The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch

Everyone has heard of Screaming Lord Sutch. In the sixties he was one of the fathers of British rock and roll, with a wild pyrotechnic stage act years ahead of people like Alice Cooper.

By the eighties he was regularly upstaging prime ministers at general elections in his Monster Raving Loony Party garb of leopardskin coat and top hat. And always he was the Great British Eccentric available for chat shows and publicity stunts.

Most recently, his trademark number, 'Jack the Ripper', has been covered by the hippest band of all, the White Stripes.

But in 1999 Sutch died by his own hand, approaching sixty lonely and depressed, still grinding the motorways to crummy gigs, his private life in confusion.

Graham Sharpe knew him for nearly thirty years, and this first biography is an affecting, sometimes shocking portrait of an enigmatic Zelig-figure who cropped up in everyone's life and eventually found his own stalled in an endless Groundhog Day of superficiality.