Cliff Twemlow
| Cliff Twemlow | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Clifford Twemlow 14 October 1937 Hulme, Manchester, Lancashire, England |
| Died | 9 May 1993 (aged 55) Manchester, England |
| Years active | 1960s–1993 |
Cliff Twemlow (14 October 1937 – 5 May 1993) was an English actor, nightclub bouncer, horror paperback author and library music composer.
Twemlow was born in Hulme, Manchester, the son of a merchant seaman. He became a nightclub bouncer, or "Tuxedo Warrior", in 1950s Morecambe before this occupation would take him to Scotland and back to Manchester. Hoping to diversify Twemlow worked as an extra on the television series Coronation Street and attempted to break into the music industry by composing library music under the pen name Peter Reno. The latter was a hugely successful venture, with Twemlow penning more than two thousand compositions within the space of a few years. Musically self-taught, Cliff composed music using what he referred to as the 'De Dum Da' Principle. "I had discovered that with the aid of a tape recorder, I could assemble or compose lyric and tune. My voice would simulate orchestral sounds, giving me an insight as to how it could be arranged. God, the noises were appalling. Um Te Ta, Deeple, Dum Rump Pa Pa! I was in hysterics listening to the playback." he later claimed in his autobiography. Most of his Peter Reno material was written for the company De Wolfe Music and used in television (Public Eye, Rutland Weekend Television, The Benny Hill Show,Queenie's Castle, The Sweeney), films (Zeta One, Secrets of Sex, A Touch of the Sun, Deathdream) and advertisements. One of his songs "Cause I'm a Man", written in 1967, later became famous when it was used in the film Dawn of the Dead. A particularly lucrative composition was "Distant Hills", which was used as the end credit theme of the programme Crown Court from 1972 to the shows end in 1984. "Distant Hills" would also prove to be Cliff's only brush with the charts when it was used as the B side to Eye Level- the theme from Van der Valk- a single that enjoyed four weeks at number one in 1973. The same year however Cliff would encounter legal problems due to a song of his – recorded by Salena Jones – bearing the name 'Live and Let Die'. Though released shortly before Paul McCartney recorded a song by the same name for the eponymous James Bond film, a court case was instigated by the publishers of the McCartney song and an injunction slammed on the Twemlow record. Twemlow's defence was that it was simply an innocent example of two songs bearing the same title, unfortunately a "James Bond" style pose on the picture sleeve threw doubt on this, and the court found in favour of McCartney's people. The Twemlow/Salena Jones record was subsequently withdrawn. Unfortunately such problems within the music industry, combined with bad business deals, legal hassles and a divorce from childhood sweetheart Georgina Curly meant Twemlow's music success was short lived and he was eventually declared bankrupt. One of Twemlow's songs from this period "Once" from the album Restless Woman (1971), claims “Once I owned a mansion/ Money couldn't buy / People used to stop and say / There goes quite a guy/ Now I'm left with nothing/ And I have no place to go/ For when you're down/ Nobody wants to know".
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