Clyde Rawlinson

Clyde Rawlinson, photo taken outside Button House

Clyde Rawlinson is an English singer-songwriter, musician, guitarist, and poet. He's best known as the lead singer of the glam rock band V.Raptor.

Rawlinson is considered one of the pioneers of the glam rock movement of the 1970s. At the age of 29, he was attacked on the grounds of Button House by guitarist and bandmate Greg Mayhew over rumors that he was in a relationship with Mayhew's brother Adam, ultimately leading to his death.

He is the cousin to Vega McDane, though despite being family he mostly kept to the rooftop or the cellar to avoid contact from either living or the ghosts.

## Appearance

### **Physical Appearance**

Clyde Rawlinson is roughly 5'6", with dark brown hair and eyes. He although being relatively slim, he as a somewhat skinny-fat build which is emphasized by his height. No visible scars or marks.

### **Inventory**

Custom Gibson ES-335 semi-acoustic guitar he always claimed to have a spiritual connection to

A seemingly endless notebook and pen

## Personality

Clyde Rawlinson both in life and in death was always a fun loving, free spirited lad. He doesn't let his death get to him and enjoys the ghostly abilities he's obtained. Rarely ever upset, he's often found with a smile on his face, humming away to his old music.

## History

Rawlinson was born at Hackney Hospital and grew up in Stoke Newington, in the borough of Hackney, east London, the son of Maggie Rawlinson (née Bishop) and Lucasz Rawlinson, a lorry driver. His father was an Ashkenazi Jew of Russian and Polish ancestry, while his mother was of English, Welsh and Scottish descent. Moving to Wimbledon, southwest London, he fell in love with the rock and roll of Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Arthur Crudup and Chuck Berry and hung around coffee bars such as the 2i's in Soho.

Rawlinson was a pupil at Northwold Primary School, Upper Clapton. At the age of nine, he was given his first guitar and began a skiffle band. While at school, he played guitar in "Lena and the Ribbonettes," a trio whose vocalist was a 12-year-old Lena Weiss. During lunch breaks at school, he would play his guitar in the playground to a small audience of friends. At 15, he was expelled from school for bad behaviour. It was around this time that his mutant abilities began to present themselves and he found himself able to manipulate sound to create light. He was afraid of this, however, and kept this hidden.

Rawlinson briefly joined a modelling agency, appearing in a clothing catalogue for the menswear store. He was a model for the suits in their catalogues as well as for cardboard cut-outs to be displayed in shop windows. Town magazine featured him as an early example of the mod movement in a photo spread with two other models. In 1964, Rawlinson met his first manager, Gideon Urie-Fredrickson and recorded a slick commercial track backed by session musicians called "All at Once" which was never officially released.

Soon Rawlinson moved in with actor Michael Haig, who became his second manager. This encounter afforded Rawlinson a lifeline to the heart of show business, as Haig saw Rawlinson's potential while he spent hours sitting cross-legged on Haig's floor playing his acoustic guitar. Rawlinson at this time liked to appear in boho-chic, wearing a corduroy peaked cap similar to his then current source of inspiration, Bob Dylan.

Haig later sold Rawlinson's contract and recordings for £200 to his landlord, property mogul Garrett Engels, in lieu of three months' back rent, but Engels was too busy with his property empire to do anything for him. A year or so later, Rawlinson's mother pushed into Engels's office and shouted at him that he had done nothing for her son. She demanded he tear up the contract and he willingly complied. The tapes of the first two tracks produced during this recording session vanished for over 25 years before resurfacing in 1991 and selling for nearly $8,000. Their eventual release on CD in 1993 made available some of the earliest of Rawlinson's known recordings.

He signed to Jewel Records in August 1965 and recorded his debut single "The Wizard" with The Ladybirds on backing vocals, and studio session musicians playing all the instruments. "The Wizard", Rawlinson's first single, was released on 19 November 1965.

