MEMORIAL FUND SET UP FOR TRAGIC FORMER KINKS KEYBOARDIST
P LAYING keyboards with rock legends The Kinks, Gordon Edwards looked every inch the star. But after a life battling drug addiction and depression the pianist today lies buried in an unmarked grave in the Valleys.
He was found dead in a Greenford bedsit, having taken his own life in 2003.
His niece, Melanie Edwards, is the only one who tends plot 1145 at Llanharan cemetery. He’s buried there with other family members who hail from the area.
“The way he went was very tragic and not a lot of people came to the funeral,” the mum of one said.
“Every now and again I go and put some flowers there but people come along and move them. It’s a lawn cemetery so they cut the flowers.
“It just breaks my heart when I go there.
“There is nothing there to say who is there.”
The family had lost touch with Gordon when he died.
“My father had already died so he was on his own,” Melanie said.
“I got a call from the police saying his body had been found – I don’t know how they got my number.
“He was living alone and had not paid his rent so he was probably having financial problems.”
Gordon spent only a short time with the band in 1978.
He departed when he was left heartbroken after splitting from his long-term girlfriend.
“I really felt a lot about the relationship and got really depressed,” he said later.
“I was drinking a bottle of whisky a day to get completely smashed and to blot everything from my mind.” That included life with The Kinks. He was sacked when he did not turn up for a flight to New York where the band were due to record.
Singer Ray Davies took over on keyboards.
“I’ve found there was a lot more to him than I realised,” Melanie, 51, said.
“His mother played the organ in a Welsh chapel and taught him to sing and to play.
“He was a natural and I remember listening to him. He was one of those people who could just pick up an instrument and play.”
As a child Melanie would look up to him and think ‘Wow’.
“He had big curly hair and he was a superstar to me,” she said.
“We all looked up to him. He was really sweet.”
But there was a dark side to the rocker.
“He suffered with depression and now and again he would come and live with us and my dad would look after him,” Melanie said.
“Drugs were probably all around but it just seemed so unlike him. Someone said it was down to certain company he was keeping at the time.”
Melanie has “mixed memories” of her uncle.
“He was famous and on TV and I was kind of like ‘Wow, I’ve got a famous uncle’,” Melanie said.
“When he would visit he would bring signed albums and he was head-to-toe like a rock star.”
Like her dad, he was a quiet man “but he was all right not saying anything”.
“He would write and songs,” Melanie said.
“He didn’t sing them to me directly but I would hear him in his room.”
A lot of Gordon’s time was spent touring and the family would “hear sing his stories about what he was doing”.
“I learned more about his drug problems when he would come and stay with us because that would cause problems with my mum and dad,” Melanie said.
Her late father brother.
“He was doing things like shoplifting and had a criminal record and my dad would pay the fines,” she said.
“My dad took responsibility for him. “He was a vulnerable soul.” As well as being in The Kinks, Gordon worked with The Pretty Things and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.
“I’m proud of him and pray to him and talk to him,” Melanie said.
“I had a dream about him where he came to me.
“I met him and he looked happy and was smiling with this mop of permed curly hair.
“I said to him ‘Is there anything I can do? I’m sorry I didn’t do enough’.”
After that Melanie, from Cardiff, decided to start raising funds for a headstone.
“I’ve got about £300 from a GoFundMe page that people are seeing through Facebook.
“That money will go straight to the headstone fund.
“It’s coming along but he has been buried over 10 years and this is a solo project.”
To donate visit www.gofundme. com/gordonjohnedwards was Gordon’s