How a Boring Christmas Meal Turned Into Over £10,000 for the Foxton Centre
The Legendary Willy Banjo Charity Christmas Party is on Saturday 5 December 2026 at The Ferret, Preston. The Hiphopalippz are playing, with guest DJs to be announced. Doors are 7pm and it runs till 2am. Every penny goes to the Foxton Centre.
Here’s how a few lads going for a Christmas meal ended up raising over ten grand.
Four lads, bored, average food
One Christmas we started having a Christmas meal. I remember me, Lee and Adrian sat there. Then I’d go on my mates’ do from Screen and Design in Lostock Hall: Billsy, two Craigs, me, and one more lad whose name I can’t remember. Bored, sat round a table, and again the food was bloody average. That’s why we changed it. The café girls that used to feed me and look after me didn’t even have a Christmas party.
So I said, why don’t I get us all together? We’ll book a big table and have a Christmas party. That’s what we did, and we did it for years.
There are loads of stories from those nights that I can’t tell. Needless to say, my screen-printing mates got banned from coming. Not by me. By the wives.
It all ended up at Bistro French: £35 a head for three courses of average food and a covers band, so loads of office workers could get leathered and get off with one another. Funny night. But we realised: why are we paying that for a covers band when we know people in bands?
A fiver each and a hip-hop band
Our mate Tommy Brown, Little Ellie’s big brother, has a best mate called Matt, who now runs The Ferret. Matt had set up a band called The Hiphopalippz. We’d seen them and thought they were amazing. I think they wanted £500 to play.
So I said to Tommy, why don’t we get a venue? Get the band on, everyone chips in a fiver a ticket, sell 100 tickets and the band’s paid for. Chances are we’ll fill it. If we don’t, the shop makes up the difference.
We got upstairs at Revolution, a beautiful room with a big vaulted ceiling. It was bouncing. We told the door staff to let anybody in, ticket or no ticket, just to fill the place. It was packed. We did that a few years running. I think my mate Ormy’s band, Charlie Says, played one year, and a few others.
It’s always been about getting everyone together: old friends, the people from the jet-ski parties we used to put on, and everyone who’s worked with us over the years. Usually they’d meet working at Glastonbury or wherever, live together for a week, then not see each other again for a year, because they’re all just random pirates who used to come and work for us.
We had some cracking nights. My dad got banned: he got so pissed he fell out of the car and dislocated his shoulder. Oops. (It wasn’t the Moscow Mules, apparently.) My mates used to keep him topped up while he sat at the back being told stories, and Kathy’s missus too. I think they enjoyed it. A lot of those people they’d known forever, and they got to hear what we’d been up to, because it was daft, wasn’t it?
The year it became a charity party
About 17 years ago, the day after I’d put my dog down, so I wasn’t in a good state anyway, we got the phone call. Eggy Briggs, Little Ellie’s boyfriend (fiancé by then, I think), had died falling downstairs. Little Ellie had worked with us. Super, super sad. Heartbreaking.
We were supposed to be having the party. I spoke to Little Ellie, and she still wanted it, because it’d be good to have a gathering and see everybody. But paying for a band felt weird. So instead Matt DJ’d for us for free, God love him, playing the same tunes the band would have played. We all chipped in as usual, and the money went to the charity Eggy’s funeral collected for, which I think was North West Air Ambulance.
Big up the Briggs.
From Revolution to The Ferret
The parties carried on for a few years in different guises. This was pre-Facebook, so sorry, there aren’t many pictures from the nights. If you’ve got any, send them in. Eventually Revolution changed owners or something and got really arsey. We could only have the room till 10, even though we’d filled it for them from 8 o’clock, because they wanted to put the R&B DJ on at 10.
So we moved. We might have had a few years off, I can’t remember. Then when Matt took over The Ferret we had a party there with The Hiphopalippz, and it was a cracking party.
Why the Foxton Centre
Then the banking crisis hit, around 2008, 2009, 2010. The banks ripped us all off and we bailed them all out. You could see the difference in the city centre. It went from the occasional drunk, the odd person with mental health issues, to thirty, forty, fifty desperate people: addicts of one form or another, homeless, sleeping in doorways everywhere.
North West Air Ambulance is an amazing charity. But I never saw the ambulance in town. I saw desperate people who’d had their entire social safety net systematically taken away from them. Most people forget that’s what happened after the banking crisis.
So we changed to the Foxton Centre, a Preston charity that’s been supporting the community since 1969. They work with homeless people and people from disadvantaged backgrounds, trying to get them back on a path and supporting them once they’re on it.
Over £10,000 so far
I worked it out a while back and we’ve raised well over £10,000 for the Foxton Centre. That’s from tickets, t-shirts, hoodies, all sorts.
biggest thanks go out to all those who’ve attended or given up thier skills and time to play for us and this great cause 🙂
Some of the flyers over the years
This year: Saturday 5 December 2026
- Where: The Ferret, 55 Fylde Road, Preston PR1 2XQ
- When: Saturday 5 December 2026, doors 7pm till 2am
- Who: The Hiphopalippz, plus guest DJs to be announced
- Tickets: £5 Skint, £10 Standard or £20 Super Generous. Tickets are on Skiddle only, via The Ferret’s listing. Door tickets only if it hasn’t sold out.
- 18+ only. All proceeds go to the Foxton Centre.
Come and see everyone you haven’t seen since last year. If you can’t make it, share this with someone who should, or donate to the Foxton Centre directly.
More from the last 30-odd years: The Willy Banjo Story · 21 Glastonburys