Rick Lloyd is a British actor and musical director best known as a member of the original Flying Pickets who had a Christmas number 1 hit in 1983 with a cover

Cover version

In popular music, a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a contemporary or previously recorded, commercially released song or popular song...

 of Yazoo

Yazoo (band)

Yazoo are a British synthpop duo from Basildon, Essex. They had a number of Top 10 hits in the UK charts in the early 1980s...

's "Only You". Although the Flying Pickets are known for making a cappella

A cappella

A cappella music is specifically solo or group singing without instrumental sound, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. It is the opposite of cantata, which is accompanied singing. A cappella was originally intended to differentiate between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque concertato...

 covers of other people's songs, there are some original songs on their 1984 Lost Boys album that were written by Rick Lloyd.

Lloyd composed the song "Dives in Omnia" for the 1987 Channel 4

Channel 4

Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...

 series Porterhouse Blue

Porterhouse Blue

Porterhouse Blue is a novel written by Tom Sharpe, first published in 1974. There was a Channel 4 TV series in 1987 based on the novel, adapted by Malcolm Bradbury...

, starring David Jason

David Jason

Sir David John White, OBE , better known by his stage name David Jason, is an English BAFTA award-winning actor. He is best known as the main character Derek "Del Boy" Trotter on the BBC sit-com Only Fools and Horses from 1981, the voice of Mr Toad in The Wind In The Willows and as detective Jack...

, which led to him becoming the joint winner of the 1987 BAFTA TV Award for Best Original TV Music. He also composed the music for John Burrow's Viva Espana, which won Best Musical at the 1993 London Fringe Awards.

He was musical director for the 1999 film 'Julie and the Cadillacs'., and was also musical director for recent tours of Grease

Grease (musical)

Grease is a 1971 musical by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. The musical is named for the 1950s United States working-class youth subculture known as the greasers. The musical, set in 1959 at fictional Rydell High School , follows ten working-class teenagers as they navigate the complexities of love,...

, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hair

Hair (musical)

Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical is a rock musical with a book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot. A product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, several of its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement...

.

Other collaborations with John Burrows include the 1980 play One Big Blow about a group of miners in a colliery brass band. This was originally performed by John McGrath's 7:84

7:84

7:84 was a Scottish left-wing agitprop theatre group. The name comes from a statistic, published in The Economist in 1966, that 7% of the population of the UK owned 84% of the state's wealth....

 Theatre Company, of which the other members of The Flying Pickets were members. One Big Blow will be showing at the Romiley Little Theatre later in 2007.

He moved to Wales where, as well as performing and composing, he is also teaching a course in songs and songwriting.