Another seriously under rated performer from the 60s was Robin Smith, aka Crispian St Peters. He started out on Decca in 1964 and after a couple of excellent self penned, but flop singles, he made it big with a cover of "You were on my mind". The cover trend followed for his next single, the enchanting "Pied Piper" and onto his final hit , the Phil Ochs protest song "Changes.
He remained on Decca into the early 70s but never graced the charts again, despite a rather unique vocal style and seemed to stop having any commercial releases after 1972.

Sadly Crispian has suffered from schizophrenia and related conditions for some time now and no news has been heard of him, since being admitted to a secure hospital, suffering from the effects of Pneumonia in 2003. Knowing the health service as I do, he was probably just left to take his own medication and not checked up on until it was too late. I hope the news is better now, but even his own website has had no updates since this time.

I'm sure from your years of running Decca, that you'll have some memories of him JK. He was deliberately promoted, according to the old press, as being a somewhat aloof and arrogant character, which he despised.

There are a lot of crispian st peters impersonators around europe but the original is far too ill to carry on. I heard he suffers from depression and had some strokes as well.<br><br>Post edited by: JK2006, at: 2006/02/21 13:50