Terry Reid, the British rock singer and songwriter, who turned down offers to front Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple to embark on a solo career that earned him the nickname Superlungs, has died. Cleopatra Records shared the news in an email, and Reid’s representative gave confirmation to The Guardian. No cause of death was given, but Reid had been raising funds as he received treatment for health issues including cancer. He was 75 years old.
Terrance James “Terry” Reid grew up in the British county of Cambridgeshire, where he formed his first band, the Redbeats, as a teenager. After they supported Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, Reid was invited to join the more established group. He was 16 when they joined the the Rolling Stones on tour, as part of a support bill alongside Ike & Tina Turner and the Yardbirds.
When the Jaywalkers split in 1967, Reid went solo, recorded early albums Bang, Bang You’re Terry Reid and 1969’s self-titled, and accepted an invitation to join the Rolling Stones on two forthcoming tours. The Yardbirds were also in the midst of a split, and Jimmy Page, impressed by Reid’s performances with the Jaywalkers, invited him to front a new band he was forming—soon to become Led Zeppelin. As Reid considered the offer, he watched Robert Plant and John Bonham perform as Band of Joy and suggested Page hire them instead. “It was a perfect combination,” Reid told The Independent in 2007. “Who’s to say what would have happened if Jim and I had got a band? It might have been a bloody failure.”
Deep Purple repeatedly asked Reid to replace their outgoing lead singer the following year, but, by then, Reid was focused on his solo career. After a celebrated performance at the first Glastonbury festival, in 1970, he believed his time would come with the release of his new album, River. But when he delivered the finished LP—now a cult classic—to Atlantic, the label saw little appeal in its borderless mix of rock, blues, soul, funk, and Latin rhythms. Their reluctance to promote the album helped confine Reid to an underground status that stuck with subsequent albums Seed of Memory and Rogue Waves.
The subsequent decades entailed scattered work as a session musician, working out of his adopted home of Santa Monica. He briefly re-emerged in 1991 with The Driver, a Trevor Horn–produced album that Reid came to hate and whose title track, a collaboration with Hans Zimmer, was rejected as the theme song of Days of Thunder. He returned to front-of-stage in the 2000s, when he began a residency at Los Angeles the Joint with drop-in appearances from friends such as Robert Plant—who said on stage that Reid “could have had [his] life”—Keith Richards, and Bobby Womack.
