Vivien and the Headline

Vivien and the Headline's "The Band" page names 5 people and stops there, promising only that surprise guests are not excluded. The actual headcount for the wedding-day act turns up elsewhere on the site, on the page sampling songs for the dance floor, which calls the group the band in its full, 5-piece line-up. It is a strange place to bury the one number a couple actually wants, but it is there, stated plainly, once you know where to look.

That 5-piece is Vivien on lead vocals, Roque on drums, Cedric on keys, Benjamin (also written Benjie) on bass and Alex (also written Aleks) on guitar. The band's own homepage dates itself to 2010, describing a Swiss live act that has thrilled audiences since 2010 with rousing performances, musical versatility and real passion, and that now counts itself among the most sought-after formations for weddings, galas and exclusive events, at home and abroad. Vivien is also the name behind the business on paper: the site's impressum lists her as both the contact person and the one responsible for its content, trading as "Vivien and the Headline" with bookings handled under a separate business name, Headline Music Entertainment.

Duo at the altar, 5 on the dance floor

The site is unusually specific about matching the formation to the moment rather than selling one fixed act for the whole day. For the ceremony, it names a duo or trio: Vivien's voice over piano or guitar, working through a repertoire of ballads that runs from Etta James's AT LAST and Ed Sheeran's THINKING OUT LOUD to Adele's MAKE YOU FEEL MY LOVE and The Beatles' COME TOGETHER, 10 tracks sampled on the dedicated wedding-songs page. The aperitif gets what the site calls elegant background music, without a separate named format of its own. For dinner or a quieter stretch of the reception, the same core can grow to a trio or quartet playing acoustically, without effects, a 12-song sample running from Duffy's MERCY and Stevie Wonder's ISN'T SHE LOVELY to Bob Marley's TURN YOUR LIGHTS DOWN LOW. Only for the dance floor does the full 5-piece come out, built for singing along and dancing (Tina Turner's PROUD MARY, the Jackson 5's BLAME IT ON THE BOOGIE, a Daft Punk, Chic and Pharrell Williams mash-up of GET LUCKY, GOOD TIMES and HAPPY), with the option of folding an unplugged set into the middle of the show. Nothing on the site names a genre or a request they turn down; if there is a hard limit to the repertoire, it isn't published.

There is also a combined liveband-and-DJ option, pitched to cover everything from the aperitif to the last dance, with the band and a DJ alternating or playing together and the DJ side leaning into lounge and soul, funk and house, current charts, Latin and tech house. The same claims run through every version of the pitch: sound, lighting and scheduling all come from the same source, and the band brings its own professional sound and light equipment, indoors or outdoors, rather than expecting the venue to supply a PA. The wedding page adds that the band coordinates the technical side directly with the venue, rather than leaving that handoff to the couple.

Weddings are one booking among many, and the headcount moves

Weddings sit alongside a wider events business. The partyband page lists corporate events, anniversaries, birthdays, city festivals, garden parties, Christmas parties, pop-up events, aperitifs and New Year's Eve as other bookings, and a dedicated gala and corporate page describes the same band playing international events and congresses for clients from local small businesses up to multinationals; for that side of the business it says it will play for a group as small as 50 guests or as large as 500. That page is also where the site's other headcount lives, and it is not the 5 named for the wedding-band configuration: here the formation flexes as duo, trio or complete band of up to 6 musicians. These figures do not reconcile into one, and the site does not try to make them: 5 is what gets named specifically for weddings, 6 is the ceiling stated for corporate and gala bookings. Read together, the safer description is a core 5 that can add a sixth player for a bigger brief, not a fixed number either way.

That same corporate page is the only place on the site that names English at all: it says performances go 100 percent live, and on request multilingually, listing German, English, French, Italian and Spanish. That is a claim about the songs, not about whether a couple's planning calls, contract or the day's announcements run in English, and it sits on the gala and firmenevent page rather than any of the wedding pages. The wedding-specific pages, like the rest of the site, are German only. A language switcher exists in the page code but is turned off, and there is no English version at another address. For a couple planning from abroad, that is worth knowing going in: expect to correspond in German, or ask directly whether the booking process can run in English, because the site itself does not say either way.

A reference list heavier than the price page

Nationwide across Switzerland, and beyond, is how the band describes its own range, and its own reference list backs that up with named clients rather than a general claim. Companies include Axa Versicherung, Miele, Helsana Versicherungen, Ricoh Schweiz, Zurich's university hospital and the ZHAW university of applied sciences. Hotels include the Grand Hotel Zermatterhof, the Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois in Basel, the Baur au Lac and the Dolder Grand in Zurich, Beau Rivage Palace in Lausanne, Gstaad Palace, Fairmont Le Montreux Palace, Four Seasons Geneva, Grand Resort Bad Ragaz and the Carlton in St. Moritz. Castles and churches include Schloss Laufen and Schloss Habsburg, and the list credits 2 Swiss public television appearances alongside it. It reads as a long, specific roster rather than a logo wall, and it does the one useful job a reference list can do: show that this band works 5-star hotel ballrooms and historic venues as regularly as it works private gardens.

On travel outside Switzerland, the site names a handful of countries it has played in, though its own German and English pages don't fully agree with each other. The German text lists Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy and the Philippines; the English text adds Liechtenstein to the same list. Neither version states a travel radius or a travel fee, and nothing on the site publishes a price of any kind, a package structure or a minimum booking. Every page ends the same way: get in touch and hold the date, with the actual quote left for that conversation. Nothing found while researching this suggested the business has stopped trading; contact details, enquiry prompts and the reference list are current and consistent across every page checked.

The one question the wedding pages never answer

What comes through clearly, even without a price list, is a band that has bothered to structure its own offer around how a wedding day actually unfolds, rather than turning up with one set list for the whole event. A named line-up in place since 2010, a ceremony format built specifically around Vivien's voice and one other instrument, its own sound and lighting equipment, and a client roster that includes some of the country's best-known hotels all point to a professional outfit rather than a hobbyist covers act. The one planning question a foreign couple should raise early, because the wedding pages of the site never answer it, is simply whether the booking itself, from the first email to the running order on the day, can happen in English.