It’s Brenton writing this, in the first person.  I don’t know about you but I find stories written in the third person (when obviously written by one of the subjects) a bit weird.

The story starts with the two of us meeting – you can find some info on our earlier lives and training here.

Jacqui and I met around 1992 or 3.  I don’t think she can actually remember it but we were both doing a concert for the now defunct Adelaide Chamber Orchestra.  This orchestra is so defunct that I can’t even find a Wiki entry to give you a link, but it did exist!  Anyway, Jacqui was the principal cellist and I was just lucky to get a gig.

Fast forward to 1995 I started getting some casual violin work with the Adelaide Symphony where Jacqui was a full-time member.  She still barely noticed me until one night she saw me doing a piano-vocal gig at a birthday party.  Seems she liked my singing way better than my orchestral abilities and it was soon after that – during the Adelaide Symphony Asian tour of 1996 – that our romance blossomed.  After that, I did a three-month contract with the West Australian Symphony and straight afterward Jacqui and I joined forces and headed off to Sydney to try our luck.

Jacqui had been shortlisted for a job with the Sydney Symphony and was getting plenty of work as a casual.  Meanwhile I decided to move away from violin playing to become a piano bar singer.  I was sending out demo tapes (well, it was 1997!) to every agent in the Yellow Pages when suddenly I got a call from P&O Australia who were in desperate need of a piano-vocalist.  I told them my new girlfriend and I worked together as a duo and they said “fine, bring her aboard”.  Actually we’d never even considered working together but somehow we scrambled up some songs for our three-week contract on the Fair Princess.  We called the duo Edi’s Duo which we’ve now renamed Two Hearts Duo.  I think the new name’s better.

Our first year in Sydney was great fun.  We got to play some awesome orchestral gigs including backing Ray Charles and David Helfgott, playing the New Year’s Eve Concert at the Sydney Opera House, working with George Martin and Human Nature on a show called All You Need is the Beatles and being a part of The Main Event with John Farnham, Anthony Warlow and Olivia Newton-John.  Jacqui continued working with the Sydney Symphony and I did some piano bar gigs, session work and played with a very cool trio called The Penguins.  I also pushed myself to enter the open musical theatre vocal section of the Sydney Eisteddfods and came in second.  The junior section was won by a very confident youngster called Nathan Foley who went on to become a member of Hi-5.  If I remember correctly he took off his shirt mid-song!

Fast forward another year and we took our Edi’s Duo to an audition for Princess Cruises.  Not only did we get the job (a four-month contract in Alaska) but we met a woman who changed our lives; Sydney agent Robyn Wade.  Robyn convinced us that a lounge duo was not the best fit for our talents and that we should form an act.  We said, “what’s an act?”  The result of that fateful meeting is our unique variety act String Fever which has taken us all around the world, won us five MO Awards, gained and lost us many friends, and paid most of our bills for the last two decades.

A String Fever show usually includes a short Elton John tribute and we’ve also expanded that into a full-length tribute show called Elton by Brenton (formerly Crocodile Rocket).  Elton was my first musical hero and my voice now sounds a lot like his, just as many dogs look like their owners.  We ended up doing a lot of Crocodile Rocket shows during our ten years in Melbourne from 2007 to 2017.  I guess Melburnians like Elton.

Between 1998 and 2013 we cruised the world crazily as Headline Entertainers with String Fever.  You can see all the ships we’ve performed on here.  Since returning to a more balanced life we’ve created a couple of new musical products, mainly for the wedding market, being The Cello Guys (contemporary cello & piano, in the style of The Piano Guys) and Adelaide String Duo.  In January of 2017 we moved back to Adelaide for family reasons.  We were still doing some cruising until 2020 when the pandemic stopped everything in its tracks.

We’ve now done the big covid pivot and centre a lot of our energy on Aged Care performances – sometimes as many as ten in a week. We find it a very rewarding way to use our entertainment skills and we feel thankful that we haven’t had to ditch our arts careers as so many of our peers have. We’ve also launched into the para-musical field of DJing which is a lot of fun and way less taxing on the body than playing!