The 80’s Club Featuring Honeymoon Suite, Aldo Nova & Men Without Hats – March 8, 2024

Event Details

All Ages – Reserved Seating

Date: Friday, March 8, 2024

Doors: 6:30 PM

Show Time: 8:00 PM

Cost: $49.00 – $79.00 (Plus applicable fees)

About This Event

Relive the best of ’80s music with some of the most notable bands from the decade. The 80’s Club features performances by Honeymoon Suite, Aldo Nova and Men Without Hats. Get your tickets for Friday, March 8th at the Event Centre at Grey Eagle Resort & Casino.

Honeymoon Suite

Johnnie Dee and Derry Grehan, the principal and founding members of Honeymoon Suite, met when introduced by manager Stephen Prendergast in 1982. Deciding to work together, they formed Honeymoon Suite with Grehan’s former Steve Blimkie And The Reason’s band-mate Dave Betts on drums, plus an anonymous keyboard player and bassist.

In 1983, they decided to enter the Homegrown Contest put on yearly by Toronto’s Q107-FM radio station so Prendergast approached his friend and producer Tom Treumuth to produce a song for them. Based on the buying public’s response, “New Girl Now” won the contest and Bob Roper at WEA Canada was so impressed with the song and response that he signed the band right away.

Personnel conflicts eventually arose and the keyboardist was replaced with Toronto-bred Ray Coburn. Although a session player named Brian Brackstone played bass on the album, the band soon found themselves a permanent bassist named Gary Lalonde. Originally scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day, the milestone first album was released in June of 1984.

Propelled by the success of more singles from the album, 1985 saw the band begin to headline gigs throughout Ontario and the rest of Canada. A highlight was the presentation of an award at the 1985 Junos. By this time the first album had achieved platinum sales status. Almost 22 years later the album has now sold over 400,000 units in Canada alone.

Honeymoon Suite’s second album was released on Valentine’s Day 1986. The Big Prize featured a rare appearance by Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. It went platinum in Canada almost immediately and started selling steadily in the US. Tours in the States that year included opening stints for Heart, .38 Special, ZZ Top, Journey, Starship, and Saga. The band also headlined a sold-out show at the Kingswood Music Theatre just north of Toronto. Ray Coburn left and was replaced by Toronto whiz-kid keyboardist Rob Preuss (formerly of the Spoons). 1986 also saw the band win a gold award for ‘Best Live Act’ at the World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo, the ‘Group Of The Year’ Juno and headline more dates in both Canada and some northern States.

For album number three, the band went to Los Angeles in the winter of 1987 to record with Ted Templeman (Little Feat, The Doobie Brothers, Van Halen), and while there Dee was hit by a car at L.A.X. airport breaking his leg in several places and requiring surgery for a ten-inch pin to help the leg heal properly. While recovering in hospital, Doobie Brother Michael McDonald was brought in to help out with the recording sessions; he wrote lyrics and sang back up on one song. The results of all the hard work was Racing After Midnight, a slightly harder-edged more guitar-oriented album that spawned a European tour with Status Quo and a headlining tour of Canada.

The trio returned to the studio in 1990 to craft Monsters Under The Bed with Paul Northfield producing. The album featured Steve Webster (from Billy Idol’s band) on bass and Jorn Anderson on drums. Singles like “Say You Don’t Know Me” and “The Road” did well in Canada. Some US success did come their way as songs got placed on TV’s Miami Vice and two movie soundtracks, Lethal Weapon II and One Crazy Summer.

Aldo Nova

After four decades, dozens of classic songs, and hundreds of shows, multi-platinum GRAMMY® Award-winning singer, songwriter, producer, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist Aldo Nova can finally be seen alive and kicking after a long self-imposed hiatus.

Aldo Nova took the world by storm when his first multi-platinum, top ten self-titled debut album, Aldo Nova, gave the world the definitive rock anthem “Fantasy.” On its heels came the platinum-selling Subject…Aldo Nova yielded another massive anthem, “Monkey on Your Back.” He made his third and last album, titled Twitch, for Portrait Records, a division of CBS Records, (now called Sony Music) when the executives at the record company wanted to take creative control and forced Aldo to do songs that he didn’t write. This led Aldo to go back to Montreal to wait until CBS let him out of his contract. He started to write jingles for companies such as Coca-Cola, Chrysler, Air Canada, and more, earning him the TBA Award for writing one of the top ten jingles in the world that year. Five years later, Sony Music finally released Aldo Nova from his contractual obligations towards them, and at that point, he was finally able to move on. He made his next album, ‘Blood on the Bricks,’ with Jon Bon Jovi., which was written and produced by both of them.

