One of them, Rob Strong, pulled out with laryngitis and so sent along his 16-year-old son, Andrew. I had put 70 songs into rehearsal to see if we could cope with them and various session singers to help. Andrew Strong came in very late in the process. Robert was one of three that I had narrowed down for the Deco role and was on a short list of two for the manager's part. Robert Arkins was originally cast as the band's singer, Deco. How was Andrew Strong cast? Robert Arkins played Jimmy Rabbitte, a streetwise entrepreneur with a dream that a dedicated group of working-class musicians could transcend their dead-end existence through the songs popularized on the Stax-Volt and Atlantic record labels in the 1960s and '70s. The first of Doyle's Barrytown trilogy - "The Snapper' and "The Van" were also made into movies - "The Commitments" featured a largely unknown cast drawn from Dublin's thriving music scene that had produced U2 and Sinead O'Connor. "The Commitments," directed by Alan Parker and based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, braved the likes of "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" and "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare" to be a modest success and spawned a hit soundtrack featuring new versions of such classics as "Mustang Sally," "Chain of Fools" and "In the Midnight Hour." The album was so successful a second volume was released in 1992. In summer 1991, a small movie about a group of young Dubliners who form a band to play American soul music opened with little fanfare.
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