My nephew Sam, lead guitar in the band Trial of Origin, messaged me earlier today with the fantastic news that they had beat more than 600 school bands to reach joint first place in the BBC Midlands Today School of Rock competiton. This means they will get time in a professional recording studio. You can watch an excerpt of them playing here afterwards they may even get some needle time on Radio1.

The BBC site still shows second place but according to Sam “its cos of this BBC thing. have u heard one of the bands got a computer or something (maybe skype) to block vote for them. so they got loads and loads votes, so they won. HOWEVER the BBC knew they hadnt really won, and wen they took away the false votes, it was us who actually won. so even though we were classed as the runners up, theyr still giving us the winners prize“

Robert Scoble featured them on his blog last year (Scoble ahead of the pack as always) afterwards Ewan Spence picked up on them and featured the band in his rock podcast #14. Maybe I can get Fred to feature them over at his A VC blog.

Really excellent news and they get to play a gig at the Birmingham NEC