Zoot Money was one of those Zelig-like characters who turned up as a sideman, playing keyboards on hundreds of records from the early Sixties. But he actually started out as a front man.
He formed the Big Roll Band with guitarist Andy Summers – yep, *that* Andy Summers – back in 1961 and they were regulars at the Flamingo jazz club in Soho and Alexis Korner’s rhythm and blues nights at Ealing Jazz Club, playing a blend of soul, jazz and R&B.
But as the Sixties began to swing and LSD cast its spell, the outfit’s flamboyant front man moved with the times and changed his band’s name to the groovier Dantalian’s Chariot.
They quickly became part of the growing counterculture, playing alongside Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown.
They performed in white robes and kaftans with all their equipment painted white to enhance the mind-blowing effect of a colourful psychedelic light show imported from San Francisco.
Money and Summers’s joint composition Madman Running Through The Fields came out under the new band’s name in 1967 – backed with the gentle and equally groovy Sun Came Bursting Through My Cloud – and if you think it sounds like drug-crazed nonsense you’d be right.
“Madman was a description of our personal experiences, and the subsequent self-revelations brought about by hallucinogenics,” Money said later.
“The verse is the voice of the taker, the one who’s dropped the acid, and the chorus (‘Isn’t that the madman running through the fields?’) is him being observed by a second party: a puzzled onlooker – much like the audiences at the time.”
Something of a cult record today, thanks to its inclusion on various Sixties psych compilations, the single was a flop at the time and the band’s psychedelic direction earned the disapproval of their label EMI, who rejected an entire album’s worth of songs in that vein.
Months later, the band broke up, with Money and Summers going to America to join The Animals, who re-recorded the single (retitled The Madman) with Eric Burdon and Money sharing the vocals, including a spoken word dialogue section that is the very definition of “far out”.
It appeared on The Animals’ third album Love Is, taking up most of Side 4 when the album was released in 1968, by which time Summers had joined Soft Machine, ending up almost a decade later in The Police.
Money, meanwhile, appeared on albums by artists including Alan Price, Steve Marriott, Mick Taylor, Vivan Stanshall, Geno Washington, Alexis Korner, Alvin Lee, Georgie Fame, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Humble Pie, Long John Baldry, Lonnie Donegan, Peter Green, Spencer Davis and Thunderclap Newman.
He added acting to his repertoire in the Seventies, appearing in small roles in several films and TV shows including Porridge, EastEnders, Bergerac, The Professionals and Shoestring.
RIP Zoot Money (1942-2024)