The Big Town Playboys are a six-piece acoustic British rhythm and blues revival group. Founded by Ricky Cool and Andy Silvester in 1984 and known as Ricky Cool and the Big Town Playboys, they covered American music from the 1940s and 1950s, such as that of Amos Milburn and Little Walter.
The Big Town Playboys have released a series of studio albums, as well as a collaborative project with Jeff Beck (entitled Crazy Legs), re-creating the songs of Gene Vincent. Several of their songs also appeared on the soundtrack of the film, The Pope Must Die. They have performed as a backing band for Robert Plant, who contributed guest vocals on their album Roll the Dice They also performed together at the Birmingham Heart Beat 86 charity concert. Eric Clapton has expressed admiration for their work, arranging for them to open for him during his two week long stint at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1996.
Mike Sanchez left the band at the end of 1999 to pursue a solo career. Presently, Ian Jennings is the only remaining original member of the band. After Sanchez's departure, the Big Town Playboys were fronted by another local London artist, Big Joe Louis, of "Big Joe Louis and his Blues Kings."
In May 2005, the band teamed up with Gary Brooker and Andy Fairweather Low to give a charity concert called "Aftershock" in India, with all proceeds to benefit victims of the tsunami caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Read more about Big Town Playboys: Discography
Famous quotes containing the words big and/or town:
“The name of the town isn’t important. It’s the one that’s just twenty-eight minutes from the big city. Twenty-three if you catch the morning express. It’s on a river and it’s got houses and stores and churches. And a main street. Nothing fancy like Broadway or Market, just plain Broadway. Drug, dry good, shoes. Those horrible little chain stores that breed like rabbits.”
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)