Lives remembered. Part 2: Deaths from July to December
27. 1. 2026 | Rubriky: Articles,Lives
More deaths that touched me in 2025. These stand out from the second half of the year..
[Ken Hunt, London] The satirist-songmaker and mathematician Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) was one of a kind. He died on 25 July in Cambridge Massachusetts. Born Thomas Andrew Lehrer in New York City on 9 April, musical theatre and Broadway were in his bloodstream. With his audacious wit and unerring intelligence, he was writing comic, pithy songs by the very beginning of the Fifties. His first record, Songs by Tom Lehrer in 1953 had an initial pressing of 400 copies. It quickly sold out through word of mouth. He became more than a cult sensation, assisted by a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. A second album More of Tom Lehrer was a studio recording and the live An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer added to his reputation. His subject matter often broke conventions. Getting songs banned from the radio helped. ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’ and the venereal disease anthem, ‘I Got It from Agnes’ were targets. His tongue-twisting list song, ‘The Elements’ to the tune of the ‘Major-General’s Song’ from The ;Pirates of Penzance was perfection. His songs were greatly admired in 1981 Jerry Garcia and I shared a mutual appreciation of his work. And yet he had a relatively brief musical career before he bowed out in 1962 to concentrate on academia. Of course, that wasn’t the end, but that’s the end of this story. After all, Lehrer does mean ‘teacher’ in German.
The Mexican-American conjunto, nortee
Songwriter and guitarist Terry Reid (1949-2025) died on 4 August in Rancho Mirage, California. He was born Terrance James Reid on 13 November in St Neots, Huntingdonshire. His story has been ;much told about turning down Jimmy Page’s invitation to join Led Zeppelin instead Reid suggested Robert Plant. He also turned down Ritchie Blackmore’s offers to replace their departing singer Rod Evans in Deep Purple. In 1970 Ahmet Ertegun signed Reid to Atlantic Records. When he played at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 he had David Lindley by his side and Lindley moved to England that year. Lindley left Reid to join forces with Jackson Browne. And that is the extent of the story for now. It resumes in the Martin Carthy biography.
The double-bassist and session musician Danny Thompson (1939-2025) died on 23 September in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. Born Daniel Henry Edward Thompson on 4 April in Teignmouth, Devon, he was particularly associated with his lengthy partnerships with John Martyn and Richard Thompson. In 1967 he co- founded the British folk-jazz band Pentangle with Terry Cox (drums), Bert Jansch (vocals and guitar), Jacqui McShee (vocals) and John Renbourn (vocals and guitar). His discography is dizzy-making. It ranges from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated via Tim Buckley, Kate Bush, Graham Coxon and Donovan to Cliff Richard (‘Congratulations’) and Andrew Ridgeley. A true legend of English music.
The poet, translator and playwright Tony Harrison (1937-2025) died on 26 September. Born Tony William Harrison in Beeston – the Leeds one – in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 30 April, he made dialect poetry an essential vital component of his work. A number of his plays were performed at the National Theatre in London. He adapted a cycle of three medieval English ‘mystery’ plays – with ‘mystery’ an old word for ‘trade’. He used the York and Wakefield cycles as his main sources. With music by the Home Service, The Mysteries began their staging at the Cottesloe at Theatre, the smallest of the three theatres in London’s National Theatre complex in 1977. But on Easter Saturday 1977 there was a taster of part of The Passion on the Southbank itself. People watched from Waterloo Bridge or came down the theatre level. Harrison attended, moving unrecognised through the audience. What became three plays tell an abridged biblical story from Genesis to Revelation.
In 1966 the film maker Peter Watkins (1935-2025) generated a lot of column inches for his powerful documentary-style depiction of a nuclear attack on Britain and its aftermath. The War Game was made for BBC’s prestigious Wednesday Play series but the Corporation banned it. It subsequently had cinema release and won the 1966 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The grassroots demand to view it led to community hirings and an alternative network of venues such as church and village halls, independent cinemas, town halls and the like. (I saw it in the Old Town Hall in Mitcham, Surrey in a screening organised by CND. Watkins was born on 29 October 1935 in Norbiton, close to Kingston upon Thames, in Surrey. Watkins’ films developed a style of drama which blended dramatic and documentary elements. He pioneered a pseudo-documentary style influenced by the television reportage seen during the Vietnam War which he wove into his film Culloden (1964). The television ban on The War Game lasted until July 1985 in Britain. It was televised the week before the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Watkins died on the day after his 90th birthday on 30 October 2025 in Bourganeuf, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in central France.
The vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux (1947-2025) of Muscle Shoals session and Grateful Dead fame died on 2 November in Nashville, Tennessee. She sang on Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Suspicious Minds’ and Boz Scaggs’ remarkable Atlantic LP in 1969 (the overlooked gem before the hits kept on coming). She was instrumental in getting her husband, the keyboardist Keith Godchaux into the Grateful Dead and sang with them, on Robert Hunter’s Tiger Rose and a bunch of Jerry Garcia Band spin-off groups throughout the Seventies. On 8 May 1977 she was with the Dead when they played Cornell University’s Barton Hall. It was snowing outside in New York. The show stands as a crowning moment in the Dead’s history that decade. It was released as Cornell 5/8/77 in 2017. The Godchauxs left the group in 1979 and Keith Godchaux died in a car accident in July 1980.
The artist Gertrude Degenhardt (1940-2025) died on 12 November in Greifswald. She was born Gertrude Schwell on 1 October in New York City. Her guitarist-composer daughter Annette Degenhardt died in 2022.
