Jonny Wilkinson
Jonny Wilkinson is the bass player in Sunderland based band 'Peace Frog' The band first formed at Leeds Beckett but members of the band were from the North East and so over the years the band has managed to play gigs across the North East and Yorkshire.
I’m the bass player in the band Peace Frog . In the summer of 2019 we had been recording in St. Helens for our single ‘Ellena’. After the session on our second day of recording we were travelling down to Leeds for a headline gig at Leeds Beckett university.
After already having to turn around not once, but TWICE to go and get equipment that we’d left In St. Helens, what was about to happen would leave us speechless even to this day.
Driving down the M62 a notification appears on the sat nav telling us to go a ‘shortcut’ to save 7 minutes off our journey. You're probably thinking is 7 minutes really worth it? The short answer is no, it definitely wasn’t. The sat nav took us down the most brutal of country lanes, through a small stream, then through the most terrible stretch of what seemed to be a dried up riverbed with boulders bigger than the size of the wheels on the VW polo we were in!
Myself and Nathan Gooch, our guitarist, moved countless boulders to clear the way for Liam, our vocalist and driver, to be able to get the car through. Eventually, we reached the end of what I’d like to call a road but in reality just seemed to be more like a dried up clump of riverbed! What we thought was the end was only just the beginning, as the clutch, which had already been smoking trying to get off the road, had absolutely disintegrated. AA were called and we sat and waited for recovery for what felt like an eternity.
We were so impatient, we didn’t want to sit around waiting so we tried to get the car started and by some miracle we got it moving! We got extremely excited and ahead of ourselves and cancelled the AA call out and set off again.
The car died again about a mile up the road when we got to a steep hill. We called AA again.
The fella showed up and towed us to Leeds just in time for our gig but my word, what an afternoon!
*Photographs supplied by Peace Frog and Victoria Measham
To find out more about Jonny and Peace Frog check out their video below and make sure to follow their social media and streaming platforms!