Dr. Hook: O2 City Hall Newcastle

Oep live ! exclusively presents for the first time in the UK in many years Dr Hook featuring Ray Sawyer Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, shortened in 1975 to Dr. Hook, was an American rock band, formed around Union City, New Jersey. They enjoyed considerable commercial success in the 1970s with hit singles including Sylvias Mother, The Cover of Rolling Stone, A Little Bit More and When Youre in Love with a Beautiful Woman. In addition to their own material, Dr Hook and the Medicine Show performed songs written by the poet Shel Silverstein. The band had eight years of regular chart hits, in both the U.S. and the UK, and greatest success with their later gentler material, as Dr Hook. When told by a club owner that they needed a name to put on a poster in the window of his establishment, Cummings made a sign: Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Tonic for the Soul. The Hook name was inspired by Sawyers eyepatch and a reference to Captain Hook of the Peter Pan fairy tale, though, humorously, because Captain Hook was neither a doctor nor wore an eyepatch. The medicine show and doctor (referring to the shows common in the 19th century) were intended as tongue-in-cheek support for drug abuse. Ray Sawyer lost an eye in a near-fatal car crash in Oregon in 1967, and has worn an eyepatch ever since. To this day, Sawyer is considered Dr. Hook because of the eyepatch he wears.