In 1966, Rawlinson turned up at Francis Scott's front door with his guitar and proclaimed that he was going to be a big star and he needed someone to make all of the arrangements. Scott invited Rawlinson in and listened to his songs. A recording session was immediately booked and the songs were very simply recorded. Only "Hippy Gumbo", a sinister-sounding, baroque folk-song, was released at the time as Rawlinson's third unsuccessful single. One song, "You Scare Me to Death," was used in a toothpaste advertisement. In early 1967 he joined Scott's own band "Margot" because they needed a songwriter and he admired Rawlinson's writing ability. The band achieved some success as a live act but sold few records. His tenure with the band was brief and the band split following an ill-fated German gig in which severe weather caused damage to the stage and injuries to himself and his bandmates. Rawlinson took some time to reassess his situation. Though he took a break from musical endeavors, his imagination was filled with new ideas and he began to write fantasy novels (The Krakenmist and Pictures Of Purple People) as well as poems and songs, sometimes finding it hard to separate facts from his own elaborate myth - he famously claimed to have spent time with a wizard in Paris who gave him secret knowledge and could levitate. The time spent with him was often alluded to but remained "mythical". Given time to reinvent himself,  Rawlinson's songwriting took off and he began writing many of the poetic and neo-romantic songs that would appear on his first albums with Velociraptor.

### **Velociraptor**

When Margot collapsed, among other problems, the band's equipment had been repossessed by their label Southland Records. But Rawlinson, unperturbed, rallied to create Velociraptor, his own rock band together with guitarist Greg Mayhew, drummer Gerry McCarthy and an unknown bass player. Scott recalled of Rawlinson: "He got a gig at the Electric Garden then put an ad in Melody Maker to get the musicians, specifically those he described as being "out there, different, more than human" as a way to recruit fellow mutants. The paper came out on Wednesday, the day of the gig. At three o'clock he was interviewing musicians, at five he was getting ready to go on stage.... It was a disaster. He just got booed off the stage. They remembered what happened and they didn't want what he was putting out there." Following this concert, Rawlinson pared the band down to just himself and McCarthy, and they continued as a psychedelic-folk rock acoustic duo, playing Rawlinson's songs, with McCarthy playing assorted hand and kit percussion and occasional bass to Rawlinson's acoustic guitars and voice. McCarthy said of Rawlinson that after the first disastrous electric gig, "He didn't have the courage to try it again; it really had been a blow to his ego... Later he told everyone he'd been forced into going acoustic because Southland had repossessed all his gear. In fact he'd been forced to go acoustic because he was scared to do anything else."

The original version of Velociraptor released three albums and four singles, flirting with the charts, reaching as high as number fifteen. One of the highlights of this era was when the duo played at the first free Hyde Park concert in 1968. Although the free-spirited, drug-taking McCarthy was fired from the group after their first American tour, they were a force within the hippie underground scene while they lasted. Their music was filled with Rawlinson's otherworldly poetry. In 1969, Rawlinson published his first and only book of poetry entitled The Warlock of Love. Although some critics dismissed it as self-indulgence, it was full of Rawlinson's florid prose and wordplay, selling 40,000 copies and in 1969-70 became one of Britain's best-selling books of poetry. It was reprinted in 1992 by the Velociraptor Appreciation Society.

In keeping with his early rock and roll interests, Rawlinson began bringing amplified guitar lines into the duo's music, buying a white Fender Stratocaster decorated with a paisley teardrop motif. After replacing McCarthy with Adam Mayhew, brother to Greg Mayhew who he took back into the band as rhythm guitar, he let the electric influences come forward even further on A Beard of Stars, the final album to be credited to Velociraptor. It closed with the song "Elemental Child", featuring a long electric guitar break influenced by Jimi Hendrix. Becoming more adventurous musically, Clyde bought a modified vintage Gibson Les Paul guitar (featured on the cover of the album V. Raptor), and then wrote and recorded his first hit "Ride a White Swan", which was dominated by a rolling hand-clapping back-beat, Rawlinson's electric guitar and Mayhew's percussion. At this time he also shortened the group's name to V. Raptor.

### **V. Raptor and Glam Rock**

Rawlinson and his producer oversaw the session for "Ride a White Swan", the single that changed Rawlinson's career which was inspired in part by Mungo Jerry's success with "In the Summertime", moving Rawlinson away from predominantly acoustic numbers to a more electric sound. Recorded on 1 July 1970 and released later that year, it made slow progress in the UK Top 40, until it finally peaked in early 1971 at number two.

