It was a cold October evening, the rain rattling against the kitchen window and the cat whining for its food. I was sat at the dining room table reading the latest letter of refusal from a record company regarding my band's latest demo. "Maybe it's time for something different", I thought to myself.
Just then the cat knocked a pile of videos off the cabinet in the living room in its desperate search for food. "Bloody cat!", I said to myself as I stooped to pick up the scattered mess. THE BLUES BROTHERS! I picked up the video. The answer was staring me in the face. Sod the original stuff! Let's form a covers band, just for the Christmas period, clean up and go back to pretentious stuff in the New Year. Yes, WE could be The Blues Brothers.
It was like a mission from God. We had the resources if not the ability and what's more, there could be money in it (how wrong could you be). After a few phone calls it was all set and in no time at all we had our first headline gig.
Woughton Centre 21st November 1986. "The Blues Collective" seemed to be the obvious choice of name (being a collective of musicians from other local bands - and Rod whom we found in Edinburgh). We were crap but we didn't care and neither did the audience. We had a party on stage and it rubbed off on everyone there. This was the dawning of a new era. The band that was put together for a laugh, was set to become an institution.
We've become one of the biggest crowd pullers at the Edinburgh Festival in recent years. We toured Europe, made numerous T.V. appearances nationwide, won several awards for our debut album "Hot Hits Volume 1", featuring all original material, and have played to a total of 286,000 people. This is not the end of the story by any means. There are plenty of ideas as yet unrealised and plenty of egos as yet unsatisfied.
Lee Scriven 1994
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