| BILLY FURY, the pop singer
who was one of Britain's first rock'n'roll stars, has died of a
heart attack in London. He was 41.
Known in the first years of his career as "Britain's own Elvis
Presley", he first came to prominence in January 1959 with the
record Maybe Tomorrow. In the next 15 years he had 26 other
hit recordings and his records spent more time in the popular music
charts than any other pop star except the Beatles and Elvis Presley
himself.
Fury was thin and rather weakly looking and his career was
affected by the heart condition that first attacked him when he was
a child. It gave him a shy and reserved manner untypical of
rock'n'roll singers. His illness also contributed to one of his
greatest hobbies, ornithology, which first interested him as a child
when he was convalescing. As an adult he regularly spent time at his
farm in Wales watching birds.
Fury, whose real name was Ronald Wycherley, was born in Garston,
Liverpool, in 1941. He started singing in the clubs around Liverpool
which were to spawn the Merseyside pop music revolution.
In the 1960s his hits, many of which he wrote himself, included
Halfway to Paradise and Like I've Never Been Gone. In
the 1970s Fury's career began to wane as fashions in pop music
changed and he was struck by the first of a series of heart attacks
at the age of 30.
Fury did not receive the princely rewards from rock'n'roll that
many later stars did. In 1978 he appeared in a bankruptcy court with
tax debts of more than £16,000. He promised to repay some of the
money by reviving his hits and was granted an immediate discharge.
Two years earlier he described in a newspaper interview how he
had learnt to live with the knowledge that his life could end
suddenly. He said that at 14, when he developed rheumatic fever, he
overheard a doctor telling his mother that he would be dead by the
time he was 30. "In self-defence I have cultivated a death wish," he
said. "I drove recklessly, I wrote off a lot of cars. But I came
through all my accidents practically unscathed."
Married as a young man but divorced quickly, Fury lived for the
last 12 years of his life with Lisa Rosen. He had no children.
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