The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (179 page)

The London Boys - Ephraim and Fuller: Kitsch ‘n’ sync

Sunday 21

Edem Ephraim

(London, 1 July 1959)

Dennis Fuller

(Jamaica, 19 June 1960)

The London Boys

Loved and ridiculed in equal parts, The London Boys were, at their peak in 1989, the last word in Eurodisco kitsch. Edem Ephraim and Dennis Fuller chanced upon one another working lowly-paid jobs in Germany during 1980, going on to pack the floors of Hamburg’s gay clubs as rollerskating duo The Roxy Rollers. In this guise, they were unearthed by producer Ralf-René Maué, who turned them into the (briefly) all-conquering London Boys. Somehow, Ephraim and Fuller’s blend of old-school Hi-NRG disco and Eurovision camp smashed them into the Continental charts – shifting nearly 5 million records in the process. Britain had had its first tantalizing glimpse of the pair some years before, dancing in Kate Bush’s ‘Sat in Your Lap’ promo; now, their own singles ‘Requiem’ (1988) and ‘London Nights’ (1989 – only kept from the top by Liverpool’s own gift to European culture, Sonia) hit big in the UK, while a London Boys album,
The Twelve Commandments of Dance,
was also a surprise smash.

Then, some time after their huge triumph, there was tragedy. By the mid nineties Ephraim and Fuller were working as a touring novelty. Following some dates in Austria, the duo were travelling across the Alps with Ephraim’s wife, Bettina, and a Hamburg DJ friend. As they negotiated a particularly treacherous section of mountain road, a drunk Swiss driver attempted to pass on the opposite side. The resultant collision killed both London Boys – plus the two passengers and the other driver. Ephraim and Fuller both left young children.

Friday 26

Stevie Plunder

(Anthony Hayes - Canberra, 1963)

The Whitlams

(Various acts)

With a smile on his face, a cold beer in his hand and a fistful of amphetamines, Anthony Hayes became his alter ego, ‘Stevie Plunder’, guitarist and very-much-frontman of The Whitlams – in the early 1990s, Australia’s ‘band most likely to’. Graduating from earlier bands such as The Plunderers and Hippy Dribble, Plunder formed The Whitlams in 1992 – on Australia Day, naturally – with Tim Freedman (piano) and Andy Lewis (bass), using studio drums until they could find a suitable percussionist. The band, named after their favoured Prime Minister, set about recording a debut EP,
Introducing the Whitlams
(1993). A full-length album emerged the following year, and with the single ‘I Make Hamburgers’ afforded much airplay, all seemed very promising for the band.

However, four years to the day of his band’s formation, Stevie Plunder’s body was found at the foot of a cliff – an apparent suicide that shocked a music industry celebrating another Australia Day. No motive has ever been ascertained. Although the band continued under Freedman’s guidance, a second suicide – that of Lewis in 2000 – was to horrify The Whitlams’ fanbase once more.

MARCH

Saturday2

Dinho Alves

(Alecsander Alves - Irecê, Bahia, 4 March 1971)

Bento Hinoto

(Alberto Hinoto - Guarulhos, Sao Paulo, 1971)

Julio Rasec

(Júlio César Barbosa - Guarulhos, Sao Paulo, 1969)

Samuel Reoli

(Samuel Reis de Oliveira - Guarulhos, Sao Paulo, 1974)

Sergio Reoli

(Sergio Reis de Oliveira - Guarulhos, Sao Paulo, 1970)

Mamonas Assassinas (Utopia)

With a name meaning ‘killer melons’ (or ‘mammaries’, if you like) and a swathe of dubious poetry, Mamonas Assassinas may have appeared to be little more than a South American equivalent of California’s Bloodhound Gang, but they were the biggest new rock band out of Brazil during a triumphant 1995. That year, the band’s eponymous first album had shifted 2 million copies in their homeland – and, having upset parent groups with hits like ‘
Vira-Vira
’,
‘PeladosEm Santos’
and ‘Robocop Gay’, Mamonas Assassinas were now looking to conquer the rest of the Americas. It was all a far cry from the serious rock of the band’s beginnings (as Utopia), when they sold just fifty copies of their debut EP. By the start of 1996 an appearance by the riotous, irreverent Mamonas – Dinho Alves (vocals), Bento Hinoto (guitar), Julio Rasec (keyboards) and brothers Samuel (bass) and Sergio Reoli (drums) – was suddenly worth $50K a throw. Then, after one of the shortest spells in rock’s spotlight, it was all over: the group’s rise was suddenly, shockingly curtailed by a multiple tragedy eerily foreseen by more than one.