The English actor, playwright and theatre director Jack Shepherd (1940-2025) died on 24 November. Shepherd worked at the Royal Court Theatre from 1965 to 1969, making his first appearance on the London stage as an Officer of Dragoons in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. From 1977 to 1985 he was a member of Bill Bryden’s Cottesloe Theatre Company at the National Theatre. He played Judas in The Passion, Boamer in Lark Rise, Thomas Clarkeson in The World Turned Upside Down, and The Correspondent in Dispatches among others. Keith Dewhurst and Shepherd co-wrote the book Impossible Plays: Adventures With the Cottesloe Company. Dewhurst, Harrison and Shepherd all figure in Prince Heathen and the Age of Martin Carthy.
Jimmy Cliff (1944-2025) also died on 24 November, in his case in Kingston, Jamaica. The leading ska, rocksteady and reggae vocalist and songwriter was born James Chambers on 30 July in St. James, Jamaica. Jimmy Cliff bridged the transition from ska to reggae. He signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island label, releasing Hard Road to Travel in 1967. He also moved to England and recalled experiencing racism on a level unknown to him. Island coloured his choice of material. In 1970 he had a Top 10 hit with a cover of his fellow Island act, Cat Stevens’s ‘Wild World’. The real breakthrough came with Perry Henzell’s film masterpiece The Harder They Come in 1972 in which he cast Cliff in the lead role. Walking around Brixton and Stockwell in the years immediately after the release of the soundtrack album, its songs by Toots & the Maytals, Desmond Dekker and Cliff were the soundtrack of the street along with Bob Marley and the Wailers. Cliff’s ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ and ‘The Harder They Come’. Other evergreen songs of Cliff’s included ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ and ‘Sitting Here In Limbo’ and his cover of Johnny Nash’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. The last was incorporated into on the film soundtrack to the Jamaican bobsled drama, Cool Runnings in 1994.
The playwright and scriptwriter Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) died on 29 November. He was born Tomáš Sträussler on 3 July 1937 in Zlín in Czechoslovakia. With the Nazi occupation of his homeland an inevitability, his family succeeded in fleeing abroad. They reached Singapore before the Japanese occupied the region. He landed up in British India where he spent three years at a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Himalayas before his mother and her two sons were able to reach England in 1946. The Czech language played no part in his life. His career and life were too wide-ranging to cover here. However, of particular interest to me was his play Rock ‘n’ Roll, which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 3 June 2006. Set in Cambridge and Prague, it expressed Stoppard’s passionate interest in Alexander Dubček and the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Warsaw Pact’s suppression of Czechoslovakia’s dream of liberalisation. Stoppard wove in Václav Havel and the Plastic People of the Universe into the Czechoslovak setting and the songs of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and The Beach Boys into the British one. At one point a character says, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy: it’s the counting.” That was typical of Stoppard’s arch wit.
In 2017 Barbara Dickson was asked who had inspired her the most in her career. She replied that the “Scottish singer-songwriter Archie Fisher was the greatest influence on me. And James Taylor. He still pushes the envelope.” Whether as a folksinger, songwriter or broadcaster, Archie Fisher (1939-2025) was a leading figure in the Scottish folk revival and the acoustic music scene. Born on 23 October 1939 in Glasgow, he was the second of eight children and the only son born to John and Morag Fisher. Of the children three became leading figures in the Scottish folk scene. The other two being Ray Fisher and the youngest of the brood, Priscilla who as a member of the Singing Kettle became a major children’s entertainer in her homeland. Encouraged by a teacher school at Norman Buchan, Ray and Archie Fisher dived deep into folk music. They recorded an EP Far Over the Forth which Topic put out in 1961, followed by The Fisher Family’s Traditional & New Songs From Scotland in 1966. This included him and Ray with their sisters Cindy, Joyce, Audrey and Priscilla. Archie also played guitar. Dickson and Fisher recorded together. The first album The Fate o’ Charlie was Jacobite songs in 1969, and then Thro’ the Recent Years in 1970. As a songwriter he was best known for ‘The Final Trawl’, ‘The Witch of the Westmorlands’ (originally ‘Westmerlands’) and ‘The Shipyard Apprentice’ (alternatively titled ‘The Fairfield Crane), co-written with Norman Buchan and Bobby Campbell. Fairport Convention and Eva Cassidy covered his ‘Dark-Eyed Molly’. During his tenure as the director of the Edinburgh Folk Festival from 1988 to 1992, he raised the festival’s profile to new heights. For his final year he booked the Scottish folk supergroup, Clan Alba. Through BBC Scotland’s Travelling Folk series from 1983 to 2010, he became nationally known as a broadcaster of repute. He died on 1 November.
My good friend Aparna Banerji of The Tribune alerted me to the death of the Jalandhar-based, Punjabi vocalist Ustad Puran Shah (1953-2025) on 22 December. A hereditary mirasi vocalist, his influence lives on “in his son, Master Saleem, and disciples like Hans Raj Hans and Jasbir Jassi”. The Mirasi traditionally were the genealogists of a number of communities in Northern India and Pakistan.
Also remembering my good friend, Nigel O’Neill (1947-2025) who died on 15 January. He used to sit at one table down the pub at lunchtime doing multiple crossword and Sudoku puzzles while I would be sitting at another copy-editing that morning’s copy, often an obituary on afternoon turnaround. One day we struck up a conversation, started sharing the same big table, and it led to a friendship of several decades.