Alex Chilton - Lies [July 1995]

A teen star with the Box Tops, he went on to form the influential cult band Big Star.

The maverick US musician Alex Chilton, who has died of a suspected heart attack aged 59, enjoyed a long and extremely varied career that went from 1960s teenybop stardom through punk-era cult and beyond.

Chilton was born into a bohemian family in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Sidney, was a jazz musician, and as a teenager Chilton's taste for soul music marked him out. In 1966 the Memphis band the Devilles were looking for a lead singer and were pointed towards a 16-year-old who had wowed the girls at the local high school's talent contest with his soulful rendition of Bobby Hebb's Sunny. 

Renamed the Box Tops, they attracted the interest of Chips Moman, boss of the Memphis hit-making studio American Sound, and began working with the gifted songwriter-producer Dan Penn. One Saturday in spring 1967, they recorded three songs, with Penn insisting on 30 takes of The Letter. At less than two minutes long, the song showcased Chilton's remarkable voice, as he growled and wailed like a black singer many years older. The Letter topped the US chart that summer and became a huge worldwide hit (reaching No 5 in the UK).

The cream of Memphis's musicians were employed by Moman to write, arrange, play on and produce a string of Box Tops hits: Cry Like a Baby, Neon Rainbow, I Met Her in Church, Choo Choo Train and Soul Deep. Chilton quickly became the only band member employed on the sessions. It was his astonishingly mature voice – he could croon with feeling then groan like a Mississippi bluesman – that made the Box Tops stand out, but the singer said later that he was unhappy about this situation and felt like a puppet.

After the band's fourth album, Dimensions (1969), he left the Box Tops and moved to New York, where, still only 19, he attempted to develop his own songs (very few Box Tops songs were written by Chilton). While this period developed his guitar-playing and resulted in many original songs, nothing definite came of his sojourn and he shifted back to Memphis in 1971.