Bostin' new beginning for ELO star

You can take the musician out of the Black Country, but you can't take the Black Country out of the musician.

Kelly Groucutt, the colourful ELO vocalist and bass player might live on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border but his Black Country accent is still as pronounced as ever.

"Oim bostin," he says after an inquiry about how he is doing. Kelly brings his new band, The Orchestra, to Bilston's Robin R'n'B Club tomorrow night, and the Coseley-born star says his heart will always be in the Black Country.

"There's something really special about Bilston," he says. "The first-ever band I was in, when I was 15, used to rehearse right across the road from the Robin, at the Globe Hotel. It has now been demolished, but I have still got a photograph of that building now."

Michael William Groucutt was working in a sheet metalwork factory when he made his first foray into the world of pop music. Amid the clatter of all the heavy machinery, young Michael sang along loudly to the pop hits blasting out loudly from the factory radio, and his colleague Graham Cartwright – the factory owner's son – told him how some of his friends played the guitar and drums, and needed a singer for their new rock 'n' roll group.

Adopting the name Rikki Storm, he became the frontman of Rikki Storm and the Falcons.

"I don't think we ever recorded anything," says Kelly, but the youngster had now caught the music bug and was not going to let it go easily. A short while later he formed another group, Rikki Burns and the Vibras, which would last for around another six months, performing at weddings and parties, as well as venues such as the former Scala cinema in Wolverhampton. The Electric Light Orchestra, the brainchild of Birmingham-born Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, had already been going for four years when Groucutt joined in 1974.

The Orchestra, which includes former ELO members Clark and Kaminski, along with Americans Parthenon Huxley and Eric Troyer, will be performing the old ELO classics at tomorrow's concert, taking off from where the former ELO Part II left off – the group was forced to drop the ELO name following legal pressure.

And while he no longer lives in the Black Country, his roots in the area are firmly entrenched, with one of his sons living in Swindon, just outside Dudley, and another in Wordsley. Two years ago Kelly married his long time girlfriend Anna-Maria Bialaga at Dudley Register Office.