Shelter Four

Shelter Four is a Pop/Rock band from the Netherlands.
We started of somewhere in the year 2001. After playing in a band together for years (with performing in a protestant church as its all time apex. Just imagine: that’s bad…) Roy, Robin and Ernest were reunited. Together with Roel and Ralf we tried to create our own songs, but for all the band members participate in our song-writing process it is very time-consuming and sometimes quite frustrating. Almost every week someone threatened to quit the band, wreck a guitar or kill the piano player… well: what are friends for? We were just trying to write music, but apparently something was missing…
We were unable to develop, so we decided there was a need for real life drums. Easier said then done: drummers are typically very shy, tend to avoid human contact and if they don’t they’d better done… (at least the drummers we were dealing with at this point). Fortunately there was one man made for the job (and one man only): Dennis Weijers (DB for initiates).
Actually: the song-writing process did not change, rehearsing wasn’t more peaceful or easier or more fun (well, DB has got some keen sense of humour, I‘ve got to admit that…), but at least it SOUNDED like a real band…
To move on, we decided we needed to spread the word… People should be able to listen to our music, form an opinion about it and, ideally, keep it to themselves… We needed to record our music and skip the “performing on a stage”-part. Thus occurred.
While the five of us recorded a little (4 tracks) demo-cd, Ralf was sailing the oceans of the world in search for, well, payment I guess, so Robin recorded the bass-lines. But being a sailor wasn’t his mission; he returned, hurray!
Making music is one thing, having people cheer and clap for you another. We needed that part to: we had to go on stage, we had to start building a set… And so we did.
The following year we got the chance to play our music in Ernesto’s Cantina Mexicana at the band contest Podiumvrees 2007. Unfortunately (but quite understandable) we didn’t make it to the finals, but it was a very exciting experience for all of us. From that day on we were eager to play more often and to get as soon as possible on stage again.
Too bad Roel decided to quit the band at this point. Due to this we had to cancel two gigs and, for he was our lead guitar player, we needed to adapt most of our old songs and started writing new ones.
After a couple of months the five of us were being productive again, so we were carefully thinking about getting on stage again.
Enjoy the music and let us know.
(Also check out www.shelterfour.nl )