“The dedication these musicians put into the craft is phenomenal,” he told BBC Radio Stoke.<\/p>\n
“I’m always in awe that they actually hold down day jobs as well and then come into the band room in the evening to play so magnificently.”<\/p>\n
Despite all the pressure and hard work that goes into playing “at the highest level”, Gray said it was important to remember that it was still a “hobby”.<\/p>\n
But he added: “You choose to do a hobby; you don’t choose to do it badly, do you? You don’t go fishing to not catch a fish.”<\/p>\n
Foden’s victory at the British Open, which featured 19 bands, meant it would be invited to represent England at the European Championships in 2028.<\/p>\n
Wilkinson, who also won best cornet player at Saturday’s contest, said he still got “extremely nervous”, not least because of the band’s legacy.<\/p>\n
“We’re the custodians,” he added, “so we want to do a fantastic job just like the players before us so we can pass on this legacy to the next generation.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“The dedication these musicians put into the craft is phenomenal,” he told BBC Radio Stoke. “I’m always in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":772330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-772329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}