YB Band to perform 20th anniversary concerts
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Yoon Do-hyun of YB Band performs “20 year old” at the media showcase on Oct. 6. / Yonhap
By Kim Jae-heun
Popular rock band YB, or Yoon Do-hyun Band, will perform a series of concerts titled “20 years old” to celebrate the group’s 20th anniversary from Thursday to Sunday at LG Arts Center in Gangnam, Seoul.
The concert will feature music that the band has performed over the last 20 years as well as what they want to perform in the next 20 years. YB Band also plans to debut a song titled “20 years old” on stage.
“I’ve never thought that we would come this far,” said Yoon Do-hyun, the lead vocalist of the band, at Ilchi Art Hall in Gangnam, Seoul, on Oct. 6. “We happened to play for 20 years. We talked things out when we had problems, we had passion in music and we distributed our income equally. We started good.”
“No one in our band has an unsociable or bad personality. It has been easy for us to get along with each other because we were all so different,” Yoon said.
Bass player Park Tae-hee picked his concert at Pyongyang in 2002 as the most memorable performance of his career.
“Pyongyang is not a place where you can perform even if you want to. Our last concert with the primary members in 2000 also stays strong in my mind,” said Park.
YB Band was dismantled for three months in 2000 when they clashed with their agency with the issue of member replacements. Now the band constitutes five members including Yoon, Park, bassist Kim Jin-won, guitarists Heo Jun and Scott Hellowell.
Hellowell, a British musician who has been with the band for 10 years, picked his performances in “I Am a Singer,” or the singing competition program, as his most memorable experiences because the competition was intense.
“The stages we made for I Am a Singer was most exciting and at the same time the most challenging. We were running out of time and we had to come up with something. But it was the time when we showed the strongest teamwork,” he said.
Debuting in 1995, YB Band gained nationwide popularity during the 2002 World Cup with its cheer song “Oh Pilseung Korea,” and its appearance in the I Am a Singer show in 2011. The band performed at various rock festivals while winning a best rock performance award in 2002, 2003 and the Mnet specialized award in 2011 at Mnet Asian music awards.
After the concerts in Seoul, the band will continue their performances in nine more cities including Changwon, Daegu, Busan and Pohang.
“People around me say the band has done enough but that is not how we live. We are dreaming of the next 20 years in the way that we have done during the last 20 years,” Yoon said.