A plumber is about to realise a decade-long dream of going on tour with his music – as his story is made into a Hollywood film.
Kev Crane, 51, from Quorn in Leicestershire, says he is fitting one more bathroom in January before preparing for a singing tour of football clubs in the spring, after his talents were discovered while he was working.
“I was singing in the bathroom, the next door neighbour heard me singing away, he said to Paul who owns News Reality Records ‘who’s that guy singing in your bathroom?’ he says ‘the plumber’.
“We get chatting and he tells me he has a record label – I say ‘actually I’ve just built a recording studio in my loft and reignited an album I started 25 years ago,'” Mr Crane explained.
Lockdown gave Mr Crane the time to build the studio and rediscover his passion, having been in a band decades ago.
“The sound is shell suit perfect ’80s”, said record producer Paul Conneally, “and I thought, no one is making anything quite like this and he’d done it all by himself, I was amazed by it.
“That story of him in lockdown trying to build back his dream that he had 20 years ago, it just struck me that we’ve got to put this out.”
After Mr Conneally released music through his label, Hollywood screenwriters heard about his story in the Washington Post.
Mr Crane flew to LA for meetings with director Billy Ray, who wrote the screenplay for 2012 blockbuster The Hunger Games and Captain Phillips (2013) starring Tom Hanks.
“What I loved about this story was it was about these two men, Kevin and Paul, for whom music had been everything”, Mr Ray told Sky News, “and then they lost that thread for about, you know, 20 years of their life.
“And then they found that thread again and saved one another, even though neither of them knew they needed to be saved. I just thought that was beautiful”.
The script is in development with British screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, he said. The duo wrote comedies including The Likely Lads, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and feature film The Commitments.
Mr Ray said the movie would be called “The Music Inside” and that they would get “someone spectacular” for the starring role.
