Laurie Hornsby
Born in Birmingham UK in May 1948 it follows that my entire teenage years were spent in that magical of all periods, the 1960’s and to quote a certain Martha Reeves ‘there was music everywhere’. Consequently by 1968 I was a full blown on the road musician as a member of a travelling band. But deep down inside I always knew that it would be as a writer/songwriter that would provide me with any form of professional satisfaction and so in 1980 I took the bull by the horns, gave up the road and began performing my own material on local radio stations and in the popular folk clubs of the day that were plentiful in the Birmingham area. Aiming my songs at the nostalgia market for the working class of the industrial west Midlands I established quite a reputation and, as a result of healthy worldwide CD sales, a full blown 17 song musical that I’d devised back in 1975 was commissioned by the Birmingham Rep. ‘Wallop Mrs Cox’ was produced by the Rep as a community musical and with the breaking of breaking box office records, the show was back on at the Birmingham Rep six months later for another sell out season (Both runs enjoyed a 98% box office). With that show under my belt another community musical I’d devised, ‘Riding the Number 8’, a historic journey aboard a ’bus around Birmingham’s inner city, quickly followed. ‘Wallop Mrs Cox’, in the summer of 2010, enjoyed a season at the prestigious Birmingham Hippodrome. However, in regard to ‘Great Expectations’, in 1970 I’d spent a summer season working as a musician on the south east coast of England in the holiday resort of Ramsgate, Kent. One lazy Sunday afternoon I took a ride on an open top ’bus (I must have a thing about ’busses) to the neighbouring town of Broadstairs, the one time hometown of Charles Dickens. A guided tour of Bleak House, Dickens’ place of residence and where the man himself wrote such works as David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby, according to mine host, the curator as we stood together alongside Dickens’ desk, told me that at this very desk Charles Dickens had sketched out the plot and the whacky characters for his masterpiece ‘Great Expectations’. Forty five years on I sat down at the piano and set about writing my own musical adaptation of this most intriguing of tales.
