He had mutton chop sideburns, a vast quiff and was dressed in black leather, even down to murderers’ gloves, over which he wore enormous silver rings, which he then wiggled in a beckoning fashion while staring suggestively into the camera.
Nevermind hiding behind the sofa during Dr Who – for me, in December 1973, as a six-year-old nurtured on bubblegum pop, the debut appearance on Top of the Pops of Alvin Stardust, with his rock’n’roll Child Catcher look, was the most menacing thing I had ever seen.
In the 1990s he found God – at Waterloo Station apparently, a place where one might be more likely to experience a loss of faith
Frightening in a dark panto way it may have been – but its performer was a concoction. ‘Alvin Stardust’ was a character, the name crudely drawn to attempt to tap into the success of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album from the previous year and graft a bit of his glam stylings onto the older rock’n’roll sound and look of a Gene Vincent.
And just a couple of weeks before he appeared on TOTP, Stardust was being played by someone else entirely, one Peter Shelley. The pop producer had conceived of this new Stardust, then wrote, produced and sang his debut single. Shelley had even appeared on regional TV as Stardust before deciding at the eleventh hour, as the record began to attract attention, that he had no appetite for pop stardom himself – and casting around for an Alvin stand-in.
The candidate he settled on had been born Bernard Jewry – and was already into his thirties, five years older than the twin leading lights of the then booming glam rock scene whom he was tasked with emulating, Bowie and Marc Bolan.
Of course the history of pop is full of manufactured groups and invented characters jumping on bandwagons so this wasn’t in itself particularly unusual. But what was extraordinary was that this was the second time Jewry had taken over another pop performer’s identity at short notice.
Some 12 years earlier, a teen pop act called Shane Fenton and The Fentones were just getting some interest when their singer abruptly died. Like Stardust, ‘Shane Fenton’ didn’t actually exist but was a character created by a young wannabe called Johnny Theakston. Then, in 1961, Theakston became ill with rheumatic fever and soon died, at just 17. While his bandmates were still processing this shock, they received a reply from the BBC to an audition tape they had earlier sent – and an invitation to come in and perform. Theakston’s mother was adamant that the band should continue in tribute to her tragic son – and Johnny’s friend Bernard Jewry was persuaded to take on the Shane Fenton role in his place.
Jewry took it on so successfully that the band would go on to have four top 40 hits, do TV work and tour, before fizzling out as their skiffle-based act was quickly left sounding outdated by the arrival of The Beatles et al. But Jewry continued to live and perform as Fenton – even naming his first child Shaun Fenton – until abruptly becoming Alvin Stardust in 1973.
The effect of that debut Stardust TOTP appearance which so scared me as a young child was immediate: ‘My Coo Ca Choo’ stormed up the charts and was only kept off the number one spot by Gary Glitter’s ‘I Love You Love Me Love’ (which you definitely won’t hear this Christmas) and then Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ (which you definitely will). His next single, 1974’s ‘Jealous Mind’ – this time featuring Jewry singing himself in the style of Peter Shelley pretending to be Stardust – did hit number one.
Glam rock aficionado Darren Johnson, who has written books on Slade, The Sweet and Suzi Quatro, divides the genre into two strands: ‘We usually refer to glam as either high or low. The former is the art school glam of Roxy Music and Bowie and then the low is that more working-class stuff from Slade, The Sweet and Gary Glitter. Alvin probably fits into the lower end of low glam, alongside Mud [of Tiger Feet fame], who shared his harking back to a fifties rock’n’roll look and sound – but camped up.’
And he says that footage of Shelley performing as Stardust is glam rock’s most elusive artefact: ‘I’ve never been able to track it down. Apparently he was dressed in a clown outfit and looked nothing like the leather-clad Alvin Stardust we are all familiar with.’
Listening to ‘My Coo Ca Choo’ 50 years on from that moment, I find that as a novelty pop record it stands up rather well. Its style is what I would call glam rock’n’roll. It’s an Eddie Cochran tribute in the style of T. Rex, with a wah-wah guitar riff underpinned by a handclap drum pattern and the vocal pitched higher than the leather image might lead you to expect. And the lyric is smart, if borderline comical: ‘Tom cat, you know where it’s at/Come on, let’s go to my flat/Lay down and groove on the mat/And you can be my coo ca choo.’
His fortunes had dipped by the mid-1970s as glam peaked then slumped but he had a mini-revival in the 1980s with new hits including ‘I Feel Like Buddy Holly’, on which he both evokes and sounds like the bespectacled rock’n’roller had he been produced by Trevor Horn.
In the 1990s he found God – at Waterloo Station apparently, a place where one might be more likely to experience a loss of faith. He acted as well as sang, playing The Green Cross Code Man – and, as his stage persona had suggested he should, The Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He married three times, had four children, and lived under his third name to the end – which came in 2014 from cancer. He was cremated in Swansea – a case of ashes to ashes, stardust to dust.
These days Stardust’s star has fallen, fallen so far that his name appears after Alvin and the Chipmunks among Spotify’s Alvins. And so it is for this strange triple life that he is most noteworthy now.
Glam rock / The strange life of Alvin Stardust
11
0
05.12.2023
He had mutton chop sideburns, a vast quiff and was dressed in black leather, even down to murderers’ gloves, over which he wore enormous silver rings, which he then wiggled in a beckoning fashion while staring suggestively into the camera.
Nevermind hiding behind the sofa during Dr Who – for me, in December 1973, as a six-year-old nurtured on bubblegum pop, the debut appearance on Top of the Pops of Alvin Stardust, with his rock’n’roll Child Catcher look, was the most menacing thing I had ever seen.
In the 1990s he found God – at Waterloo Station apparently, a place where one might be more likely to experience a loss of faith
Frightening in a dark panto way it may have been – but its performer was a concoction. ‘Alvin Stardust’ was a character, the name crudely drawn to attempt to tap into the success of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album from the previous year and graft a bit of his glam stylings onto the older rock’n’roll sound and look of a Gene Vincent.
And just a couple of weeks before he appeared on TOTP, Stardust was being played by someone else entirely, one Peter Shelley. The pop producer had conceived of this new Stardust, then wrote, produced and sang his debut single. Shelley had even appeared on regional TV as Stardust before deciding at the eleventh hour, as the record began to attract attention, that he had no appetite for pop stardom himself – and casting around for an Alvin stand-in.
The candidate........
© The Spectator
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