My friend Victor Brox, the singer, keyboard player and trumpeter, who has died aged 81 from cancer, generated enough music and anecdotes during his first 25 years to sustain him indefinitely.
Victor was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, to Victor Hickling, an insurance broker, and Ethel Crozier, a dance teacher. After leaving William Hulme grammar school, Victor went to St David’s College, Lampeter (now the University of Wales, Lampeter), to study philosophy. There he played in a “spasm” band, making music on found objects. In Ibiza, on what was not yet called a gap year, he had an affair with Nico, who was not yet famous for Velvet Underground.
When the Blues and Gospel Caravan, a package tour of US blues musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe, rolled in to Manchester in 1964 for a Granada TV broadcast, Victor found them an extra gig in a dingy bar, which is how Muddy Waters came to be playing in Chico’s Bossa Nova opposite Manchester Victoria station. In 1965 Victor married the writer and singer Annette Reis, and together they recorded I’ve Got the World in a Jug, one of the first British blues 45s, with Jimmy Page on guitar, and with Victor now using the stage name Brox.
Victor and his group, the Victor Brox Blues Train, became a draw in Manchester clubs, and backed US visitors including Little Walter and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. In 1966 he moved to London at the invitation of the musician and broadcaster Alexis Korner. The big time beckoned with the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, and their four albums together between 1968 and 1970 represent the best of Brox on record. Jimi Hendrix was a jam session buddy.
Victor was the high priest Caiaphas on the original 1970 recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. He collaborated with Graham Bond (on the album Holy Magick, 1970), Dr John (Sun, Moon and Herbs, 1971) and Screaming Lord Sutch (Hands of Jack the Ripper, 1972) and made the 1974 album Rollin’ Back with Annette. He would regale fellow musicians with stories of life on the road, and was something of a blues Baron Munchausen, though the tallest of his tales usually had a basis in truth.
In the 1980s he was in the all-star band Mainsqueeze, which toured Europe, and made one LP, Live at Ronnie Scott’s. He also had various residencies around Greater Manchester area. The 90s found him in the south of France, collecting fossils and singing with Art 314, France’s oldest blues band. A tour of the Australian outback in 2000 was a baptism of fire for his daughter Kyla, also a talented singer, and became an annual fixture in their calendar. As a result, Victor began a study of Indigenous Australian music, painstakingly written by hand, but this was blown up in a controlled explosion at London Stansted airport in 2003 when Victor left it unattended and it was mistaken for a suspicious package.
He returned to the north-west in 2005 to look after Ethel in her final years. Latterly he could be found writing at the John Rylands library in Manchester by day and performing by night.
Victor’s marriage to Annette ended in divorce in 1983. He is survived by their daughters, Ginie, Anna, Buffy and Kyla, son, Sam, and 12 grandchildren.
• This article was amended on 13 April 2023. An earlier version said that Victor Brox found the Blues and Gospel Caravan an extra gig in 1963, but that was in 1964 and was at a bar called Chico’s Bossa Nova, not Chick’s Bossa Nova. Also neither Sonny Williamson II nor Big Joe Williams were at this particular gig.
