Today would have been the 81st birthday of Bernard William Jewry, had he not sadly died in 2014 at the relatively young age of 72. This wouldn’t be especially remarkable had he not spent the previous 40 years going by the name Alvin Stardust.
You may have heard some or all of this before, but it’s a remarkable (and not well-known) story. Bernard, you see, had two separate, successful, careers in music, in different decades, with different names and personas — and both times he inherited the name and persona from someone else.
He was a roadie for Johnny Theakstone and the Tremeloes in the early 1960s when they sent a tape to the BBC — under the name Shane Fenton & the Fentones.
Eventually, they heard back: they’d been successful — or at least got over the first hurdle — and been invited to audition for the show in person. Unfortunately, between the tape and the reply, their 17-year-old singer, Shane Fenton, had died.
The rest of the band had decided that was it, apparently, but when they got the BBC’s letter, Johnny/Shane’s mum asked them to keep at it, and keep the name. So Bernard the roadie became ‘Shane’, and the band had four years of relative success, including four top 40 hits.
When that fizzled out, Bernard did some management and small-scale touring. Then a man called Peter Shelley came along, who had written and recorded My Coo Ca Choo under the name Alvin Stardust to promote the record label he’d just started.
Surprised when he was invited to appear on TV as a result, he dressed up as “a glitter-suited recluse who had been living in Spain” (according to the Telegraph obituary of the man who went on to become Alvin Stardust) — and the song hit the charts. But Peter didn’t want to keep ‘being’ Alvin, so he asked Marty Wilde to do it instead. He said no, but Bernard Jewry’s manager knew just the chap… It probably made sense to go for someone who’d last seen limelight a decade earlier.
(Incidentally, Peter Shelley did put out other songs, including this, two years later. What possessed him to own up to this and not My Coo Ca Choo is anyone’s guess.
But I digress.)
Bernard/new Alvin decided not to go for the glitter suit look, and took the opportunity to refresh the character, and indeed himself. Back to the Telegraph obit:
Fenton’s chiselled features and striking blond mane had won him a select female following, so for Alvin Stardust he felt he had to reinvent himself. Modelling himself on Jack Palance in Shane, he clad himself in head-to-toe black leather and, the night before his date with destiny, dyed his hair black in his bathroom sink. When he looked in the mirror, however, he saw black streaks down the side of his face and purple stains all over his hands, which he found impossible to scrub off. “There was no way I could go on TV looking like that,” he recalled.
The next morning found him at a theatrical wigmakers: “They had these long black sideburns, perfect for covering up the stains on my face, so they fitted them right then and there.” Across the road in a ladies’ outfitters, the new Alvin Stardust bought a pair of black leather gloves to cover his stained hands.
So, he had been ‘Shane’, and now he was a character from Shane. And, of course, it worked. The record went to no.2, and the follow-up hit number 1 in March 1974, by which time, Bernard/Alvin was Music Week’s best live male act. “For a 31-year old who had been playing working men’s clubs,” says the Telegraph, “it was a dream come true”.
And it was one that lasted. When you factor in the acting years, the musicals, and the nostalgia circuit, he got 40 years out of Alvin.