He emerged as a trusted collaborator for some of the biggest stars in the world. He co-wrote the song “Mr. Big Time” with Jon Bon Jovi for the soundtrack of the movie Armageddon and worked closely with Jon on his soundtrack album for the film Young Guns 2, doing all the pre-production and demos himself in Bon Jovi’s home studio. He also wrote the signature riff from Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory,” which was his first number 1 song as a solo artist. For Celine Dion, he penned “A New Day Has Come,” which was a number-one hit in 26 countries for six months, along with “Your Light,” “Can’t Fight the Feeling,” and “You and I,” and 15 other songs for her, in English and French, her native language. He garnered a GRAMMY® Award in the category of “Album of the Year” for writing and producing three songs from her diamond-selling album, Falling Into You. He has worked with Elton John both on Jon Bon Jovi’s Young Guns 2 soundtrack and produced the song “Levon” for Elton’s multi-platinum Two Rooms, the songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. His discography also includes writing hits for everyone from Faith Hill, Carole King, and Clay Aiken to Garou and Blue Öyster Cult. In 1997, Nova released his all-instrumental, critically acclaimed album, Nova’s Dream, which he re-released in 2023.

On February 6th of 2008, Aldo made the conscious decision never to write, collaborate, produce or arrange anyone else’s music but his own and embarked on his 14-year journey to create his rock opera, titled The Life and Times of Eddie Gage, which he finally finished on March 5th, 2022. The rock opera is 2 hours and 5 minutes long and consists of 25 songs. He writes the music and the lyrics to all his songs, produces, arranges, engineers, and mixes all his own projects, which are all released on his own record label, Viral Records.

On April 1st, 2022, he released his 10-song EP The Life and Times of Eddie Gage, a rock opera by Aldo Nova that showcases all-new material. He filmed, produced, and edited three videos for three of the songs from the EP, “Free Your Mind, “Burn Like the Sun,” and “King of Deceit,” which showcases Aldo in full costume and makeup to give a powerful performance which is in a more theatrical style. On April 19th, 2022, he released Aldo Nova 2.0 Reloaded, which consists of all his biggest songs completely redone and turbocharged. Aldo didn’t stop there and released his three-song EP of never-released songs called Short Stories on May 15th, 2022, and then on June 19th, 2022, he released his three-song all-instrumental Sonic Hallucinations, which was described by critics as three symphonies for aliens. All four albums can be found on every major streaming platform.

Men Without Hats

Canadian new wave/synthpop group featuring original frontman Ivan Doroschuk, Lou Dawson and Rachel Ashmore on keys, and guitarist Sho Murray.

Known for the hits “The Safety Dance” (#3 on Billboard Hot 100) and “Pop Goes the World.” Men Without Hats returned to the spotlight in 2011 with a breakout show at SXSW culminating a hiatus of 20+ years. The seventh studio album Love in the Age of War (2012) was followed by extensive, well-received tours throughout North America and across the world in the years since.

In 2022, Men Without Hats released Again (Part 1) and (Part 2). Again (Part 1) is an exciting and creative five-song EP that features covers of The Tragically Hip; Lou Reed; The Rolling Stones; and Mott The Hoople, as well as a brand-new version of the immortal “Safety Dance”, reinvented as a ballad entitled “No Friends of Mine”.  An innovative, synth-pop masterpiece showcasing the band’s versatile strong songwriting and unique style, Again (Part 2) features the first single “If The World Should End Today” and includes 14 new tracks full of memorable hooks, melodies, and infectious rhythms that honour both the 80’s roots of the group and cutting-edge technology of today. These albums mark the beginning of a new phase in the career of Men Without Hats, following the induction of “The Safety Dance” and “Pop Goes the World” into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020. Founding members Ivan and Colin Doroschuk are joined by renowned Canadian guitarist and producer Sho Murray. The albums were recorded in their studio on Vancouver Island where the Doroschuk brothers have lived for the past two decades, since moving from their hometown of Montreal.