Smokie

Smokie is a British rock band from Bradford, formed by school friends Chris Norman, Alan Silson and Ron Kelly in 1963. They became best known in the second half of the 1970s in Europe. The band’s 11 singles and 5 albums reached the top 20 in Europe between 1975 and 1979.

The fate of the British rock band Smokie is still of interest to fans of the genre. It is interesting that the songs of the collective, despite the Iron Curtain, were no less popular in the USSR than in their homeland, and some compositions to this day have not lost their relevance.

The history of the creation of “Prokurennyi” is unique in that the band changed its name many times. The quartet (and originally trio) was called The Yen, then The Sphynx, Essence, The Four Corners, Kindness and Smokey. The world-famous variant was created in 1975 by replacing the penultimate letter at the request of Smokey Robinson, founder and frontman of the American band The Miracles.

Two of the three founding members of The Yen – Alan Silson and Chris Norman – had attended St. Bedes Grammar School together in the wool capital of the UK, the town of Bradford. A year and a half later, the pals were joined by a third classmate, Terry Attlee, who still plays in Smokie today. Only the drummer of the first lineup Ron Kelly had nothing to do with the trio’s alma mater.