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Dean Ford -- Reflections of My Life
Dean Ford of Marmalade fame died 3 years ago this week...
Dean Ford, vocalist for the Scottish band the Marmalade, whose voice was heard around the world on the group’s biggest hit, “Reflections of My Life,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 72.
His daughter, Tracey McAleese Gorman, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Ford had a heady decade in the 1960s and early ’70s as the Marmalade (which eventually dropped its “the”) had hits in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, then grew even bigger with “Reflections,” a somber ballad in which the singer examines the world around him with dismay but also a glimmer of something positive.
“The world is a bad place, a bad place, a terrible place to live,” sang Mr. Ford, who wrote “Reflections” with his bandmate Junior Campbell. “Oh, but I don’t want to die.”
The song reached Billboard’s Top 10 in May 1970 after achieving even greater success in Britain. Fame, though, proved hard to handle for Mr. Ford, who left the group in the mid-1970s and struggled with alcoholism. In 1986 he sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous.
One of his subsequent jobs was driving a limousine in Los Angeles, and his passengers included celebrities like Jane Wyman, Michael Jackson and Bob Dylan. But, he told The Scottish Mail in 2015, he never told passengers that he was once a celebrity too...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/obituaries/dean-ford-dead.html
His daughter, Tracey McAleese Gorman, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Ford had a heady decade in the 1960s and early ’70s as the Marmalade (which eventually dropped its “the”) had hits in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, then grew even bigger with “Reflections,” a somber ballad in which the singer examines the world around him with dismay but also a glimmer of something positive.
“The world is a bad place, a bad place, a terrible place to live,” sang Mr. Ford, who wrote “Reflections” with his bandmate Junior Campbell. “Oh, but I don’t want to die.”
The song reached Billboard’s Top 10 in May 1970 after achieving even greater success in Britain. Fame, though, proved hard to handle for Mr. Ford, who left the group in the mid-1970s and struggled with alcoholism. In 1986 he sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous.
One of his subsequent jobs was driving a limousine in Los Angeles, and his passengers included celebrities like Jane Wyman, Michael Jackson and Bob Dylan. But, he told The Scottish Mail in 2015, he never told passengers that he was once a celebrity too...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/obituaries/dean-ford-dead.html
