WHAT do Sheffield Wednesday, Russell Watson and Blaskey's Wallpapers (if your memory is long enough) have in common?

The answer is Rick Blaskey, of the big family business which had shops all over Sheffield, who is co-producer and creative director of A Night at the Opera at the City Hall on Sunday.

Ninety minutes of operatic items everyone knows, the show features six singers who include ex-G4 member Jonathan Ansell and Italian mezzo soprano Silvia Colloca, a trained opera singer and Hollywood film actress soon to be seen in Gavin and Stacey stars James Corden and Mathew Horne's new movie Lesbian Vampire Killers – as the lady herself!

Some of Rick's family still live in the city but his most enduring link is Sheffield Wednesday.

"I moved to London still being the biggest Sheffield Wednesday fan in the world. That is the most important thing in my life," says the season ticket and share-holder who produced two Owls records in the 1980s, lives at Owl Cottage and whose car number plate has OWL in it.

A true blue, then?

"I am such a true blue, even after going to watch them lose 6-0 at Reading!"

He and the London-based company he runs, Music and Media Partnership, mix football with music and is responsible for producing the England football anthem – Three Lions, World Cup anthems, the music for ITV's forthcoming coverage of the FA Cup, and so on.

Away from football, he discovered Russell Watson and brokered his record deal, has produced José Carerras and Kiri Te Kanawa concerts, "discovering all these fantastic (opera) tunes" in the process, and produced Jonathan Ansell's first solo album when he left G4.

The names keep dropping when Rick explains how he got into the music business, meeting Hughie Green on a Sheffield-to-London train and criticising him for not having enough pop music on Opportunity Knocks.

The outcome was an invitation to work on the show as a "dogsbody" and see how it was put together.

He says: "I saw how it worked and said to him I really want to work in the record business. It makes sense that all these acts you're auditioning, 16 million people are going to see them on TV in three months' time, why don't I get records made? Why don't I sign them to a record company?

"That's exactly what happened, Lena Zavaroni, Bobby Crush, Peters and Lee, the lot!"

His tastes seem wide. "I just love a big tune, football anthems, a piece of opera or a pop song," which is how A Night at the Opera came to be conceived.

"When I produced Jonathan's solo album I told him my life's ambition was to do a stage show, a touring show with great opera tunes and I wanted him to be in it. He said, I'd love to be."

Does it bother him that people pooh-pooh this sort of pseudo-opera, saying the likes of Russell Watson and Paul Potts are not opera singers?

"There are two answers. Number one is the good thing about the show that we're doing, apart from everything being done as Puccini, Verdi or whoever, wrote it, nothing is arranged, all six singers are classically or operatically-trained.

"Secondly, you're right. All I would say is it's music. I think if these composers were alive today, they would feel that the more people who heard their music the better. Opera was written for the masses, although it's become elitist.

"Is it, though? The masses voted for G4 who came from the X-Factor, Paul Potts from Britain's Got Talent, Russell sells 10 million records, so does Katherine Jenkins.

"I rest my case."

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