THEY ALSO SERVED
ACTOR CHARLOTTE CORNWELL (below, b.1949) had already appeared in the 1974 David Essex film Stardust when she starred as Anna Wynd, one of female trio the Little Ladies, in the 1976/77 TV series Rock Follies. The fictional band released two albums produced by Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay, the first of which was a UK Number 1 in April 1976. She later enjoyed stage and screen success, including stints with the RSC. Her half-brother David was better known as the espionage novelist John Le Carré, who died in December.
BASSIST MATT HARRIS (b.1969) played with SF punks Overwhelming Colorfast before pursuing a more psych-rock sound with Oranger. After their well received 2000 LP The Quiet Vibrationland, Harris was joined cult powerpoppers The Posies, playing bass on Every Kind Of Light in 2005 and 2010’s Blood/Candy, as well as Ken Stringfellow’s 2004 solo LP, Soft Commands. Harris also joined Pavement’s Scott Kannberg on Preston School Of Industry’s Monsoon album and his debut as Spiral Stairs, 2009’s The Real Feel.
SAX PLAYER GRADY GAINES (b.1934) was a session man for Texas blues label Peacock Records before joining Little Richard’s Upsetters in 1955. After Richard temporarily retired in 1957, Gaines played with James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Joe Tex, Curtis Mayfield and Millie Jackson. He retired in 1980 to work in the hotel industry, but was back in the mid-’80s leading The Texas Upsetters, cutting new albums and gigging.
VOCALIST, instrumentalist and “anti-diva” FRANÇOISE CACTUS (below, b.1964) played in West Berlin garage punks The Lolitas before forming Franco-German retro-pop eccentrics Stereo Total with Brezel Göring in 1993. Debuting with 1995’s Oh Ah, they hit biggest with 2001’s Musique Automatique, toured internationally, appeared on the soundtrack to Adam Curtis’s 2011 series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, and released a final LP
Ah! Quel Cinéma!, in 2019.
JEREMY LUBBOCK (b.1931) was a jazz club pianist when he recorded Catch A Falling Star for George Martin in 1953. He went on to work as a freelance arranger for the BBC before relocating to the US in the late ’70s, where he worked with Minnie Riperton, Chicago, Barbra Streisand, Leonard Cohen and, famously, Joni Mitchell, on 1979’s Mingus. He also worked with Quincy Jones and David Foster and penned The Best Of Me, a Number 2 UK hit for Cliff Richard in 1989.
AKRON/FAMILY co-founder, multi-instrumentalist and voice MILES SEATON (b.1979) played on six albums with the cult Williamsburg folk-experimentalists, from their 2002 beginnings until their hiatus began after 2013’s Sub Verses. He released two solo LPs, Functional Music Vols. 1 & 2 (2015) and Phases In Exile (2017). He also contributed to Michael Gira’s Angels Of Light project.
PHOTOGRAPHER RICKY POWELL (b.1961), dubbed “the fourth Beastie Boy”, was a regular chronicler and intimate of the group from 1986 to 1995 (he’s one of the bespectacled patsies in the 1987 (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!) video). A positive vibes man with “scorpionic magnetizm” (sic), he was well-connected on the New York music scene, hosted his own public access TV rap show, published several books of his work, was the subject of 2020 film Ricky Powell: The Individualist, and sold his own ‘Lazy Hustler’ bong/statuette of himself.
AUTHOR JOHNNY ROGAN (below, b.1953) studied literature, and wrote his first book, 1980’s epic Byrds history Timeless Flight, while a mature student in Oxford. It was the first of a forensically researched series of biographies of Neil Young, Van Morrison, Ray Davies, The Smiths and others, each one revealing their subjects in all their ambivalent humanity (Morrissey later wished death on the author). His last book, Byrds: Requiem For The Timeless, Volume 2 was published in 2017; he was a friend to MOJO and will be greatly missed.
AUDIO ENGINEER RUPERT NEVE (b.1926) served in the Royal Signals during World War Two, and formed Neve
Electronics in 1961 to design and manufacture groundbreaking mixing desks. His Neve consoles remain highly prized, and were used by The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Nirvana and others. Relocating to Texas in 1994, Neve continued to design and collaborate, launching his first digital design, the RMP-D8 microphone preamp, in 2018.
NASHVILLE SONGWRITER JIM WEATHERLY (b.1943) wrote for Ray Price, Glen Campbell and Kenny Rogers, and penned Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me and Neither One Of Us (Wants To Be The First To Say Goodbye) for Gladys Knight & The Pips. He’s best known for Midnight Train To Georgia, the 1974 hit for Knight that won its author a Grammy. The song was inspired when Farrah Fawcett, the then-girlfriend of his actor pal Lee Majors (TV’s Six Million Dollar Man), mentioned she was taking “the midnight plane to Houston”. Weatherly wrote a country song that would eventually morph from Houston to Georgia, country to R&B, and Gladys Knight’s first Number 1 US pop hit.
Clive Prior and Jenny Bulley