On this day, 22 August 1966, pop singer-songwriter Crispian St. Peters played Cardiff’s Top Rank as part of the Radio England Swinging 66 UK Tour.
The tour, that featured the Small Faces, Neil Christian, Dave Berry and Wayne Fontana, was heavily advertised on air and gigs proved reasonably successful in the south-east of the country, where Radio England could be heard. Unfortunately outside the station's transmission area, audiences were understandably sparse. The tour proved a financial disaster, losing over £17,000.
The station attempted to get some of this back by selling autographed copies of the left-over concert programmes.
While a member of Beat Formula Three in 1963, Crispian St. Peters was heard by David Nicholson, an EMI publicist who became his manager. Nicholson suggested he use a stage name, initially "Crispin Blacke" and subsequently Crispian St. Peters, then promoted his client as being nineteen years of age, shaving off five years from his actual age of 24.
In 1964, as a member of Peter & The Wolves, St. Peters made his first commercial recording. He was persuaded to turn solo by Nicholson and was signed to Decca Records in 1965. His first two singles on this record label, "No No No" and "At This Moment", proved unsuccessful on the charts. He made two television UK appearances in February of that year, featuring in the shows Scene at 6.30 and Ready Steady Go!
In 1966, St. Peters' career finally yielded a Top 10 hit in the UK Singles Chart, with "You Were on My Mind", a song written and first recorded in 1964 by the Canadian folk duo, Ian & Sylvia, and a hit in the United States for We Five in 1965. St. Peters' single eventually hit No. 2 in the UK and was then released in the US on the Philadelphia-based Jamie Records label. It did not chart in the US until a year after his fourth release, "The Pied Piper", became known as his signature song and a Top 10 hit in the United States and the UK. Although his next single, a version of Phil Ochs' song "Changes", also reached the charts in both the UK and US, it was much less successful.
After the success of "You Were on my Mind", St Peters gave an interview to the New Musical Express claiming that he was a better song-writer than the Beatles and that his performance on stage made Elvis Presley look like the Statue of Liberty. After just one hit single, he claimed he was going to be “bigger than Presley, was more talented than Sammy Davis Jr.”, “sexier than Dave Berry” and “more exciting than Tom Jones”. These comments did not go down well in the pop music press, who began to treat him as a conceited outcast. After his fourth single flopped, work and money dried up, and he became depressed. In 1970, he was dropped by Decca and admitted to hospital suffering from a nervous breakdown.