Rawlinson took to wearing top hats and feather boas on stage as well as putting drops of glitter on each of his cheekbones. Stories are conflicting about his inspiration for this—some say it was introduced by his personal assistant, Anya Soro, although Rawlinson told Joanne Hawke in a 1974 interview on that he noticed the glitter on another band's dressing table prior to a photo session and casually daubed some on his face there and then. Other performers—and their fans—soon took up variations on the idea. The era of glam and glitter rock was born. Rawlinson followed "Ride a White Swan" and V. Raptor by expanding the group to a quartet with bassist Jonah Green and drummer Ted Riley, and cutting a five-minute single, "Hot Love", with a rollicking rhythm, string accents and an extended sing-along chorus inspired somewhat by "Hey Jude". It was number one for six weeks and was quickly followed by "Get It On", a grittier, more adult tune that spent four weeks in the top spot. The song was re-titled "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" when released in the United States, to avoid confusion with another song with the same title by the American band Chase. The song reached No. 10 in the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1972, the only top 40 single the band had in the US.

In November 1971, the band's record label, Gaia, released the Electric Warrior track "Jeepster" without Rawlinson's permission. Outraged, Rawlinson took advantage of the timely lapsing of his Gaia Records contract and left for EMI, who gave him his own record label, the V. Raptor Wax Co. Its bag and label featured an iconic head-and-shoulders image of Rawlinson. Despite the lack of Rawlinson's endorsement, "Jeepster" peaked at number two in the UK. In 1972, Rawlinson achieved two more British number ones with "Telegram Sam" and "Metal Guru" and two more number twos in "Children of the Revolution" and "Solid Gold Easy Action". V. Raptor record sales accounted for about six percent of total British domestic record sales. The band was reportedly selling 100,000 records a day; however, no V. Raptor single ever became a million-seller in the UK, despite many gold discs and an average of four weeks at the top per number one hit.

By late 1973, his pop star fame gradually began to wane, even though he achieved a number three hit, "20th Century Boy", in February and mid-year "The Groover" followed it to number four. "Truck On (Tyke)" missed the UK top 10 reaching only No. 12 in December. However, "Teenage Dream" from the 1974 album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow showed that Rawlinson was attempting to create richer, more involved music than he had previously attempted with V. Raptor. He expanded the line up of the band to include a second guitarist, Walter Ellison, and other studio musicians, and began to take more control over the sound and production of his records. It was then that V. Raptor would go on a temporary hiatus so that each member of the band could pursue other interests.

### **Resurgence**

In September 1975, Rawlinson returned to the UK and to the public eye from the US with a low-key tour. Rawlinson made regular appearances on the pop show Supersonic, directed by his old friend Daniel Winters and released a succession of singles, but he never attempted to regain the success of his glory days of the early 1970s.

Later in early 1977, Rawlinson was commissioned to front a six-part series called Rawlinson in which he hosted a mix of new and established bands and performed his own songs. The show was broadcast during

the post-school half-hour on ITV earmarked for children and teenagers and it was a big success.

Rawlinson's friend and fellow artist Luca Halliwell was the final guest on the last episode of Rawlinson. The two performed near the end of the show, and after Rawlinson's signoff, they began to play a bluesy song over the closing credits. Right as the vocals were about to begin, however, Rawlinson stumbled off the stage and out of the camera frame. The Halliwell's amusement was clearly visible, and the band stopped playing after a few seconds. With no time for a retake, the occurrence was aired.

### **The 1977 Incident**

September 16th 1977, V. Raptor visited the grounds of Button House for a photoshoot which was planned to bring attention to their next album, one which the band had decided to put together to break into the new music scene of the late 70s.

After an altercation between Rawlinson and guitarist Greg Mayhew, Rawlinson had wandered away from the band and crew in order take a break and have a cup of tea in relative privacy.

Although it was unknown how exactly it happened, Rawlinson was found hours later, dead under the weight of a VW Camper-van whose breaks had been tampered by Mayhew. Despite this, Mayhew was deemed innocent.

## Special Ability

Clyde has the ability to summon his guitar at will, wherever he's left it. As it's a custom Gibson ES-335, he is able to modify the sound to be either acoustic or electric depending on what he'd like to play.

## Skills

Music, poetry, writing, singing, is generally good at reading the emotions in a room, can recite Tolkien's works, avoiding physical conflict