Peter Skellern

Having played trombone in his school band and acted as both organist and choirmaster at a local church, composer, singer, and musician Peter Skellern completed studies at the Guildhall School of Music and graduated with honors in 1968. He later recalled that “I didn’t want to spend the next 50 years playing Chopin,” which prompted him to enter the vocal-harmony ensemble March Hare; the group renamed itself Harlan County, issued a country-pop album, and dissolved in 1971.

Skellern, by then married with two children, worked as a hotel porter in Shaftesbury, Dorset, until late 1972, when his self-written single “You’re a Lady” climbed to number three on the U.K. chart. His album Not Without a Friend contained only original material apart from a version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair,” and the title track of 1975’s Hold on to Love gave him another British hit, establishing him as a creator of wittily observed yet homely love songs comparable to those of Gilbert O’Sullivan. Beatles admirers, already attentive after Derek Taylor produced Not Without a Friend, took further notice when George Harrison contributed to Hard Times; its title song was later recorded by Ringo Starr. In 1978 the modest hit “Love Is the Sweetest Thing,” featuring the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, appeared on a Fred Astaire tribute that earned a Music Trades Association Award for Best MOR Album of 1979.

Skellern next wrote and performed six autobiographical programs for BBC television, followed by the musical-play series Happy Endings, and hosted the 1983 chat show Private Lives. The following year he assembled Oasis with Julian Lloyd Webber, Mary Hopkin, and guitarist Billy Lovelady in order to merge their classical and pop interests, yet the band’s recordings made little commercial headway. In 1985 he joined Richard Stilgoe for Stilgoe and Skellern Stompin’ at the Savoy, a charity performance for the Lords Taverners; the partnership produced several tours and the two-man revue Who Plays Wins, which reached both London’s West End and New York City.

After a period of disenchantment with the record business, Skellern released his first album in nearly eight years in 1995. Although originally planned as a tribute to the Ink Spots, the collection ultimately comprised several songs associated with that legendary group together with a few Hoagy Carmichael compositions “just to break it up.” He later composed sacred choral music and was ordained deacon and priest in the Church of England. Following the discovery of an inoperable brain tumor, he died in February 2017 at the age of 69.