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Blues Brothers Official Tribute & Musical

The Blues Brothers - How it all started...

While on tour with Blood Brothers and prior to the start of its west end run, I remember sitting at the bar in some god forsaken hole with Con O’Neil, just chatting about stuff we had done before. I mentioned to him that I had run a band in Brighton for years (the Funk Skunks) and that just before the tour I had done a couple of gigs in Brighton with a band I had put together doing numbers from the Blues Brothers film. Those gigs were a lot of fun…

The first one was at the Richmond pub in Brighton. The band was myself on sax, Jerry Dearden on trombone, Ada Stevens on guitar and vocals on Treat Her Right, Terry Johnston on guitar, Stu Parkes on bass, Dave Higgins on drums, Nigel Brimley on keys, Tony Savva on vocals and Simon Ross on vocals. This was a great well attended gig so we did another one, better rehearsed this time, at the old Concorde opposite the pier.

Again this was a fantastic night. Nobody else was doing this stuff at the time, or at least making a whole night of it.

Blood Brothers went to the West End and Con won the Olivier Award for best actor in a musical and then got offered a load of other stuff that he fancied doing so when his contract was up he went off to do some real “luvvie” stuff. We saw him a couple of times, he and his girlfriend Annette Ekblom came to visit the theatre a few times after they had both left blood brothers, and even came down to Brighton a couple of times to see the Funk Skunks.

About six months later Annette collared me in the pub after work one night (in fact she ended up doing this on about four separate occasions) saying that Con would really like to have a go at playing Jake on the Blues Brothers gig and that I should talk to him about it. Well we did talk about it, and I then talked about it to Steve, the landlord of The Hare and Hounds in Brighton one night, which resulted in him and his wife Wendy performing the CD of blood brothers to myself and Terry at 1am on a Sunday morning after we had just done two shows!

I talked about it with the band that had been doing it and everyone was up for it. Tony Savva, who had been doing most of the singing, had moved to Cyprus by this time (which was a shame - I was in a band called Zoo with Tony when I was 15 and at school - he is another fantastic bloke) so we decided to ask Warwick Evans (the best ever narrator in Blood Brothers) to play Elwood, which he agreed to do.

So it was sorted - We did a gig in the Hare and Hounds which was electric. Terry and Ada played guitars, Glen Muscroft on bass, Nigel Brimley on keyboards, Dave Higgins on drums, myself and “mister fabulous” Martin Etheridge were the brass section, and Con and Warwick on vocals. Stu Parkes did Flip Flop Fly - the pub was rammed and the health and safety brigade would have stopped it if they had found out! The response to the gig was fantastic and so Con went round to a loud of producers to see if they were interested. None were really keen apart from David Pugh, so we did another gig to give him a chance to see it.

It was decided at this time (I found out later) that this next gig had to be “right to sell” so I couldn’t have any mates getting up and the band had to be trimmed to be tighter and functional! Well it worked and 3 months later we opened in the West End, thanks to David Pugh and Causeway Productions (a company that Con had set up)
 

this website was cobbled together by Ada, masterminded by Tony McCormick 2008