Freddie Garrity

Published Thursday 1 June 2006 at 14:20 by Patrick Newley

Freddie Garrity, the actor and lead singer of sixties pop group Freddie and the Dreamers died on May 19, aged 69.

Although overshadowed by the Beatles, the Dreamers became renowned as the comedy act of British pop, mainly due to bespectacled Garrity’s jerky, high-jumping dancing. The group had chart success with songs such as You Were Made For Me and I’m Telling You Now and were popular in pantomime and summer seasons in the UK.

Garrity was born in Manchester on November 14, 1936. He left school at 15 and worked variously as a brush salesman, a milkman and in a shoe shop. In 1959 he joined Roy Crewsden, Pete Birrell, Bernie Dwyer and Derek Quinn to form the Kingfishers pop group, which they later renamed Freddie and the Dreamers.

The group’s first single was If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody, which reached number three in the charts. They made their pantomime debut in 1963 and and went on to appear in several comedy films including What a Crazy World with Susan Maughan and Joe Brown and Every Day’s a Holiday.

A US tour in 1965 saw them star in television shows Shindig! and Hullabaloo, and Garrity’s eccentric performing turned the group into a sensation. American youngsters invented the Freddie, a dance to mimic his madcap stage moves. The same year the group appeared in a summer season in Blackpool with Tommy Cooper.

The original band split in 1971 but Garrity was still performing in the nineties, entertaining fans in a Solid Sixties tour around the UK. Garrity had suffered from ill health since 2001 when he was diagnosed with emphysema.

Mitch Murray - who co-wrote with Garrity the hit You Were Made For Me - pays tribute: “In the middle of all the Liverpool mania and the so-called British invasion of the States, Freddie was totally his own person, one of a kind. The Dreamers injected comedy into every performance in a very visual way. They introduced something different. They even managed to knock the Supremes off the No 1 spot in America with I’m Telling You Now.”

Garrity died in a hospital in Bangor. He is survived by his wife Christine and four children by two previous marriages. His funeral will be held at Carmountside Crematorium, Stoke, at 12.15pm on Friday, June 2, and later at Port Vale Football Club.