Screaming Lord Sutch: Sutch's Life

On June 19, 1999, Screaming Lord David Edgar Sutch climbed into his Big Black Coffin and pulled down the lid for the last time. Virtually unknown in the US, he is fondly remembered in England as a true rock original and the founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party...always one lost election away from number 10 Downing Street. Regarded as a cartoonish character for his antics, he ultimately proved to be a more tragic figure.

Dave Sutch was born in 1940 to a working-class couple in Hampstead. Sutch's father, a War Reserve policeman, was killed during the London Blitz when he ran his motorcycle into a concrete bomb shelter. Annie Sutch raised her son alone and Little Lord Sutch spent his formative years growing up amid the dark insanity of World War II and the grim years of rationing and rebuilding that followed it.

During this time of hardship, Sutch was introduced to leopardskin jackets and Winston Churchill. Both encounters had a profound impact that manifested itself for the rest of his life - one as an affectation of his rock and roll lifestyle - the other as his political spirit guide. He even combines these two fetishes in his autobiography:

"My gran in Yorkshire made me a lovely little siren suit like the one Winston Churchill wore but trimmed with leopardskin fabric, which I proudly wore when my mother took me down to the local park."[1]

Sutch goes on to recall an encounter with the larger-than-life Prime Minister, the veracity of which is left as an exercise for the reader:

"'Now, Sutch, get out of my way, you little squirt!' he shouted, and as he did so he took his fat cigar from his mouth and stubbed it out on my outstretched, pleading hand...By that branding he had passed the torch of his destiny, and that of the British people, to little me."[1]

Imbued with a love of costumed buffoonery and carrying the butt-end of the nation's destiny burned on his palm, Sutch grew up entranced by both the theatrical and political stages. Like most British teenagers, he was bored by the stodgy music foisted upon the public by the BBC and found enlightenment in the forbidden sounds of American rock and roll that emanated from Radio Luxembourg. He let his hair grow long and began to hang out with other jukebox ne'er-do-wells at the Cannibal Pot coffee shop in Sudbury, where he would soon come face-to-face with the musical side of his destiny.

Inspired by Universal horror film stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, Sutch looked for a way to combine his love of rock and roll with his interest in the macabre. Like Frankenstein's monster, all he needed was a little electricity to get him going...enter drummer Carlo Little and the incipient Savages. Carlo had just gotten out of the army in 1960 and was also hanging out at the Cannibal Pot. He and Sutch bonded immediately over their love of American rock and a shared disgust with parent-friendly poseurs like Cliff Richard and Pat Boone. They decided to form a band, although at that point Sutch was more inclined to take on the role of manager rather than lead singer. They enlisted Bernie Watson on guitar, guitarist/bassist Rick Brown, and future Stones keyboard session-man Nicky Hopkins to complete the ensemble and began practicing in the pub next door to the Cannibal Pot. Carlo recalls the moment that young Dave Sutch was transformed into Screaming Lord Sutch:

"During a 12-bar rock and roll jam Bernie screamed his guitar loudly. Excited by his playing Sutch went crazy with his head, his hair fell down the full 18 inches, and he screamed his head off, 'Yeah, man!' it was such a funny sight that none of us could play any longer for laughing."[2]

Soon the band was playing a couple of gigs a month. Sutch was honing his stagecraft and was turning into an acceptable song-shouter in the style of Little Richard. The band built up a small coterie of followers, but their momentum was halted when Carlo was offered a semiprofessional gig and left the band. Dave auditioned at another coffee shop called the Two I's where, ironically, some of the rock pretenders he had pooh-poohed so vehemently had been discovered.

To set himself apart from the usual crowd of pomaded and pompadoured Elvis lookalikes, he'd taken a pair of buffalo horns, glued them onto a motorcycle helmet, and ripped the sleeves off of his aunt's leopardskin coat. To his delight and his aunt's consternation, he aced the audition and began performing at local venues where he stunned audiences with screamed, shouted, and probably farted renditions of Elvis tunes. The money from these gigs went to pay his aunt for her ruined leopardskin jacket.

Sutch and Carlo regrouped the Savages in 1961. Dave was now writing his own songs in a style he dubbed "Rock 'n' Horror" with titles like "Monster in Black Tights", "All Black and Hairy", and "Jack the Ripper". Unlike the relatively harmless Halloween stylings of Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash" which topped the US charts a year later, Sutch's lyrics were drenched in gore and barely-disguised lust. The following lines from "My Big Black Coffin" attest to the latter:

"I got two horns on my head and a twinkle in my eye
I got two feet of hair and it makes the chicks all sigh
When I hit them with my great club, start to holler and cry"

The Savages hit the road with a shocking stage show and "heavy" sound that enthralled and inspired bored teens and serious musicians alike. The show went something like this: first the band ran through the crowd wearing leopardskin leotards or loud orange shirts with white boots then launched into a raunchy instrumental version of "Lucille". Sutch was carried onstage by 4 men dressed as monks in a coffin just like his hero Screamin' Jay Hawkins. From inside the casket, Sutch emitted a series of bloodcurdling screams and moans before emerging to sing "My Big Black Coffin".

His appearance was calculated to whip the audience of teenage girls into a frenzy of mass panic and hysteria. As Sutch tells it, the plan seemed to work:

"I was a nasty sight, my face covered with thick horror makeup of unearthly white, with black and red round the eyes to make me look as though I'd just been dug up...To round off the effect I had a mouthful of green gunge which I spat over the audience. The halls were always so packed that the girls couldn't get away and I would bend down and rub the rubbery hands over their faces and hair to get them screaming."[1]

After scaring the bejesus out of his female fans, Sutch started sweatin' to the oldies. He had a wacky prop for every song: for "Sweet Little Sixteen" he donned a pair of plastic breasts, the horned helmet appeared during Bobby Darin's "Bull Moose", and he pranced around a flaming kettle and pretended to set his long hair alight for "Great Balls of Fire". Other audience members like Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, and future members of Led Zeppelin were more interested in the Savages' authentic blues-rock sound than the Grand Guignol stylings of their leader. Sutch ended each show with "Jack the Ripper", which featured a mock stabbing and disembowelment, and climaxed with a sword duel between Saucy Jack and the Police that progressed from daggers all the way to gigantic broadswords.

The Savages hooked up with legendary producer Joe Meek in 1961 to record "My Big Black Coffin" as their first single. Meek and Sutch got along well as they were both publicity-crazed outcasts, and the songs were a natural outlet for Meek's tendencies towards over-the-top production values. They recorded in Meek's flat, which he had converted into a studio. From his living room, Joe orchestrated the various band members who'd been separated in different rooms - Sutch laid down his vocal track from the bathroom. Meek improved upon the stage show's sound effects by adding a long intro to the song featuring chain rattling, howling wind, and moans so orgasmic they sounded like a porno soundtrack. The single was renamed "Till the Following Night" to garner more airplay and released upon an unsuspecting populace.

The song's violent imagery and unbridled horniness placed it in immediate conflict with the guardians of public morals at the BBC, and Auntie Beeb promptly banned it. Once again the old showbiz axiom, "No publicity is bad publicity" proved true and the Savages watched their already wildly successful stage act become even more popular. Meek and Sutch churned out 5 more horror-themed singles, but none managed to dent the charts. Sutch and Meek parted ways over a money dispute in 1965.

Having conquered the hearts and minds of Britain's teenagers, Sutch decided to try and ride his fame into political office, figuring that the extra publicity might improve his record sales if nothing else. He founded the National Teenage Party in 1963 after rejecting more inflammatory monikers like the Sod 'Em All Party. The NTP's platform called for lowering the legal voting age and commercializing public radio. Sensing a golden opportunity to follow his cigar-branded destiny when scandal-tainted John Profumo resigned from Parliament, Sutch plunked down his cash deposit to get on the ballot in Profumo's district of Stratford-upon-Avon and began rocking the vote. Convinced that Sutch was a sex-crazed madman (which wasn't far wrong, actually), his candidacy created a furor in Willie Shakespeare's old crib. He lost the race and his deposit - the first of many.

In 1964 Sutch's pirate ship hoisted the Jolly Roger and fired a shot across the bow of the BBC. Sutch literally jumpstarted British commercial radio by using banks of truck batteries to power a low-watt transmitter from an abandoned fort on an island in the Thames estuary. Radio Sutch blanketed the airwaves with rock music (including Sutch's, 'natch) and readings from naughty bedroom classics like "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and "Fanny Hill". Unfortunately, its broadcast range didn't extend more than about 60 meters. Finally, the British Government sent in a battleship to scare the squatters out of the old fort. Sutch put up a swashbuckling defense and had the British press on his side, but eventually backed off, his point made.

In 1967, Dave Sutch legally changed his name to Lord Sutch and took to driving around London in a 1955 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow with a Union Jack painted on the bonnet and the interior done up in...what else...leopardskin. By this time, the Savages' line-up was a revolving door through which future mainstays of Brit-rock like Ritchie Blackmore, Matthew Fisher, Jeff Beck, and Noel Redding passed freely.

It was the end of the 60s. Lord Sutch had grown weary of the grind and was looking across the Pond at new horizons in America. He made a deal with Carnaby Street fashion designers to trade hip clothing with the local savages in exchange for wampum, then stashed the Roller in the hold of the Queen Elizabeth and sailed across the ocean to the New World.

He found the natives to be a simple lot who frequently believed that he was a real British nobleman and treated him accordingly. In return he plied them with crushed-velvet jackets, silk cravats, psychedelic tartans, and Cuban heels. After arriving in LA, Lord Dave decided that he'd found the Motherlode of loonies and settled in for a stay. He struck up a friendship with the self-styled mayor of Sunset Strip Rodney Bingenheimer, who soon had Sutch making the LA party scene and rubbing elbows with the entertainment elite. Through the auspices of Mayor Bingenheimer, Sutch met LA model Thann Rendessy, with whom he produced his only male heir, Tristan Lord Sutch.

In 1970 Sutch called in the favors owed him by his ex-bandmates and cut a record, "Heavy Friends". Featuring 6 songs cowritten by Jimmy Page, it abandoned his horror trappings in favor of a more mainstream sound. The LP wasn't much of a showcase for Sutch, but record buyers snapped it up anyway for the cool picture of the Union Jack Roller on the cover and guest stars like Jeff Beck, Page and Bonham, Noel Redding, and Nicky Hopkins.

He followed up this minor success with an all-star live album, "Hands of Jack the Ripper" Sutch neglected to tell the performers it was being recorded, which ruffled some feathers when they spied it on the record racks a few months later. "Ripper" is a partial return to form and is memorable for a 9-minute version of the title song during which Sutch invokes the Hands of the Ripper to dispatch pesky characters like Harold Wilson and the dreaded Engelbert Humperdinck.

After getting mugged and losing the Roller to thieves, he left LA and returned permanently to England. Soon he was separated from Thann and adrift musically and politically. In an attempt to call attention to his return, Sutch issued an LP in 1980 called "Alive and Well" and revived the NTP as the Monster Raving Loony Party in 1983. The album vanished without a trace, but the Loonies went on to make political history in the UK...well, sort of.

Running for office whenever the opportunity arose, he entreated the local populace to "Vote for Insanity: You know it makes sense!" and they responded by failing to elect him 43 times in a row. He kept up a furious musical pace, playing up to 200 gigs a year to pay for his electoral jones. Despite his apparent lack of success, much of the Loony platform found its way into law: the teenage vote, the commercialization of radio, and longer hours for licensed pubs. On the other side of their mad coinage, there was no shortage of failed Loony policies either:

- Granting family pets the right to vote

- Filling the Dartmoor Wine Lakes with mackerel so they come out already pickled

- Demoting John Major to Private

- Setting accountants in concrete and using them as traffic barriers

In the 90s Lord Sutch published his autobiography and appeared as himself in a made-for-TV movie called "A Woman's Guide to Adultery." His beloved mother passed away in 1997, and in 1999 his faithful dog Splodge (whom he had once entered as a candidate in a London election) followed her. That same year, he was forced to declare the Loonies bankrupt. Depressed and heavily medicated, he hung himself shortly thereafter and was found in his mother's house, dead at 58 years of age.

Despite his untimely end, Lord Sutch left behind a brilliant legacy as the Jack T. Ripper of British rock and roll, the Long John Silver of pirate radio, and the Winston Churchill of political tomfoolery.

Rock's most monstrous raving loony may be gone, but his great, batlike wings still cast a horrifying and humorous shadow over us all...and that's probably just the way he'd want it.

[1] From "Life as Sutch", by Lord David Sutch, Copyright 1991

[2] From "Carlo Little: The Savages Years", reprinted courtesy of Giselle Rawlins/Carlo Little, Copyright 1999