Utopia move forward with reunion tour following Ralph Schuckett’s departure

Utopia star Ralph Schuckett has pulled out the rock band’s upcoming reunion tour due to health concerns and personal reasons.
Todd Rundgren has started rehearsals for the tour with Kasim Sulton and John Wilcox, and the singer has confirmed keyboard player Schuckett won’t be joining them.
He bowed out last month (Mar18) and Gil Assayas, who was discovered by one of Rundgren’s sons, has stepped in to replace him.
“At that point I wanted to walk into the ocean and not come back ’cause we were fully committed to this and there was nobody off the top of my head I thought was gonna be able to just walk in and do what Ralph had been working on for months,” Todd tells Billboard, “so we decided we would just open it up to anybody, but in the meantime we found someone that my son had actually met and heard play.
“We looked at his stuff on the Internet and were all blown away by how talented he was and how confident he seemed.”
Sulton adds, “He’s fantastic. He’s a force to be reckoned with. The position is synthesizer-heavy ’cause that’s what we were doing at the time, all analogue-synthesizer based music. So we needed to find someone who did that, who had a grasp of how to get that sound and how to play those songs and be true to the original recordings.
“He sends us little videos here and there with his progress and it sounds exactly like the records. We couldn’t have made a better choice.”