IN THE reference books it says Dickie Pride was found singing in a pub in the Old Kent Road, but this is not so.

He was plucked from obscurity by a sudden thirst that overcame celebrated pianist Russ Conway on his way back from a show in Brighton towards the end of 1958.

Russ told playwright Charles Langley: "I dropped into a pub in Tooting and there was this incredible singer. I'd no idea who he was, but I was so impressed I talked to Larry Parnes about him. We went to see him the next week and took Lionel Bart with us. We were all so impressed that Larry decided to sign him on the spot."

Dickie was still only 16 when Russ Conway dropped into the Castle pub in Tooting and changed his life. A few weeks later he played his first gig at the Kilburn Gaumont, in north London, then the biggest cinema in the country and now a bingo hall, in a charity show.

He was so impressive that Record Mirror wrote: "He ripped it up from the start. His performance shook the theatre to its very foundations". It was two weeks after his 17th birthday and he had never sung on a professional stage before.

Signed up for the Larry Parnes stable of young singers at 20 a week, which was roughly four times the average wage at the time, Dickie quickly made an impact as a dramatic stage performer.

Unfortunately, the only film of him singing to have survived is from the 1959 Oh, Boy! show which has him static in front of the microphone. Because in those days the cameras were not terribly manoeuvrable, singers had to keep to one spot or the cameras would lose track of them.

All the Parnes stable were given names the impresario thought encapsulate their personality. So there was Billy FURY, Marty WILDE, Duffy POWER, Johnny GENTLE, Tommy STEELE. The only exception was Joe Brown who refused point blank to be called Almer Twytch.

Dickie had one over his fellow performers in that he had benefited from a musical education and could both read and write music, as well as sight read a song. He was also able to play a wide range of instruments from the piano to the drums.

He had been schooled at the Royal College of Church Music near his home in Croydon and as a choir boy had sung in Canterbury Cathedral.

Born Richard Charles Kneller in October 1941 at Heathfield Vale, Croydon, south London, he showed early promise as a singer and by the time he was eight he was already singing in charity concerts.

Later he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Church Music, partly through the prompting of his mother, who was Welsh, and was a mainstay of the local church choir.

At the Royal College his teachers considered his voice so fine that he would sing opera when he grew up. He sang in Canterbury Cathedral and sang before the Archbishop of Canterbury, but also managed to shock his teachers by forming a skiffle group called the Semi-Tones.

When he left school he did not at first take up a singing career, but had a series of low paid jobs, including working in a stone mason's that specialised in making grave stones, from which he was fired for being too cheerful and singing at work.

The contract he signed with Parnes guaranteed him 60 a week by the fourth year, a fortune in those days, but in fact Parnes reneged on almost all the contracts, which were in any case so tightly drawn that Parnes could do almost anything he wanted.

Another Parnes singer, Vince Eager, wondered one day why he had never received any record royalties. "You're not entitled to any," Parnes told him.

"But it says in my contract that I am," Eager protested. "It also says I have power of attorney over you, and I've decided you're not getting any," Parnes replied.

When Vince went to lawyer he found the contract was watertight and the only thing he could do was refuse to work for four years until it ran out. Which, eventually, was what he did.

Although Parnes had many talents as a manager, picking hit songs was not one of them and Primrose Lane, a rather surgery ballad, barely made it into the Top Thirty for Dickie Pride.

While Dickie's talents were absolutely obvious to anyone who saw him perform live on stage, Parnes repeatedly failed to find a song that would propel him into the charts.

This was a problem encountered by most of Parnes' singers and even Billy Fury had trouble getting into the Top Ten and did not really crack it until three years after signing for Parnes.

The truth was that there were not enough good songs to go round and Parnes' answer was to cover American records. Unfortunately, these had often already been issued in Britain, sometimes by more than one American singer at the same time, and so there were two, three and sometimes more versions of the same song competing for sales, with the obvious result that little progress up the charts could be made.

Duffy Power, who shared a flat with Dickie Pride, remembers the tours they made together.

Duffy said: "Dickie was absolute magic on stage, completely spell binding. On a tour you get a bit jaded listening to the same people singing the same things every night, but Dickie was the one the other singers went to the wings to watch. You couldn't take your eyes off him.

"But it was a very funny set up because although he was not that high up the bill, he closed the first half of the show, which is like being second on the bill, and got extra songs to sing. So it was like Parnes recognised that he deserved a top billing, but wouldn't give it to him."

The truth was that Pride and Parnes were not getting on well. Dickie already realised that while he enjoyed rock'n'roll, musically it was not demanding enough and he wanted bigger and better songs to sing. Parnes, on the other hand, could make money out of him only if he sang rock.

It was an impossible situation that quickly began to take its toll on Dickie, who seems to have felt he had become trapped in the Dickie Pride persona and wanted to get back to being Richard Kneller and sing the songs he wanted to sing.

Hal Carter, who was Larry Parnes No2, recalled: "Dealing with Dickie became more and more difficult. He was a genius in my opinion, but with a couple of flakes missing. The trouble was you never knew when you went in to the room whether you were going to get the genius or the madman.

"He had a tendency to hit out with his fists rather than talking and the slightest frustration would start him swinging. If he drank he didn't just have a drink he got legless and he was into smoking dope very early on.

"One day Larry said to me 'go and sort out Dickie Pride'. Larry couldn't handle him any more so I went off and virtually lived with him for a month.

"I remember one night we ended up back at his mother's house in Croydon. We had to share a room because it was only a small house and in the night I was woken by this extraordinary noise like an animal in pain.

"It took me a bit to realise it was Dickie and when I pulled the curtains back a bit there was enough light to see that he was sitting bolt upright in bed making this weird noise and pulling at his face. I don't mean just pulling, it was almost like he was trying to tear his own face off. But the really strange thing was that he was still asleep.

"I tried to stop him but I couldn't, he was too strong, but eventually he settled down again and lay still. He'd been asleep the whole time.

"At the time I didn't really know what to make of it, although it's pretty obvious to me now that he was a deeply troubled young man and this was one of the symptoms.

" I've often thought about this incident since and the only explanation I can come up with is that he wasn't actually trying to tear his face off, what he was trying to do was tear off the mask we'd put on him. He was trying to get out from behind the Dickie Pride mask and get back to being himself."

Georgie Fame, who backed Dickie in the early days, remembered: "If there was anyone in the audience heckling he'd jump off the stage and go and thump them.

"He was also the man who taught me to sing harmony, when I'd never even heard of it. He'd get three or four of use together on the back of the coach singing and that's how I learnt to do it. He was tremendously talented and his death was a tragedy."

DICKIE PRIDE CHRONOLOGY:

Dickie Pride