One day in 1996 I went to the cinema with a friend to watch a film called Chain Reaction. As we were waiting for the lights to go down they were playing some sort of cinema radio station. One song came on and I thought it was pretty catchy. It reminded me a little bit of Tears for Fears, with its layered young male vocals. At the end of the song the “DJ” announced that the song was called “Live and Learn” by a new band called The Big Blue.
A few days later went to Tower Records in London, and I picked up a copy of the CD single. There was another single as well, called “Fire in the Soul” which I also bought. Each single had a couple of extra tracks on them.
The songs skewed a little further towards pop than the slightly rockier sound of Tears for Fears, but the production on the music was extremely well polished and, as someone for whom slick production, wide sounds and sonic fidelity plays an instrumental part of my enjoyment of the music, I fell in love with these songs. Plus, they were catchy.
One key detail I noticed in the sleeves of both CD singles was that the songs were from the forthcoming album titled “Theory of Everything”, however no release date was given, and I could find nothing on the Internet which, admittedly in 1996 was not the library of all information like it is today.
I made regular visits to not just Tower Records but HMV and other local record shops, but the album was nowhere to be found. I asked the staff if they could look it up on their system, and all it said on their computers was that the album was not released and there was no release date.
For the following three and a half years I would continue to regularly check the B section in the Rock/Pop aisles of record shops, but the album just never showed up. In the meantime, I played the CD singles over and over again, becoming more and more into this band’s sound.
Finding this album “Theory of Everything” had started to become some sort of crusade. In my mind, the album had reached legendary status. It was the Holy Grail, which may or may not exist, but was too elusive to find.
In the last months of 1999, while ruminating on my stalled quest, it occurred to me to enter into Yahoo the names of some of the artists listed on the sleeve. The two band members were named Gary Bromham and Dru Masters. These names turned up nothing, but the record producer’s name was listed as Laurence Jay Cedar. After some searching online I managed to find his email address. So I sent him an email, explaining that I was a real fan of the two singles and the B-Sides that had been released, but whatever happened to the album “Theory of Everything”?
I had no idea if I would receive a response from Laurence, and enough weeks went by to convince me that my email had gone into a black hole, or more realistically a mailbox that was not longer monitored. But in early 2000 an email landed in my inbox from none other than Dru Masters, one of the band members.
Dru wrote that he had received my email after Laurence had forwarded it to him. He went on to provide a bit of an explanation as to why the album had never materialised. He wrote that after the single “Live and Learn” came out, it failed to gain enough of an audience for the record company to merit releasing the full record. As a result, the project never moved forward, the album was never released. However, Dru wrote, it was fully completed and mastered and he would be happy to send me a copy of the CD.
As you can expect I was completely blown away by this email, and Dru’s revelation about the existence of the album. I’m sure you can imagine how long it took me to reply to his email.
After a few exchanges of emails where I provided my home address to which he could mail the CD, along with copius amounts of gratitude for him not only getting in touch, but also offering to send me a copy of the record, in April 2000 a jiffy bag dropped through my letterbox.
Inside the package wasn’t just a recorded blank CD with a scribbled title on it, Dru had taken the time to properly print the CD artwork as well as the sleeve and inner lining, complete with credits. Reading the sleeve notes I was fascinated to see that George Michael had even provided some input into the record.
The first two tracks of the CD were the two singles I had played to death, but when track three started to play, my excitement was at peak levels. After four years I was finally hearing new music from The Big Blue.
I’m sure it goes without saying that I loved this album. It was the soundtrack to my Spring and Summer of that year, and in the intervening years I cherished the record. Every track on the ten-track disc was a joy to listen to. And it was special. So special, because, thinking back, I don’t imagine for a minute that anyone else had bothered to go on such an exhaustive hunt for this album. It was only me.
While others were uploading pirated MP3s onto the internet (this was the Napster era, after all) I did no such thing with this record. The Big Blue’s music was mine! It remained confined to the CD and, although I did eventually rip it so that I could listen to it on my Creative MP3 player some years later, I never let it become anyone’s other than mine.
In the intervening years I did eventually make contact with Gary Bromham, the other member of the band, who pointed me towards a later project he worked on, a band called Atom and their album “Safe Orbit”, which shares a lot of the production sound that “Theory of Everything” had. Another great record. Gary teaches music production, and some of his work in this area can be seen on YouTube.
Dru Masters has also gone onto other things, producing music with others, and most famously he can be seen in the closing credits of BBCs The Apprentice, with a music credit.
So that’s it, right? Well no. Because in 2025, just a few days ago, imagine my absolute surprise when, for some reason I put “The Big Blue” as a search term into Spotify. I don’t know why I did that, nothing came of the band after-all. But I was absolutely floored when I saw, low-and-behold, “Theory of Everything” was listed. Staggeringly, it had a release date of June 2019. I was surprised I’d missed it, but I had always been under the impression that it would never be released.
And it’s all there, exactly as it was on the original CD, although the cover is now different from (and better than) the one I have in my CD collection.
I cannot tell you how this made me feel. It’s bitter-sweet really. Something had come full-circle. An album that had been so precious to me because of its rarity and uniqueness, was now available for anyone and everyone to discover. As I write, the songs have less than 1000 plays and the band has 30 followers.
The Big Blue is, I suppose, likely to be a curiosity for some, but to me it has been part of the soundtrack to my life. I absolutely do not expect many people to like this record. It might find a home with fans of Tears for Fears, or it might not. But just having it as something online that I can point to, means a great deal to me now.