A Time-Bending Rock ‘n’ Roll Story You Don’t Just Hear — You Experience
Meet Joe Rox: a virtual artist born from memory, music, and AI — delivering dark, cinematic storytelling through sound. Start with The Terrible Tango and step into a world where imagination takes the lead.
JOE ROX is a virtual artist created by Gary Keady.
“I composed the song with my long-time co-composer Tony Rees. We’ve been writing together since the early ’80s. *The Terrible Tango* is a comical piece about a singer fronting a band in a 50s cabaret nightclub who spots a beautiful woman in the audience. She gives him the eye — then the unimaginable happens. He takes her onto the dance floor and they perform the tango… well, he does in his mind anyway.
“We’d recorded a demo of the song and I uploaded it into Suno AI. After several attempts, it finally delivered something usable — a foundation I could build the track around. The singer came with the track from Suno.
“My dad always called socks ‘Joe Rox’ in rhyming slang, and that memory suddenly came back to me — a standout name for an artist. My dad passed away at 101 last year, so it felt right to carry that name forward in his memory.
“Next was to create the image of Joe for the music video, which I planned to produce using AI. With a strong background in digital editing and filmmaking, I was well placed to push the technology to its limits. While going through old photos, I found a black-and-white shot of myself from 1972, standing beside my 1967 E-Type Jaguar (below). I ran it through an AI colourising program — the result was striking, but it had changed my face.
“It hit me instantly — that’s Joe Rox. (below) I refined the image, added a white T-shirt under the jacket, scaled it up, and there he was. Over the following weeks, I built a full music video around the track.
“Now that Joe Rox exists, we see him taking on a life of his own — delivering more music, more stories, and more of that offbeat sense of humour in a style that’s entirely his own.”
