Freddie Garrity born 14 November 1936

Frederick Garrity (14 November 1936 – 19 May 2006) was an English singer and actor. He was best known as the front man of Freddie and the Dreamers from 1959 until his retirement in 2001. Freddie & the Dreamers were the clowns of the British Invasion, playing their pop music for laughs while the other groups of the time were dead serious. 

Born in Sale, Manchester, the son of a miner, Garrity was educated locally. A talented schoolboy footballer, he was also steeped in his city's popular entertainment tradition. After leaving school in 1956, he signed on for an engineering apprenticeship that would have lasted seven years had his musical talent not begun to emerge. He started to practice his guitar skills on the shopfloor of the Turbine factory, and show them off at staff dances. 

A fanatical Manchester United fan, he began to get pub gigs. Then, during the first year of his apprenticeship, he won a local talent contest with an Al Jolson impression. During the skiffle era, he and his brother Derek formed a band called the Red Sox, which, in 1958, were runners-up in a north-west skiffle competition. Subsequent bookings in Greater Manchester kept them busy, but Garrity's fiancee prevailed upon him to leave the group to sing with the less demanding John Norman Four. Within weeks, he had joined the Kingfishers, who by 1961 had mutated into Freddie and the Dreamers. 

The comic capers that became their trademark were developed during a club residency in Hamburg. Though Freddie was the front man, the Dreamers did not just skulk behind him, but engaged too in trouser-dropping, slapstick and other clowning. For aspiring pop stars, they were an odd bunch; a podgy bass player, a drummer who resembled a door-to-door salesman, one guitarist sporting curious sunglasses and the other prematurely bald. 

                                    

In the early years of the band, Garrity's official birth-date was given as 14 November 1940 to make him appear younger and, therefore, more appealing to the youth market who bought the majority of records sold in the UK. Garrity's trademark was his comic dancing and his habit of leaping up and down during performances. This, combined with his almost skeletal appearance and horn-rimmed glasses, made him an eccentric figure in the UK rock scene of the early 1960s. 

The band consisted of Freddie as vocalist, guitarist Roy Crewdson, guitarist/harmonica player Derek Quinn, bassist Peter Birrell, and drummer Bernie Dwyer. Although the band was grouped as part of the Merseybeat sound phenomenon centred around Liverpool, they came from Manchester. They had four Top 10 UK hits: "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody", "I'm Telling You Now" , "You Were Made for Me" and "I Understand". Their eponymous debut album was released in the United Kingdom in 1963, peaking at number five in the UK Albums Chart and reaching number 19 in the US albums chart on 22 May 1965. It was the only LP by the group to chart in America; their subsequent four albums in the UK failed to chart. 

On stage, the group performed rehearsed, synchronised wacky dance routines. They appeared in four British films: What a Crazy World with Joe Brown, Just for You, Cuckoo Patrol with Kenneth Connor and Victor Maddern and Every Day's A Holiday (US title Seaside Swingers) with Mike Sarne, Ron Moody and John Leyton. Freddie and the Dreamers began to lose commercial ground in 1966, and disbanded in the late 1960s. 

Between 1968 and 1973, Garrity and his former bandmate Pete Birrell appeared in the ITV children's television show Little Big Time. Garrity made a solo appearance on the first episode of the Granada Television production The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club singing "Try a Little Kindness" and "Good Morning Starshine", broadcast on 13 April 1974. 

After his television career ended, Garrity formed a new version of Freddie and the Dreamers and toured regularly for the next two decades, but no further records or chart success came their way. He continued to perform until 2001, when he was diagnosed with emphysema after having a heart attack during a flight from America to Britain that forced him to retire.With his health in decline, Garrity settled in a bungalow called "Dreamers End" in Moreton Avenue, in Newcastle-under-Lyme. He was married three times and had one daughter from his first marriage, and three children from his second marriage. 

Subsequently often confined to a wheelchair, he died on May 19th 2006, at Bangor in North Wales, at the age of 69, after falling ill on holiday. Garrity was cremated at the Carmountside Crematorium in Abbey Hulton, Stoke-on-Trent, his family collected the Ashes and held a private funeral.

(Edited from Wikipedia & Alan Clayson obit @ The Guardian)