The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (212 page)

A collaborator with other DJs like Goldie (Clifford Price) and Storm (Jane Connelly, a former college friend), Kemistry operated at the sharp end of the UK’s blossoming drum ‘n’ bass/jungle scenes, her involvement in the Metalheadz organization attracting such groundbreak-ing talents as Adam F, Grooverider and Photek to the label. Despite her pioneering work, few other personal details are known about Kemistry – save for the tragic and freakish way in which she died. Travelling back with Storm from a club night they had co-hosted, Kemistry was killed just outside Winchester when a lorry’s wheel threw up a loose cat’s eye from the motorway – the missile smashed through the windscreen and fatally wounded the DJ as she sat in the passenger seat.

Adrian Borland

(London, 6 December 1957)

The Sound

(Various acts)

Equally sad was the suicide of Adrian Borland – a musician destined to remain unrewarded by his industry – on the same night. Beginning as punk also-rans The Outsiders, The Sound morphed from a group often unfairly dismissed as Joy Division clones into a very original psychedelic act. Guitarist/singer Borland – plus Graham Green (bass – later replaced by Graham Bailey), Colvin Mayers (keyboards – who died in 1993) and Michael Dudley (drums) – issued a string of interesting singles (including the much-played ‘Hothouse’ (1981)) and a pair of solid albums for the indie imprint Korova but, with no breakthrough, had to sit back as contemporaries like U2 and labelmates Echo & The Bunnymen took the spoils. Borland – who also recorded as the experimental Second Layer and, after the dissolution of The Sound in 1988, as Adrian Borland & The Citizens, as well as the lesser-known Honolulu Mountain Daffodils – also made an income as a producer.

Borland, disillusioned after visiting an ex-girlfriend, was taken home from a Kennington restaurant by police, believed delusional. Frightened of being sectioned, he then let himself out of his parents’ house and threw himself under a London Underground train at Wimbledon station early in the morning. The musician, who was in the process of recording a new album,
Harmony and Destruction,
had recently discontinued his prescription medication.

Friday 30

Darrell Sweet

(Bournemouth, 16 May 1947)

Nazareth

A key cog in the well-oiled machine that was Nazareth, percussionist Darrell Sweet moved to Glasgow as a boy – putting him in the middle of a burgeoning rock scene. With The Shadettes, Sweet found himself in what may have seemed an unambitious covers band; as Dunfermline favourites Nazareth, however, the group shortly displayed impressive songwriting skills, realized by a born-to-do-it front duo: hoary singer Dan McCafferty and slide-guitar maestro Manuel Charlton. Bankrolled by the ubiquitous bingo entrepreneur Bill Fehilly (who had also overseen the making of Alex Harvey), Nazareth set about putting together a debut album, which paved the way for a run of great hit singles – three of which, paradoxically, were covers: ‘This Flight Tonight’ (1973, written by Joni Mitchell), ‘My White Bicycle’ (1975, Tomorrow) and ‘Love Hurts’ (1977, Boudleaux Bryant).

With the hits drying up at the end of the seventies, Nazareth’s downfall was confirmed after the unexpected death of Fehilly in 1976; the band were allegedly swindled out of a lot of money by his replacement. Nazareth maintained a sufficient international following, however, to operate as a touring unit on their own. It was on such a tour in the US that the genial, unassuming Darrell Sweet passed away from a sudden backstage heart attack before a concert in New Albany, Indiana. The venue has since unveiled a plaque in the drummer’s honour.

May

Saturday 8

Leon Thomas

(Leon Thomas - East St Louis, Illinois, 4 October 1937)

Santana

Multi-instrumentalist Leon Thomas was best known as a practitioner of ‘kosmigroov’, the experimental jazz/spiritual style he virtually made his own. After studying in Tennessee, Thomas wound up in New York in the late fifties, an out-an-out blues/jazz singer with an uncanny ability to break into yodelling. As a musician, Thomas worked mainly in the jazz field, though he joined Carlos Santana’s Latin-tinged rock band in the early seventies. The 1973 album
Welcome
featured Thomas’s lead vocals on a number of tracks, but his problems with narcotics curtailed his career far too soon. After a couple of years of near-constant touring, Leone Thomas (as he now chose to spell his name) left Santana to perform smaller venues and gradually slipped off the radar. Thomas died in the Bronx, New York, from a heart attack brought on by the leukaemia he had suffered from for a number of years.

See also
RichardKermode (
January 1996); David Brown (
September 2000)

Friday 14

E William Tucker

(New York, 1961)

Ministry

(Various acts)

A guitarist whose dalliances were mainly in the field of US postpunk/industrial, E William Tucker was a respected tutor of the instrument who otherwise worked mainly as a session-player. His shortlived Swinging Pistons had sufficient impact to encourage Ministry leader Al Jourgensen to hire Tucker’s services for an upcoming album,
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
(1989). The result attracted virtually every other industrial big-hitter, and Tucker then went on the road with Foetus, KMFDM, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Pigface and Revolting Cocks – with whose Chris Connelly he would later collaborate in the studio.

On the eve of yet another tour with Ministry, E William Tucker’s body was found in his apartment by a roommate, accompanied by a suicide note that ran to ten pages. In a gesture as uncompromising as much of the music he made, Tucker had apparently swallowed a bottleful of pills, before slitting his throat. Like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain five years previously (
April 1994),
Tucker was believed to have been suffering a mystery stomach illness that caused him considerable pain.

See also
Jeff Ward (
March 1993); Paul Raven (
October 2007)