Set to record a second album in Portugal, the band left Brasilia after the last of some 200 live performances since June 1995. The normally chirpy members seemed quiet and strangely apprehensive, as though aware of the events about to unfold. Having his hair dyed red ahead of the final show, Rasec had told hairdresser Nelson de Lima of a premonition he’d had the night before, in which he saw a plane crash – perhaps prompted by young Sergio Reoli, who collected air-disaster clippings as a macabre hobby. Then, as visibly nervous singer Alves boarded the band’s chartered Lear jet that evening, he was accosted by a runway worker who wished him ‘a smash success in Portugal’: the singer wryly replied that the only likely ‘smash’ would be his head, in an accident. Almost unbelievably, just an hour later he – and all of his band colleagues – were dead. Having left Brasilia at 11 pm, after thirty minutes the craft had begun its descent into Sao Paulo when it somehow dipped and smashed into a mountainside, cutting a 200-yard path through the trees as it disintegrated. In the carnage, all nine on board perished: as well as Mamonas Assassinas, their stage manager, their bodyguard, the pilot and co-pilot were also killed. The following morning, Brazilian teenagers awoke to the harrowing sight of television pictures relaying the live rescue attempt – and gruesome pictures of the scene were
not
being censored. Horrifyingly, especially given the band’s earlier predictions, Alves’s body was missing the upper half of his head when discovered, while Rasec had been completely decapitated; other band members’ bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. (With no black box on board the craft, crew negligence can never be proven, though rumour suggests one of the
band
may have been trying to fly the plane when it crashed.)

Two days later – on what would have been singer and pin-up Alves’s twenty-fifth birthday – troops were called in to control the inconsolable young followers of Brazil’s hottest band, who’d gathered in their tens of thousands outside the morgue in Sao Paulo. The kids calmed themselves as best they could with impromptu renditions of the Mamonas’ biggest hits (which in itself must have made for bizarre listening, given the band’s preferred subject areas). Sympathies, however, were rather more muted elsewhere in the community. Many devout Christians who
didn’t
care for the band’s sometimes profane and often sexually explicit lyrics genuinely believed that divine retribution had been carried out there and then – the grim tale of Mamonas Assassinas was from then on exploited as a cautionary sermon for Brazil’s young and reckless. One such detractor may have been noted Brazilian psychic Mother Mae Dinah, who had described ‘dark shadows’ around the band and – extraordinarily – predicted their passing in an air crash some months before the event.

Saturday 16

Joe Pope

(Atlanta, Georgia, 6 November 1933)

The Tams

From poverty-stricken backgrounds, The Tams formed as early as 1952 (as The Four Dots), four ghetto buddies – Joseph and Charles Pope, Robert Lee Smith and Horace Kay – with a song to share. With no funds to back them, the gang decided on the gimmick of wearing colourful tam o’shanters with their beachwear to gain attention. Thus they had a name as well as a collection of fine and soulful voices – of which Joe Pope’s was readily pushed to the fore. It wasn’t until 1960 that The Tams managed to secure a publishing and recording deal, scoring a US hit (of sorts) with ‘Untie Me’ (1962). In January 1964, the quartet – now signed to ABC-Paramount – stormed the Top Ten with ‘What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)’. While this was by far their biggest US seller, seven years later the group raced to the top of the UK charts with ‘Hey Girl, Don’t Bother Me’ on Probe, Britain’s ninth-best seller of 1971. Two other Tams’ standards, ‘Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy’ (1970) and ‘There Ain’t Nothing Like Shaggin’’ (1987 – obviously about the sixties dance craze of that name as opposed to anything else) also made inroads into the UK listings.