Walter Lure

Last of the Heartbreakers BORN 1949

Always sporting his trademark girl’s school tie, Walter Lure was the lanky linchpin, singer and guitarist who drove Johnny Thunders And The Heartbreakers through New York and London’s ’70s punk scenes. He survived heroin addiction to become a successful Wall Street stockbroker, though he always carried on playing.

Born Walter Luhr in Queens, he was working for the US Food and Drug Administration when he discovered CBGB’s nascent punk scene around 1973-74. Already fronting the Demons, Lure joined the original Heartbreakers line-up of Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell and Jerry Nolan, initiated into the band by a heroin shot. The group soon found a following for their gutter anthem rock’n’roll, and hit London in November 1976 for the ill-fated Anarchy tour. They stayed. Punk audiences loved their Ebit seasoned street attitude and incendiary stage act, and the band loved them back. At the time, Lure told this writer: “Now we’re just going to go to the top of the world and take it for as long as they’ll let us!”

But the recording of their sole album in London degenerated into a production nightmare so fraught it split the band, although 1977’s L.A.M.F. remains one of the landmark ’70s NYC albums. Lure was a live wire presence, co-writing All By Myself, Get Off The Phone, One Track Mind (and live fave Too Much Junkie Business). “You tend to forget the unpleasant things as the years go on,” he told me in 2013. “It was just a great band.”

After occasional reunions in the ’80s, Lure quit heroin and hit Wall Street, getting lucky and finding he liked it. By the mid ’90s he was managing 125 people, forming The Waldos as his “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” hobby, and releasing 1994’s Rent Party. He carried on gigging, playing L.A.M.F. in its entirety at the 100 Club in August 2019, his final UK show. His autobiography, poignantly entitled To Hell And Back, was published in March. He succumbed to cancer at Flushing Hospital on August 21.

Kris Needs

“You tend to forget the unpleasant things as the years go on.” WALTER LURE ON LIFE AS A HEARTBREAKER