The 16th of June 2009 is the tenth anniversary of the apparent suicide of Screaming Lord Sutch, the most famous English pop star who never had a hit, and who remains the longest-serving party leader in British politics. It will, in passing, also tie-in with the general release of the acclaimed Telstar biopic of Joe Meek - with Justin Hawkins as  Sutch, and based on the West End play that was one of the most emotionally draining presentations I've ever witnessed.
       Though asked, I could make no immediate printable comment about David Sutch at the time of his demise. Every death is supposed to diminish us, but his 'diminished' me a damn sight more than others - including those of Presley and Lennon.
       I'd been introduced to David at a village fete in Devon in 1987. After that, he hired me intermittently as keyboard player with his backing Savages, beginning with an open-air charity spectacular at Covent Garden (which included a remarkable duet by Sutch and actor
Christopher Quinten ['Brian Tilsley' of Coronation Street]), and  ending at a 1997 wedding reception in Peterborough where I heard his footsteps walk off the stage to a barely polite spatter of clapping.  The happy couple and their guests may have been off by the ghoulish
vulgarity that followed our glorious leader's emergence from a coffin while we cranked out the opening bars of Chopin's Funeral March.
       In reciprocation, David made a cameo appearance during one of my own recitals in Bracknell. A week later, he'd been present less conspicuous at my lecture at the University of Reading about 'mortality in the popular song'. Neither of us could have known then
that Graham Sharpe's biography The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch (Aurum, 2005) was to take its very title from an opus in this vein  that I composed shortly after David's burial, an event that was both  ridiculous and moving. The lyrics are quoted in full on page 225, and my recording - produced by Wreckless Eric, and embracing samplings of
his Lordship's voice - was issued on the 'various artists' album 9 x 2: English Contemporary Chanson in 2002.
      Looking back, David and I had become mighty close - particularly during those final desperate months - but I couldn't help but feel a frequent sense of wonderment as if the  situations in which we were  involved weren't quite real. The previous autumn, for instance, we  were both contracted to be 'personalities' at a weekend record fayre  in Newcastle. On Saturday morning, the lady of the house where we were  staying woke me ay 6 a.m. because David's yappy little terrier, Rosie, had run off during the night. David couldn't be raised - so could I go and look for her? Half-an-hour later, I was staggering along the
pavement with a snarling dog in my arms, blood streaming from both hands, and subject to the stares of work-bound Geordies. After a morning in the city hospital, I arrived at the fayre where, naturally, Sutch had summoned the press. With EX-SAVAGE SAVAGED! a prototypical headline, it had seeped through to the London Evening Standard by the  following Tuesday.
       An exploit that the media considered less important took place a fortnight later. With a host of his UK rock 'n' roll contemporaries, Sutch mounted the stage at Sudbury's Rising Sun pub auditorium to pay musical respects at a tribute concert to an ailing Wee Willie Harris, bruited once as the kingdom's 'answer' to Jerry Lee Lewis. On that
occasion, it struck me fleetingly that, for keeping the faith for so long, the title of British Elvis ought to belong not to someone like Cliff Richard, Billy Fury or Johnny Kidd, but to the country's  godfather of horror-rock - whose most renowned track, 1963's 'Jack The Ripper', had been disadvantaged by an outright ban on all BBC airwaves.  Nevertheless, an alarming promotional film found its way onto the short-lived Scorpitone, a video juke box prevalent in the early 1960s. I was present in Macari's cafe in Aldershot when two bus conductors spent their entire lunch hour and half a satchel of silver watching 'Jack The Ripper' repeatedly, faces alight with the vacant ecstasy once reserved for public hangings.
       Sudbury was the last time I saw David perform. However, for those who derive deep and lasting pleasure from collating and  discussing eerie allusions in pop, there might be hours of enjoyable time-wasting in analysing the raw information that his was one of an
uncanny number of early deaths among artists once under the aegis of console boffin Meek. As well as Sutch, the past decade has said goodbye to Heinz Burt, songwriter Geoff Goddard, Kim Roberts - one of few fillies in Meek's stable - Denis D'Ell of The Honeycombs, Alan Caddy (guitarist with The Tornados) and, in June 2007, Tony Dangerfield, a Savage who was singled out by Meek for solo renown that  wasn't to be. Incidentally, I wrote the respective Guardian obituaries for most of these.
       There's also David's unusual behaviour after the days had dwindled down to a few. It was then that, notoriously tight-fisted, he bought me lunch in a cafe near the house in South Harrow where he'd be  found. As unprecedented was the bear-hug rather than the customary hand shake when we parted that afternoon. Yet he'd intimated that things seemed to be looking up for him, what with starring in an ITV breakfast cereal commercial, and a more apposite engagement in a Halloe'en 'Feast Of Sixties Trash And Exotica' in Las Vegas.The residual depression which had been exacerbated by his mother's death in 1997 - and that of Rosie more recently - was still evident, but he was trying to be optimistic about a long road having no turning.
       A week before he died, Sutch sang his swansong at South London's Brixton Academy during a Rolling Stones Fan Convention. If feeling under the weather, he gave 'em a game 'Roll Over Beethoven', albeit drooping slightly, but recovered by the big finish, A few moments were to be broadcasted on BBC television's Network South-East magazine in the news item about the funeral - and, over the play-out and a palpable wave of goodwill, the nation saw Screaming Lord Sutch grin, wave at the baying blackness and, every inch a star, vanish into the wings forever.