HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Around 600,000 people will line the streets of London, England on Jan. 1 for the annual New Year’s Day Parade and one of their first sights for them will the Marshall University Marching Thunder.
The university announced Friday that the marching band will be one of the leads to the 2020 celebration parade that features over 5,000 performers and is broadcast live worldwide.
Dr. Adam Dalton, director of bands in Marshall’s School of Music, spoke with MetroNews about the two-mile route and what the band will be performing.
“We are going to play ‘Sons of Marshall,’ our fight song,” Dalton said. “We are going to play ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey. We are going to maybe play ‘Right Above It,’ another fun song our students like to perform.
“Then at the end of the parade, like the Macy’s parade, there is a standstill performance that is broadcasted and what everybody sees.”
Dalton hinted at a mashup of Marshall and West Virginia themed songs during the standstill performance. He said that performance by 103 students will end the historic parade route.
“It starts a little bit uptown but it goes through Trafalgar Square that everybody knows in front of the National Gallery. It goes through Whitehall Palace which is kind of all the governmental buildings. It passes by Downing Street where the Prime Minister lives so it hits some major sights along the way.”
In total, 125 people from Marshall will travel overseas on the trip. Dalton said he left the trip open to any student to go but the expense of it may have driven some away.
The group will leave Sunday and will return Sunday, Jan. 5. Dalton said the group has plenty of time off to do sightseeing in London and they already have an itinerary schedule.
According to Marshall, both the preview show and the live parade will be broadcast on West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s statewide West Virginia Channel. The preview show will air Dec. 29, at 8 p.m., and Dec. 30, at 3 p.m. The live parade will air on New Year’s Day from 7 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Dalton said the parade will also be streaming on the London parade’s website, LNYDP.com and a link will be on Marshall’s website.
The Marching Thunder was selected after a global search of marching bands following their successful international debut in Rome in 2016, according to Marshall.