Kenny Lynch
Actor and singer who became one of Britain’s first black entertainers and serenaded the Queen
KENNY LYNCH, who has died aged 81, was one of the first black entertainers to achieve stardom in Britain in the early 1960s, when he toured with the Beatles and had a Top 10 hit with Up On The Roof (1962), a cover of a Drifters song.
But his cheeky image as a comedian took a knock in 1971 when he was named by the News of the World in the paper’s exposé of the so-called BBC payola scandal.
Unusually versatile, Lynch could range from stand-up comedy to crooning the great American songbook in his Sinatra tribute act. He was also a talented songwriter, and with the American Mort Shuman penned the Small Faces’ breakthrough hit, Sha-la-la-la-lee, in 1966. The band hated it, but it brought them enormous success, charting at No 3.
After his success with the lyrical subtleties of Up On The Roof, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Lynch had another Top 10 hit with You Can Never Stop Me Loving You in the summer of 1963. “His records were an odd mixture of featherweight early1960s teen-idol pop and American pop-soul,” noted one critic, “at times sounding a little like the songs being recorded by Gene Pitney and Gene Mcdaniels during the same era, although Lynch’s voice and material weren’t in the same league as those singers.”
In between his two chart successes, Lynch offered an insight into the emerging pop scene in a lecture he gave to students at the Chelsea College of Science and Technology explaining some of the pitfalls of showbusiness life. He liked to boast that in 1963 he was the first artist to cover a Beatles song, Misery, a number on the group’s first album which he had heard them compose on a tour bus when they were still comparatively unknown.
John Lennon and Paul Mccartney had originally offered the song to Helen Shapiro, the star of the tour – Lynch had second billing, ahead of the Beatles – but the girl singer turned it down saying it was too dreary.
In the event his version of Misery flopped. For Lennon, Lynch’s soulful treatment of the song was ruined by the contribution of the guitarist Bert Weedon, a musician Lennon detested. “I would have played if you’d asked me,” Lennon told Lynch.
It was on the same tour bus, just outside Warrington, that Lynch heard Lennon and Mccartney working on She Loves You, the song that detonated Beatlemania when it was released in the late summer of 1963. When Lynch heard their falsetto “Woooo” which punctuates the number with some frenetic head-shaking, he told them: “You can’t do that, you sound like a bunch of poofs.”
“They said: ‘The kids’ll like it,’ and they were right.” The head-shaking “Woooos”, flaunting the Beatles’ conspicuously long hair, the most sexually charged component of their image, propelled She Loves You to unprecedented heights and it became the first single in history to sell a million copies in Britain.
If Lynch’s musical judgment may have lapsed on occasions, he could also be imprudent in his choice of company. His reputation narrowly survived the BBC payola scandal of 1971 when the News of the World exposed the activities of the singer Janie Jones, said to have offered prostitutes to BBC staff in return for plugging certain records.
Lynch was numbered among the “celebrities” attending “parties” at Jones’s house in Kensington, although Jones herself insisted that he never participated in any of the orgies that ensued.
Nevertheless, two years later, Lynch’s name was mentioned in the course of a high-profile court case by one of Jones’s call-girls who said in evidence that she had heard talk of getting Lynch’s “heavies” to go after the girls if they went to the police.
There was talk of one of them being cemented under a bridge.
At the subsequent Old Bailey trial, another prostitute testified that in May 1970 Lynch and one of Jones’s clients known only as “Y” had taken it in turns to try to deflower her while she was dressed in a child’s playsuit and holding a teddy bear. It was said that “Y” watched through a two-way mirror while Lynch posed as the girl’s stepfather. In the end, she added, she had sex with “Y”, after which Jones gave her £5.
Lynch’s association with Janie Jones was described by a third prostitute, who recalled an event at a West End club on Boxing Day 1972 when “Miss Jones ran up to him at the bar and put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips”. Jones had acclaimed Lynch a star who had been her friend for many years. She subsequently went to prison for seven years for controlling prostitutes and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Lynch kept raffish company all his life. With the Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, the one-time gangland enforcer Freddie Foreman, and other superannuated gangsters and their henchmen, in 2007 he attended the funeral of Joey Pyle, a former professional boxer with links to both the Kray and Richardson gangs.
Yet a year earlier Lynch had serenaded the Queen and Prince Philip at a surprise 80th birthday party for the sovereign at a restaurant in Mayfair. Accompanied by the pianist Laurie Holloway, Lynch crooned several wartime numbers, including
People Will Say We’re In Love and The
Way You Look Tonight, which prompted an appreciative thumbs-up from the Prince.
One of 13 children of a Caribbean seaman and an English mother of mixed race from Canning Town, Kenneth Lynch was born on March 18 1938 in Stepney, east London. When the Second World War broke out the family was evacuated to Carmarthen; on returning to London, they settled in Salmons Lane near Commercial Road.
On leaving school at 15 and after taking various jobs, Lynch did National Service in the Royal Army Service Corps and was the regimental featherweight boxing champion.
In parallel with his singing career, Lynch appeared regularly in television dramas, starting in 1964 when he played Lucky, a West Indian singerguitarist, in Kingsley Amis’s A Question About Hell (ITV). He starred as a Cockney workman in Johnny Speight’s comedy series Curry and Chips (ITV, 1969), and in 1972, with the actor Harry Fowler, hosted the children’s show Get This! which combined comedy with bite-sized facts and information. In 2012 he played the racist Kenny, a black man who disliked Indians in Citizen Khan, billed as BBC Television’s first South Asian comedy.
As a songwriter, Lynch often collaborated with other composers. Although he regularly sang and recorded a lot of his own material, some of his compositions were also recorded by artists like the Drifters, the Swinging Blue Jeans and Cilla Black.
In 1996, Lynch and his golfing friends Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck, billing themselves as the Three Fivers, recorded a version of Winter Wonderland in what they called a “cheeky tribute” to the opera singers Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, known collectively as the Three Tenors. The operatic threesome were obliged to take legal steps to stop the variety veterans from “abusing and vulgarising” their reputations.
An enthusiast for fast, expensive cars, Lynch appeared in court in 1965 accused of driving his Aston Martin sports car down the Mall at 70mph. In 1991 he was handed a three-month suspended prison sentence for his third drink-driving offence. In 2005 he was banned from driving for three years after being stopped on the M40 at 3am on his way home from a charity event in London.
Together with Laurence Harvey and Lew Grade, Lynch was a showbusiness favourite of the former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, who appointed him OBE in 1970.
In the 1980s he was sacked from his Sunday morning programme on BBC Radio Oxford for urging his listeners to “really enjoy themselves” as they lay in bed.
Lynch remained a lively raconteur, television personality and occasional actor. His elder sister Gladys became the cabaret singer Maxine Daniels; she died in 2003. He is survived by two daughters.