Tony Cotton
IN THE BEGINNING
In 1974 the band began under the name of B.R.A.D . which stood for the band members names, (Bob, Ray, Andy, Dave.) as you can see I was not in the band at that time. I was more into the "Bay City Rollers" than R'n'R, well I was only 8 years old (good excuse hu!!). But even so I was still interested enough to get up on stage and sing a couple of songs. Those songs being "Tallahassee Lassie" & "Bonie Maronie". The sad thing is I looked like Jimmy Osmond, remember "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" (ha ha!!!). It wasn't long before my interest in R'n'R grew, as the years went by Bob & Ray taught me how to play guitar and early in 1977 I joined the band, along with any percussive instruments that needed to be played. Being a full member I now began singing backing vocals as well as my solo songs.
RECORDING
My first time in the studio was to record the singles
"Rockabilly Baby"/"James Dean" and "Sleep R'n'R"/"Hey
Baby" (on Soho Records). These are the only tracks that I've played guitar on. Since
then I've played the drums.
PLAYING DRUMS
The first time I had any dealing with the drums was when I was asked to play for the Boys Brigade marching band, this didn't last very long as they threw me out for being crap!! this was back in '75-'76 (to long ago to remember). The next time I got to play the drums was when our bass player (at the time) Phil decided to leave. It was then that Bob decided that he would like to learn to play the double bass and give up the guitar and Ray also fancied playing the guitar instead of the drums, this meant that there was only one main instrument left, yes you've guessed it the DRUMS. So at this point I got a pair of drum sticks and locked myself in the garden shed. The main problem being we had already got a gig booked in at one of the biggest R'n'R weekenders in the country "Caister" and it was only three weeks away. As you can imagine this was going to be a very nerve racking time for us all. To make things even harder we had decided that we were going to change back to our old instruments for a couple of songs, apart from me I was going to have to play bass guitar, yes BASS GUITAR (gulp).
The three weeks went by so quickly, luckily we had managed to get a warm up gig at a local girls youth club (its a hard life ha ha!!). As it goes both of the gigs went off very well indeed, as it happens the gig at Caister had a TV crew filming a news reel about the R'n'R weekend, and guess which band got the tv coverage ? yes us.
Well I think that that's about it for now, I hope that you enjoyed reading this page and I hope I didn't bore you to much. If you have any comments about this page or any on this site please e-mail us at: tony@thejets.co.uk
Tony.
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