It then occured to Aidan that Rylan had started playing bass and never really had the chance to do it in a band, so he proposed Rylan become our singer and bassist. They then started brainstorming song ideas, unfortunately Aidan was in a terrible Green Day phase at that point and only wanted to play Green Day songs, resulting in him suggesting somewhere around 20 of them! This was soon stopped ( and we're glad to announce he's less Green Day crazy now! ) at this point it was agreed upon to ask long time friends of theirs to be members of the band. We thought of the best and loudest drummer we knew and it was our friend Liam Etheridge so we asked him if he wanted in and thank lord he did! We then had trouble at first thinking of another guitarist, as we didnt think we knew any we wanted. We then remembered that during a Rock School workshop week where Aidan had seen Rylan playing bass, their friend Ryan Beach was playing guitar. So we immediatly shot him a message asking if he wanted to join and complete Ultimatum.
The name you ask? Well thats a lot simpler to explain: During a band name brainstorm completely randomly Aidan suggested 'Ultimatum' as he liked band names that ended in 'um' for some strange reason and it kinda stuck ever since.
We've also recently lost two of our members due to work and other commitments. We lost our Drummer Liam Etheridge, And our co Guitarist Ryan Beach. We were sad to see them leave but wish them all the best in the future.
This would probably be a good time to let you all know we've got ourselves a new drummer! He'd been rehearsing with us for a while as we needed someone to fill in for Liam at a few gigs, but after Liam left we needed a full on replacement. But replacement is not the word i would use for this guy. He's absolutely mental, and he's played our two largest gigs to date, including our first ever paid gig as a band!
Let us introduce you to Mr. Cameron Krueger!
So what's Ultimatum up to now?
Well we recorded our covers album during February 2015 which we were very happy with!
We finished recording our second ep with our new drummer cameron!
We just played our first ever paid gig at Linkfest 2016!
and we played in Devon for a bike festival earlier this year!!
Onwards And Upwards!!!
- Ultimatum