He started learning classical piano at the age of six. Hiseman and Heckstall-Smith played briefly with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers before forming successful prog-jazzers Colosseum. My vision of that band was like a mixture of outlaws and pioneers and whenever I sing that song, it’s with me. When he walked into a room, no one else mattered.
Graham John Clifton Bond was a lonely, asthmatic kid, bullied for being overweight. He’d also ripped off some drug dealer, which is why he gave himself up at the police station. But he just didn’t know. Nationality: England Executive summary: Influential blues keyboardist Some claimed that drug dealers chased Bond into the Tube station and down to the platform at the end of his life, while others claimed he had simply lost a battle against an occult obsession stronger than him. He would just not let you in.” puts the hex on a record company suit who’d done him wrong.Bond convinced the staff to allow Olsen to bring in the whole band so they could play fort the patients. They were the best audience I’ve ever had. After spending the summer of ’57 tinkling cocktail ivories in Majorca, Bond started his invasion of London’s happening jazz scene. His funeral took place at the South London Crematorium in Streatham Park, where Jack Bruce played the organ. It’s most likely that his demise was self-inflicted.Drugs were starting to derail the band too. There were tears in their eyes.”“His death shocked me,” confesses Jack Bruce. We appreciate your feedback.Photo request failed. Dick and Hiseman obviously stayed with him as long as they could but Graham was increasingly unreliable.” Brown remembers Bond asking him to write lyrics and even join the Organization. He was that sort of a guy.”“He felt that very deeply and would sometimes muse about what his background actually was,” Bruce says. It was an amazingly hip band for the time.”“We were playing bigger places but getting no money,” Bruce recalls. He was becoming increasingly frustrated by the fact that many of the musicians he had worked with on the way up were becoming much more successful than him, and he simply could not understand it.
Try again later.Found more than one record for entered EmailPlease check the I'm not a robot checkboxBecoming a Find a Grave member is fast, easy and FREE. AKA Graham John Clifton Bond. After he left school, he took a job selling encyclopaedias and refrigerators, whilst playing keyboards and alto saxophone in his spare time. The Death Of Graham Bond. “Graham couldn’t even get himself a drink,” he says. The Organization was a phenomenal band. Baker quit to form a new band, recruiting Eric Clapton who, to his surprise, insisted on Jack Bruce on bass after the two had met in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.Notting Hill resident Michael Horovitz remembers seeing Bond around the neighbourhood, cutting a different figure from five years earlier. We were all freaked out when, at the end of the take, the whole studio wall caught fire!”Things became even more freaky when Bond started signing his name ‘Aleister Crowley’.
The kind of stuff we were playing was very new for British music, as was the intensity.”On May 8, 1974, Graham Bond died under a tube train. He’d always be talking it up, saying they were making music for the future. It was body music as well, powerful and sexy and groovy. Both Bond and Baker had become addicted to heroin, making for what Pete Brown calls “the archetypal junkie relationship”. Things started changing circa 1960; he married pianist Diane Eton, joined jazz guitarist Goudie Charles’s Quintet and got noticed by young performance poet Pete Brown.Pete Brown recalls the creeping rise of psychedelia in 1966 London, and says that while Graham tried to move with the times, “the material didn’t, initially anyway. The great enigma of Bond’s life and career was that, despite packed houses and plaudits from fellow musicians, he never achieved either the fame or the riches his talent deserved. After the trio played a lucrative Manchester gig in February, Bond told a disbelieving Korner he was leaving, taking Bruce and Baker with him. That song, Theme From An Imaginary Western, is about the Graham Bond Organization. The audience howled their appreciation of their wild, free-ranging approach.
Baker’s departure the following summer was effectively the end of the GBO.Duffy Power recalls seeing Bond at a TV show with Alexis Korner. Graham Bond was dead beneath the Tube train’s wheels.It wasn’t until two days later that the police were able to identify the body, which was crushed beyond all recognition.
When I first saw him at the Roundhouse in 1970, he was a monster on stage. An email has been sent to the person who requested the photo informing them that you have fulfilled their requestYou may not upload any more photos to this memorialTake a tour to see what has changed.There is a problem with your email/password.This photo was not uploaded because you have already uploaded 5 photos to this memorialThis photo was not uploaded because you have already uploaded 20 photos to this memorialFailed to report flower. Favourite answer. 3 Answers. He had everybody standing around him, smiling.”“He was his own worst enemy,” says drummer ‘Funky’ Paul Olsen, who played with Bond in his final days.
He spent his first months in a Dr Barnardo’s Home in Essex before being adopted the following March by civil servant Edwin Bond and his wife Edith.