Bad Habits were one of the Island's best blues bands in 2011, fronted by Amanda Jackson and built around a tight, loud rhythm section. They played the festival twice that year. Wednesday night at The Globe for the free Blues at The Globe series, and Thursday night at the Kwik Kopy Late Night show . Both sets were well attended and the band was in good form.
What people remember about that week, though, is what happened before the festival even started.
The stolen drums
Drummer Liam Kearney had his kit stolen out of his locked car on the Sunday night before the festival opened. The kit was worth about nine thousand dollars. He had spent years putting it together, piece by piece, the way working drummers do. It was gone in an evening .
Kearney told CBC at the time that he was heartbroken. Other musicians offered him the use of their kits for the festival shows. He ended up playing on an older set of his own, one he still had, though he said the sound would not be quite the same .
Bad Habits played anyway. Wednesday and Thursday, as scheduled. The band did not cancel and did not make a thing of it on stage. They just played. For a band that was still building its reputation at that point, it would have been easy to pull out. They did not.
After the festival
Bad Habits kept going after 2011. They won Best New Artist at the 2013 Music PEI Awards and released a debut album called Good Thing that same year. CBC reviewed it and called Jackson a standout singer, with a band that matched her energy . The review noted that the album was all original material, which is not nothing for a debut blues record.
The band became a regular on the East Coast festival circuit for a while after that. Jackson went on to other projects, including the Amanda Jackson Band, and kept playing around the region.
At the festival
If you were at The Globe on the Wednesday night or the late show on Thursday, you saw a band that had every reason to be off their game and were not. That is the thing about live music. The show goes on, and sometimes the show is better because of what happened before it.
For the current festival, head to the schedule page or the main lineup page. This archive is kept for looking back.