Adam Faith (23rd June 1940 to 8th March 2003)

 

I can remember watching Adam Faith and Zoe Wanamaker in the television Love Hurts. I only knew him as an actor but he was a successful singer for many years (I think my mum quite liked him as he had been a teen idol in her days.) Here I am outside the Best Western hotel in Stoke-On-Trent where he had a fatal heart attack aged 62 in front of his 22-year-old lover. He was appearing in a play Love and Marriage at Stoke’s Regent Theatre and returned on the Friday night after a performance.

 

His real name was Terence Nelhams-Wright and he was discovered by a TV producer performing at a Soho coffee bar in central London in 1950's. He went to be one of the biggest pin-ups of British pop world in the 1960s and was the first UK artist to lodge his initial seven hits in the Top 5. Pop music is part of culture now but there wasn’t any years ago. Adam was one of the icons like Cliff Richard who was riding one of the first waves in the pop music world. He gave up his singing career in 1967 and turned to acting, probably as he’s been investing in property for years and was worth many millions of pounds. In the 1970's he found renewed fame starring in the popular TV series Budgie about a Cockney lad just out of prison.

 

I was vaguely aware of his success as a singer but I knew him in the 1980's when he was a financial advisor and wrote columns for The Daily Mail. Through the 1990's he split up with Jackie, his wife of 37 years. He’d had numerous affairs - one with tennis player Chris Evert - and Jackie wouldn’t tolerate it anymore. He was a wealthy man but lost the lot in a financial landslide: in 1999 he set up satellite television channel called The Money Channel but it imploded within two years. With debts of over £30 million Adam was declared bankrupt.

 

His heart declared itself bankrupt at this hotel on a retail estate surrounded by the usual Benny & Jerry and McDonald stores (I’d just filled the car at Morrison’s nearby.) He’d had a history of heart trouble and had a heart bypass operation 16 years earlier but nobody expected such an early end. After the show at the theatre he signed autographs for fans and enjoyed a late meal with his young girlfriend. Staff later said he didn’t look well. One newspaper reported he’d been having sex with his 22-year-old lover Tanya when his heart failed. She was a millionaire’s daughter but he’d chatted her up four years earlier when she was working as a waitress (she was ten years young than Adam’s daughter - blimey, dude!) They were watching a film in bed when he had a heart attack and his faced turned blue.

 

Tanya called an ambulance at 12:57am. The medics put Adam on a trolley and rushed him out through the hotel lobby. A girl rushed across to Tanya to reassure her, “‘Don’t worry, your dad will be all right.” The ambulance rushed them to North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary and Tanya watched as they massaged the failing heart. All efforts were in vain as Adam was in cardiac arrest and had lost consciousness. He’d probably died by this time but was pronounced dead at 2:30am. He had escaped death before, almost losing a leg and his life in a serious car crash in 1973 having fallen asleep then crashed into a tree (an eight hour operation was needed.) Tanya phoned his agent who instructed her to get out of there and go back home to Kent - immediately; she needed to be obliterated from the story before the Press shot it through with some colour.

 

She was not allowed to attend the funeral. Ever the womaniser Adam had actually been back with this wife Jackie for many years and she was furious but probably not surprised by the affair (she was in Spain when he died.) They shared a rambling red-brick farmhouse in the picturesque village in Kent. A Humanist funeral service was held at the crematorium at Tunbridge Wells, the star making his final appearance in a £600 cream wicker casket decked with flowers. It took Tanya two years to get over the shock of the death.

 

 

 

 

 

Round the back of the hotel…

 

Etruria Hall forms parts of the hotel (once for the home of Josiah Wedgwood who died here of jaw cancer)…

 

Take in the 1960s…

 

Adam was cremated at Kent and Sussex Crematorium…