Steve is known as the lead singer of B-Movie, the band made up of members from the Mansfield area who are internationally popular for the singles Nowhere Girl and Remembrance Day.

Success in the early 80s saw Steve and his bandmates supporting Duran Duran, Soft Cell and Culture Club.

Steve’s solo exhibition at the Lace Market in Nottingham aims to promote his new album Audience with Myself.

With Hovington’s distinctive baritone voice and introspective lyrics front and center, B-Movie had more in common with Joy Division than with Duran Duran, for whom they opened for their first UK tour.

A music critic at the time noted that the band were “as out of place as plaster ducks on a high tech wall, far too good for the confines of fashion”.

This tension between the record company-induced pressure for mainstream commercial success and the desire to stay true to their psychedelic-tinged synth-rock, exemplified in their 1981 John Peel session, was

ultimately their loss and B-Movie never achieved the success their powerfully atmospheric music deserved.

After the B-movie, Hovington embarked on an eclectic range of musical endeavors, from acoustic favorite One, whose Chrysalis-released album Upstream prompted a reviewer to hail Hovington as “the quintessential English voice”, to a collaboration with trance/big beat artists. Amethyst, on their album Golden Fish Fever.

After a two-decade hiatus, the original members of B-Movie reunited in 2004 and released two studio albums, Age of Illusion and Climate of Fear, as well as several EPs.

The multi-talented Hovington also wrote the non-fiction book The Grape Escape: One Man’s Journey from Vinyl to Vine, (2011).

Part do-it-yourself wine adventure in the South of France and part memory of living the dream as an 80s pop musician and its aftermath, it has been described by wine-pages.com as ” a truly enjoyable read, which I can highly recommend.” ‘

In 2013 Hovington released the solo album Coming of Age as Steve Hovington and The Fountain of Youth.

In early 2020, Hovington and longtime collaborator Keith Phillips began recording Audience with Myself at Half Ton Studios in Cambridge.

Over the next few months, the album began to take shape, with guest appearances from Joshua Lynch on cello and B-Movie drummer Graham Bofey.

The album features a songwriter and singer at the top of his game and was released in March 2022.

From the sublime opener Paradise, a pastoral love poem at a Cambridge beauty spot, to the upbeat folk-rock of Forlorn Hope reciting a doomed soldier’s last letter to his lover in Soho Lights, a flamboyant song lamenting a crossover romance between the stars or the blissful recklessness of youth told while singing The Berlin Girl to the dismissive words of an unrepentant sinner on the epic Epitaph final track, Audience with Myself sums up Steve Hovington, the artisan composer , singer and musician.