Even in his heyday, when he befriended the young Rolling Stones and shared a brief but intense affair with Marianne Faithfull, Gene Pitney never looked like anything other than a successful young executive, a product of Wall Street or Madison Avenue rather than Carnaby Street or the King's Road. His dark suit, white shirt, sober tie and neat haircut stood out among the young peacocks and dolly birds of the 60s pop scene, just as his melodramatic ballads, delivered in an adenoidal high tenor, were immediately identifiable amid the kaleidoscopic cacophony of the mid-60s.
In an era that worshipped truculence and improvisation, Pitney was suave and well-groomed. When he was found dead on his hotel bed in Cardiff yesterday morning, he was fully dressed and looked, according to his tour manager, "as though he had gone for a lie down".
At 65, the American singer's hitmaking days were long behind him when he performed for the last time at St David's Hall on Monday night. But his British fans had turned up to hear him perform 24 Hours from Tulsa, I'm Gonna Be Strong and Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart, the songs that had given him a career lasting more than four decades.
According to a spokesman for South Wales police, there appeared to be no suspicious circumstances. His agent, Mark Howes, said Pitney had seemed "fit and well", adding that the singer had recently described his current 23-date British tour as "the best he had done for quite a few years".
There was always a warm reception for Pitney in Britain, where his hits began in 1961 with I Wanna Love My Life Away. His voice, seemingly purpose-built for the expression of anguish, took its place among the multitude of distinctive American accents being discovered by British teenagers via Radio Luxembourg. The loyalty of his British fans was confirmed more recently in 1988, when he reappeared in the British charts with a remake of Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart, sharing the lead vocal with Marc Almond, the former singer of Soft Cell.
Although his style was closer to the Sinatra era than to the unbuttoned mode favoured by the new generation of stars, his friends included the Stones and their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who had promoted 24 Hours from Tulsa in his former guise as a publicity man. Returning the favour, Pitney gave Mick Jagger and Keith Richards a crash course in songwriting, once the shrewd Oldham had realised that publishing royalties held the key to enduring prosperity.
Pitney had begun his career as a teenage songwriter, sending self-produced demos to New York publishers from his home in Stanford, Connecticut.
A course in electronics at the University of Connecticut was hastily abandoned when one of his early compositions, Today's Teardrops, appeared on the B-side of Roy Orbison's top 10 hit Blue Angel in 1960. Among his other early successes as a writer were Rubber Ball and Hello, Mary Lou, worldwide hits for Bobby Vee and Ricky Nelson respectively.
Curiously, his own hits came from the pens of other writers, including those of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, whose ballad Every Breath I Take he recorded in 1961 under the supervision of the young Phil Spector. A few months later Pitney wrote a song called He's a Rebel for the Crystals, which became one of the hits that established Spector's famous wall of sound. One night in 1964 Spector and Pitney were also present, playing maracas and piano respectively, on the Stones session that produced a highly indecent (and eventually widely bootlegged) song titled Andrew's Blues, in which unflattering references were made to Sir Edward Lewis, then the head of Decca Records, the Stones' label. It was as far as Pitney ever got from the polished three-minute melodramas for which his public adored him.