Screaming lord sutch keith moom8/16/2023 ![]() ![]() Even David Bowie was down there years ago, along with Gary Glitter – who was Paul Raven back then. I got discovered in the 2-I’s Coffee Bar where Tommy Steele started and Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury and people like that. I was a rock ‘n’ roll singer at the time. So he had to resign because of the scandal, which caused the by-election. The War Minister was having an affair with those two and they were also having an affair with Russian spies. The first time was in 1963 at Stratford-upon-Avon during the Profumo Scandal, caused by Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler. I’m celebrating 30 years now standing for Parliament. To start off, why don’t you tell us a bit about your political platform? It was the time of button-down shirts with the great, big, long, pointed collars and the trousers with the flares, which have come back now. I sold all of the surplus I had and I just kept my one model and showed everyone and they could take their orders from the model. Yeah, I sold all the stuff that I had, and then they re-ordered again. In the afternoon I would do big shops – Macy’s and them kind of shops – and display all this Union Jack stuff, and all the British stuff, y’know? We even had Sherlock Holmes cloaks and a hat to match, in tweed. So I brought a lot of that with me and it was like a tour of America, playing gigs. There was suits, those psychedelic kind of suits – it was at the time of Hendrix and the Who with their Union Jack jackets, shirts, and all that kind of stuff. That was how I launched that tour when I came over there, with the car with the trailer with all these English goods, which they wanted me to represent for them. So we had all these stickers made of the Union Jack. That was to teach the people to be proud of Britain, and to be “Backing Britain” was to buy stuff that was made in Great Britain. It was during our “Backing Britain” campaign. ![]() I went to Denmark with that, Sweden, Germany, France, all over the place, and then ended up in America. I used to go up and down the country with a big Union Jack trailer and inside it was all British goods: jackets and shirts and records, merchandise. I used to have a trailer as well in England, which we’d use at gigs. I had an album in America with that car on it. Lord Sutch: I like the name of your paper: Union Jack. All quite innocent, but bear it in mind as you read. Some of Sutch’s tales involve a certain degree of exaggeration or misconception. Who was I to stop him in his tracks to clarify the smaller facts? It was all entertaining stuff – just let the tape roll.Ĭaveat emptor: As anyone who has read his autobiography, Life as Sutch, can tell you, historical accuracy wasn’t Sutch’s strong suit, entertaining people was. Between our chuckling, I made intermittent attempts to direct the flow of conversation, but there was little point, Sutch was on a roll, dashing down tangential side alleys and free-associating memories as the whim took him. Sutch talked a mile a minute, determined to cover all the highlights of his career, specifically: precise election results and of course the name of every single one of the famous players who’d passed through the ranks of the Savages (“my musicians,” as he called them). Within a few minutes it was obvious my carefully prepared list of questions was out the window. Sutch was a charming, down-to-earth man, with an in-built, infectious sense of humor. In April 1993 I interviewed Lord Sutch by telephone for a two-part feature in the Union Jack newspaper. And if you make great records you live forever. As Screaming Lord Sutch, his colorful, larger than life personality was a fixture of the British political landscape, but for rock’n’roll fans he will be remembered for his amazing recorded legacy: the mad rock and horror sides he cut with Joe Meek, the demented mid-‘60s gems like “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and “All Black and Hairy,” the proto-psychedelic “The Cheat,” the hard rockin’ Heavy Friends… For someone with no discernible music talent he sure made a lot of great records. When David Sutch took his own life in June 1999 the world of rock ’n’ roll lost one of its wildest and most unforgettable characters. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |