FREDDIE GARR ITTY, SINGER & SONGWRITER BORN 14th NOVEMBER 1940, DIED 21st MAY  2006

Freddie Garrity, who has died aged 69 of complications connected to emphysema, was a sort of Norman Wisdom of 1960's pop. As leader of Freddie and the Dreamers, he figured that "we definitely succeeded on our visual appeal.  We were on 1TY’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, and just did a routine to take the mickey out of The Shadows.  Next week, our record went to Number Three.  We reckoned it must have been the dance, kicking our legs forward - so for our next record, we did a routine kicking our legs back, but there’ s only three ways you can kick your legs, and we never had another hit.’"

This wasn’t quite true, because self-effacing Garrity and his group enjoyed a two year run of UK chart strikes - from 1963’s ‘If You Cotta Make A Fool Of Somebody’ to ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’. Moreover, as their fortunes subsided at home, they caught on in North America, scoring a Number One with twenty-month-old ‘I’m  Telling You Now’, while Chubby Checker cashed in with ‘Do The Freddie’, which the fellow himself also took into the Top Twenty.

A talented schoolboy footballer, Garrity was steeped in his native Manchester’s popular entertainment tradition.  In 1956, at the start of a seven year engineering apprenticeship, he won a razor as first prize in a local talent contest with an Al Jolson Impersonation. Next, be taught himself guitar and, with brother Derek, formed The Red Sax, runners-up in the North-West Skiffle Competition of 1958.  Subsequent bookings in Greater Manchester kept them busy, but Garrity’s then girlfriend prevailed upon him to leave the group to sing with the less demanding John Norman Four. Nevertheless, he accepted an invitation to join The Kingfishers, who had mutated into Freddie and the Dreamers by 1961.

Their trademark comic antics were developed during a club residency in Hamburg. Though Garrity was a front man of extreme strategy for the time, the Dreamers did not skulk behind him exchanging nervous glances, but joined in the trouser-dropping, slapstick and further clowning. For aspiring pop stars, they were an odd bunch with their podgy bass player, a drummer with the oily charm of a door-to-door salesman and two guitarists, one in shifty sunglasses, the other prematurely bald.

Finally, there was spindly Freddie in his black, horn-rimmed spectacles, the geek who got sand kicked in his face by beach bullies. Once described as ‘the sort of pop star you wouldn’t mind your girlfriend liking’, be was blessed with a singular onstage vitality, a catch—phrase (‘just a minute’) and a dash of that lip—trembling pathos that some find endearing. He was also an adept composer, co—writing ‘I’m Telling You Now’, the second of two singles that each fell just short of topping the charts during the Merseybeat craze.  In parenthesis, it was noticeable that none of his ensemble’s smashes were with songs designed specifically to be funny.

Their fading from the British Top Twenty over the next year was partly because of the onslaughts of chart newcomers of similar persuasion like The Barron-Knights and The Rockin’ Berries. Significantly, their best-selling disc during this retreat was sentimental ‘I Understand’ which, with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ quoted in melodic counterpoint, restored Freddie to the Top Ten over Christmas 1984.

It was presented without a trace of comedy on a New Year’ s Eve edition of ITV’s Ready Steady Go, but as the countdown to 1965 crept closer, the group mimed an earlier smash in silly hats. Without warning, Freddie ceased pretending to sing, and began cramming paper streamers into his mouth.

A more appropriate setting for this idiocy was in pantomime where the lads had made their debut as court jesters in Chester Royalty Theatre’s Cinderella. They were to plunge deeper into this, their natural element by recording a larger proportion of humorous material such an entire album of Disney film songs and 1971’s ‘Susan’s Tuba’, which was huge hit in France if nowhere else.

The group also scotched up several film appearances, whether performing The Hollywood Argyles’ ‘Short Shorts’ with inevitable downfall of same - in 1963’s What A Crazy World or in Every Day’s A Holiday as canteen chefs with ‘What’s Cooking’, a six-minute mini—opera that anticipated The Who’s ‘A Quick One’ by three years.

A short from 1965, Cuckoo Patrol, was banned in some US states for, purportedly, belittling the Boy Scout movement, but, during the few 1965 months that were his before a foreseeable decline in North America, Garrity was omnipresent on coast-to-coast television, and box-office returns for his concerts were astronomical.

By the turn of the decade, Freddie was general factotum on the ITV children’s programme, Little Big Time for which his unforced urbanity was well-suited.

All roads led, however, to the Swinging Sixties nostalgia circuit  -though there were tangents like a role as a drug-dealing disc-jockey in ITV’s Heartbeat, a well-received role as ‘Ariel’ in a 1988 production of The Tempest, and intermittent record releases such as self-penned ‘I’ m A Singer In A Sixties Band’ and Greatest Hits And Latest Bits, a recent album that included remakes and some intriguing Garrity originals.

Freddie was writing an autobiography when a heart attack in June 2002 left him wheelchair-bound for much of the day. Yet he remained hopeful of completing ‘one last major tour with good friends and then retiring gracefully - and then staging a comeback the following year!’

He leaves a wife, Christine, and three daughters and a son from two previous marriages.

Alan Clayson