Lynn Annette Ripley[1] (15 July 1948 – 21 May 2015), better known by the stage name Twinkle, was an English singer-songwriter. She had chart success in the 1960s with her songs "Terry" and "Golden Lights".
Twinkle | |
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![]() Twinkle in 1964 | |
Background information | |
Birth name | Lynn Annette Ripley |
Also known as | Twinkle Ripley |
Born | (1948-07-15)15 July 1948 Surbiton, Surrey, England |
Died | 21 May 2015(2015-05-21) (aged 66) Isle of Wight, England |
Genres | Pop music |
Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter |
Instrument(s) | Vocals |
Years active | 1963–1980s |
Labels | Decca Records |
Born in Surbiton, Surrey, into a well-to-do family, Ripley was known to her family as Twinkle. She attended Queen's Gate School with Camilla Shand, later Queen of the United Kingdom, and was the aunt of actress Fay Ripley.[2]
Twinkle owed her rapid entry into the recording studio at the age of 16 to her then-boyfriend Dec Cluskey, of the popular vocal group The Bachelors, who was introduced to her by her sister, music journalist Dawn James, and who passed on to his manager a demo that Twinkle's father played to him.[3] Her song Terry was a teenage tragedy song about the death of a boyfriend in a motorcycle crash. Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page and Bobby Graham were among the high-profile star session musicians who played on the recording,[3] which conjured up a dark mood with its doleful backing vocals, spooky organ, 12-string guitar and slow, emphatic rhythm arranged by Phil Coulter. The theme was of a common type for the era: it bore some similarities to the Shangri-Las' slightly earlier "Leader of the Pack" (1964), but the record caused a furore, accusations of bad taste leading to a ban from the BBC.[3]
The follow-up, Golden Lights, was also written by Twinkle, with a B-side again by producer Tommy Scott.[4] By then Cluskey was her ex-boyfriend: Twinkle dated Peter Noone in 1965.[1] The lyric expresses disillusionment with the pop business: her EP track "A Lonely Singing Doll", the English-language version of France Gall's 1965 winning Eurovision Song Contest song for Luxembourg, "Poupée de cire, poupée de son", originally written by Serge Gainsbourg, returned to a theme similar to "Golden Lights". "Johnny" continued to explore dangerous territory, this time that of a childhood friend who becomes a criminal, but it seems the pressure to produce "another Terry" led her producers to pass over her own material, for "Tommy", a song written for Reparata and the Delrons and "The End of the World" a tune composed for Skeeter Davis. Twinkle made few live appearances but performed Terry at the annual New Musical Express hit concerts.[5] After recording six singles for Decca Records she "retired" at the age of eighteen in 1966.[3]
In 1969 she recorded a self-written single, the Tamla Motown-styled "Micky", backed by "Darby and Joan", both produced by Mike d'Abo (also among the relatively few pop musicians of a privileged background in that era) for the Instant label.[1] The single vanished, unpublicised. In the ensuing years, unsigned and working in music for advertising, she recorded a suite of songs inspired by her relationship with "Micky", the actor/model Michael Hannah, who was killed in an air-crash in 1974. These remained unreleased until they were included on CD compilations. Her later recordings appeared under the name Twinkle Ripley. She recorded a 1975 single, "Smoochie" with her father, Sidney Ripley as "Bill & Coo".[6]
In the 1980s "Golden Lights" was covered by The Smiths and appeared on their compilation albums The World Won't Listen and Louder Than Bombs while in 1983 Cindy & The Saffrons covered "Terry".[7] "Terry" was also covered by Mandy Smith in 1987, but her highly publicised version was pulled from release after negative feedback.[8] It was later issued on a special edition of her album, Mandy.[9]
Photographic publicity portraits of Twinkle taken in the mid-1960s are exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery.[10]
In 1972, she married actor-model Graham Rogers,[11] who starred in Milk Tray chocolate adverts. They had two children, Michael and Amber.
On 21 May 2015, Twinkle died at 66 on the Isle of Wight, after a five-year battle with liver cancer.[12]
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