The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (171 page)

MARCH

Sunday 5

Vivian Stanshall

(Shillingford, Oxfordshire, 21 March 1943)

The Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band

One of music’s best-remembered oddballs, Viv ‘Ginger Geezer’ Stanshall was the man who introduced the world to ‘Adolf Hitler on vibes’, among a host of other strange characters inhabiting the songs of The Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band. Stanshall fled a strict upbringing (his father forced him to speak BBC English while his mother taught him to knit) to hone his extensive talent at London’s Walthamstow Art School. The first, and most successful, result was the Bonzos, a collective of like-minded weirdos, including
Monty Python
collaborator Neil Innes. The group – who scored an unlikely UK Top Five hit with ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ (1968) – specialized in the surrealist British humour prevalent at the time, with Stanshall frequently referred to as ‘music’s Tony Hancock’. The group’s creative peak was arguably the single’s parent album,
The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse
(1969), and a residency on the cult ITV series
Do Not Adjust Your Set.
The Bonzos’ quirkiness somehow never quite caught on in the US, though, and it was following a 1970 American tour that its members went their separate ways. Stanshall went on to enjoy cult success with Bonzo Freaks and Big Grunt (who were visually even stranger than the Bonzos), became a close friend of lunatic
sympathique
Keith Moon, and saw his
Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End
creation become first an album, then a book and finally a movie starring Trevor Howard. Stanshall had long been fascinated with the nineteenth-century peer and Assyriologist Rawlinson and his groundbreak-ing work in deciphering cuneiform: this project was a prime opportunity for the writer to meld his own undeniable eccentricity with that of the hard-drinking anthropologist. (By strange coincidence, Stanshall’s death came one hundred years to the day after that of his hero.) But the politically correct eighties were not so tolerant of Stanshall’s whimsicality. The writer became less visible as time marched on, his alcohol and tranquilizer addiction picking up more column inches than his work, although a play,
Stinkfoot,
gathered favourable reviews in 1988. In the mid nineties, Stanshall emerged from institutional convalescence a confused, shuffling character in slippers, venturing only occasionally out of his third-floor Muswell Hill flat to buy groceries. However, he managed to find it in himself to play a popular resident slot at The Angel, Islington, with a few old Bonzo friends, and had an album
in situ
in 1995. Stanshall – in spite of his well-documented problems with booze – also made a lucrative series of TV commercials for Ruddles beer.

Just as he appeared to have overcome his addictions and to be on the brink of a major revival, the last year of Viv Stanshall’s life was beset by a series of cruel events. A violent mugging by attackers with knives was followed by the theft of his hi-fi equipment by a homeless man to whom he’d offered shelter. Finally, Stanshall was found dead by firemen after a freak blaze at his home, details of which remain sketchy to this day.

Tuesday 7

David Loucks

(Seattle, Washington, 8 December 1960)

Racer

Tin Ear

David Loucks was a bass virtuoso and journeyman singer/producer who’d played with US soft-rock act Racer (formerly Yourself) and was a highly respected face on the Pacific NorthWest rock scene during the early eighties. He moved on to front his own electronic band, Tin Ear, with his multi-instrumentalist brother Allan. Loucks’s best-known song, ‘Chemical Imbalance’, featured on the posthumously issued album
Tin Ear
(1996).

On 5 March 1995, Loucks was duped into recording a bogus rap track with a 25-year-old man calling himself ‘Paul Waller’ and an accomplice (later identified as Shawn Swenson and Joseph Gardner) at his Seattle recording studio, Alternative Productions. When the time came to pay for studio use, Waller/Swenson claimed to have mislaid their wallets and another appointment was made for two days’ hence, when Loucks would release the recordings. On the night in question, however, several men appeared at the studio intending to steal the musician’s valuable digital equipment; the attempted heist went badly awry.

David Loucks was found by his distraught father the following morning, having been repeatedly shot with a stun gun, then gagged and bound by the gang – and finally brutally strangled. Following considerable efforts by Loucks Sr, a Seattle attorney – and a positive identification by the deceased’s brother – Swenson and Gardner were eventually sentenced to fifty-five and twenty-nine years’ imprisonment respectively for the murder, their courtroom pleas that the sole intention had been to steal Loucks’s equipment falling on deaf ears.

Wednesday 8

Ingo Schwichtenberg

(Hamburg, 18 May 1965)

Helloween

Manic depressive Ingo Schwichtenberg had not really recovered from his sacking as percussionist with German power-metallers Helloween when he took his own life by leaping in front of a train near his home town.

All had begun well for Helloween – Schwichtenberg, Kai Hansen (vocals/guitar), Michael Weikath (guitar) and Marcus Grosskopf (bass) – but twelve years of only moderate success left the members in an almost constant state of friction. In 1993, the founder drummer’s worsening mental state had reached a critical point as far as his fellow band members were concerned, when, ahead of a gig in Japan, he collapsed in a compulsive crying fit. Schwichtenberg’s excessive cocaine use did not help, the euphoria it produced drawing his condition into stark relief when Helloween were on tour. The poor performance of their latest album,
Chameleon,
and their subsequent dropping by EMI, effectively sealed Schwichtenberg’s fate with the band, and the percussionist struggled to find work thereafter. Although former colleagues were badly shaken by his unexpected death, a very different line-up of Helloween has continued to record since.

Thursday 23

Alan Barton

(Cawley, Yorkshire, 16 September 1953)

Black Lace

Smokie

Black Lace were among the more reviled acts of the early eighties. This odd duo – Alan Barton and Colin Routh, who originally represented the UK at Eurovision in 1979 – chalked up almost an entire year on the British charts in 1983–4. Their biggest hits, Brits-abroad favourites ‘Superman’ and the truly hideous ‘Agadoo’, saw to it that the group would be on the playlist at weddings across the country for ever. Displaying a marginal improvement in artistic judgement, singer Barton joined seventies hitmakers Smokie (replacing pin-up Chris Norman) in time for a comeback tour in 1986. Despite UK indifference to a sound now considered
passé,
the revitalized group went on to clock up unlikely platinum albums in Scandinavia, Russia and South Africa.

Constantly on the road, tragedy struck for Smokie when their minibus plunged into a ravine on their return to the airport after a gig in Dusseldorf. While other group members escaped with minor injuries, Barton died from a severe head wound in a Cologne hospital the following week, never having regained consciousness.

Alan Barton
(secondleft)
with Black Lace: ‘Superman’
doesn’t
return

Close!

Agnetha Faltskog

(Abba)

In 1983, notoriously phobic Swedish ice-maiden Agnetha Faltskog - having pretty much left the all-conquering Abba behind her - felt she could never overcome her fear of flying and decide to hire a coach for future touring. Negotiating treacherous Swedish weather conditions late at night, her driver braked suddenly, causing the singer’s vehicle to skid on the icy road and topple over. Faltskog somehow survived being thrown through a window with little more than concussi - but refused thereafter to use the roads.