Vince Taylor

CULT HERO: Vince Taylor was the original Leper Messiah, recognised as being one of the first and most genuine of UK rock'n'rollers, the man who inspired David Bowie's creation, Ziggy Stardust, and who influenced The Clash. "The guy was unbelievable," Bowie told Mojo magazine a couple of years ago, "just the weirdest kind of creature. I'm not sure if I held him up as an idol or something not to become."

The Clash's Joe Strummer, who sang Taylor's 1959 hit Brand New Cadillac on the band's London Calling album, recalled: "Vince Taylor was the beginning of British rock'n'roll. Before him there was nothing. He was a miracle."

Born in 1939 (as Brian Holden), Taylor and his family moved to the US after the second World War. By the mid-1950s, the family had moved to California, where Taylor's sister married Joe Barbera, of the famous Hanna-Barbera cartoon partnership. It was in Los Angeles that Taylor - clearly influenced by Elvis Presley - began to hone his act in various LA nightclubs. He had the looks, too: straight teeth, screen idol features, hair just so. He planned to move back to Britain, where the rock'n'roll boom was just taking off.

When he arrived in London in the late 1950s, Vince Taylor made such an impact that within a few months he was signed by EMI. At gigs, he would show all the signs of typical rock'n'roll magnetism, the screams from the women in the audience drowning out his weak voice, his only superficial flaw.

Trips to Europe proved somewhat more chaotic, as his performances - with Taylor dressed in black leathers, wearing make-up, throwing himself about on stage as if in an epileptic fit - induced riots.

Months of this exacting routine, however, began to take its toll as Taylor started to fall prey to the lure of drugs. Come 1964, Taylor was on the edge, his diet of drugs, wine and an increasing God complex leading to his eventual downfall. From the mid-1960s, he drifted from club to club in London, claiming to anyone who would listen that he was the Son of God, his food intake consisting solely of eggs.

In 1966, he met a young, up-and-coming rocker called David Jones (soon to become David Bowie), and spoke to him of a world where aliens existed, in thrall to a mysterious New Messiah.

While Bowie was nurturing a concept that would make him an enduring rock star, Vince Taylor spent most of the remainder of his life in France, playing occasional gigs while valiantly trying to tackle his alcoholism and schizophrenia.

He died of cancer in 1991, a forgotten article of rock'n'roll history, his most lasting legacy not his music but being the inspiration behind one of rock music's most daring concepts.