Linda Lewis

Linda Lewis - It's In His Kiss



Lewis was equally at home singing folk, pop, rock, jazz, funk and soul, yet she said she underachieved because of the men around her. She once likened herself to a kite with a succession of men holding the string. Her two marriages ended in divorce, to Jim Cregan, Rod Stewart’s guitarist and musical director, and to Neil Warnock, head of a worldwide booking agency, whom she described as “very controlling”.

Her career also coincided with the era of free love, which was often more liberating for the men involved. The cast list of her lovers included Marc Bolan, Stevens, Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott. “In those days everyone slept with everyone. If you said no, you were considered uptight,” she recalled. She always felt guilty afterwards and went to confession, where she found the priest wanted every intimate detail.

The list of her lovers might also have included Muhammad Ali, had not her first husband arrived at the wrong moment one drunken night in 1979 after the heavyweight champion had invited her up to his hotel suite. “’What you doing with that white honkey?” Ali asked her when Cregan appeared at the door. She made her excuses and left. “He expected me to stay . . . and I wish I had,” she said later.

One who was not among her conquests was Elton John, although when he told her that he wished he could have children, she offered her services as a surrogate mother. He did not take up the offer.

Linda Ann Fredericks was born in 1950 in east London, the eldest of six children with different fathers. Her Jamaican mother enrolled her at a stage school run by Peggy O’Farrell when she was three. She made a brief appearance in the 1961 film A Taste Of Honey but hated the school and was relieved when her mother could no longer afford the fees.

When Linda was 14 her mother took her to a club in Southend, Essex, where John Lee Hooker was playing and pushed her on stage to sing with him. In the audience was the record producer Ian “Sammy” Samwell, who took her under his wing and got her a recording contract with Polydor, who suggested she change her surname.

She made only one single for the label and by the late 1960s was living with Samwell in a hippy squat in Hampstead, where regular visitors included Bolan, Bowie, Stevens and other musicians. Singing in the kitchen one day she was heard by an executive from Warner Brothers who signed her to the Reprise label, for whom she recorded much of her best work.

Booked to play the first Glastonbury festival in 1970, she sat up all night tripping on LSD with Bowie. “I was convinced I had returned to the court of King Arthur and I danced with a tree,” she remembered. When she appeared on stage the next day, she picked a total stranger out of the audience to accompany her on bongos.

After marrying Cregan in 1977 she moved to Los Angeles, where “I was madder than Amy Winehouse.” One night at a party, blitzed on cocaine, she failed to recognise Keith Richards and asked him if he was a member of Paul McCartney’s Wings.

By 1980 she was divorced and to dry out went to live in the wilds of Colorado, where she brought up her adopted son Jess, a musician, who survives her. Homesick for London, she watched EastEnders on cable TV.

Lewis eventually moved back there in the mid-1990s, resumed her career and returned to play at Glastonbury more than 30 years after her first appearance. “Would I do it all again? No,” she wrote. “Would I do some of it again? Certainly.”

Linda Lewis, singer, was born on September 27, 1950. She died of undisclosed causes on May 3, 2023, aged 72