Nykolas Synystre

"Welcome To My Priest Hole" c/w "Satan's Evil Twin"
Released 15th August 1967. Piccadilly PIC 67646

Nykolas Synystre was a familiar face in the Soho of the Nineteen Sixties. He stood out from the local gangsters, hawkers and flesh traders thanks to his distinctive red velvet cape, stag-horned crown, fishnet tights, rubber gloves and German Army boots. "Today, you'd not notice him at all", remembers nephew Toby Bartam-Covering. "But jaws dropped back in '66 when Uncle Nyk rode down Berwick Street on the back of one of his naked supplicants".

Synystre, an Eton schoolboy, had hoped to make his name in The City. However, at a ball in Cambridge he drank a powerful cocktail of liquid LSD, London Gin and Trumpers cologne. He awoke the next day a fully-fledged Satanist with, as he put it, "the love bites of Beelzebub spotted across my derriere".

While those around him embraced the Summer of Love, Synystre set about creating a 'dungeon of evil with tapas snacks': the infamous Priest Hole club in St. Anne's Court. "It was a filthy basement infested with vermin", bragged Synystre. "Plaster was falling off the walls, exposing brickwork covered in slime. It stank terribly".

Synystre commissioned design agency Emerald Glow'd She Were And Fairy Haired Too Limited to deliver this concept, converting what had been a quiet cellar bookshop into the most disgusting venue in Britain. It cost seventeen thousand pounds which, at the time, was seventeen thousand pounds.

"It was my sickest dream made real", said Synystre on his release from prison in 1978. "A disgusting pit of degredation where fellow worshippers of the Dark Arts could gather to drink very expensive red wine, watch groovy bands and commit horrible acts of Satanism after hours. George Best was a frequent visitor".

Despite the revolting decor and inflated prices, The Priest Hole was extremely popular with television professionals. Said Synystre: "I think it appealed to both their general lack of self-esteem and their insatiable desire to waste money on acohol whilst being whipped by leather-clad freaks".

Thanks to her role in the BBC's 'Group Captain Grainger's Guildhall Of Pop', Felicity Wind was the talk of the town. She often took drugs at The Priest Hole. "My mind is not what it was", she says down the telephone from her sheltered accommodation in Lewes. "I do remember some kind of dark cellar filled with people wearing horns and stabbing goats...but that could have been anywhere in Soho".

Before his eventual arrest, Synystre decided to capitalise on his reputation as one of London's most deranged inhabitants by asking Terry Quick's Baroque 'n' Roll to back him on a one-off single, the amazing 'Welcome To My Priest Hole'. It begins with a searing blast of feedback as Terry Quick forces the output of four electric harpsichords through a WEM fuzz-o-naut.

We then hear Synystre's trademark growl and the crack of a whip, followed by a small yelp of pain from virginal player Jimmy Pilgrim. There then follows two minutes and ten seconds of the most explosive freakbeat ever committed to vinyl, as Synystre pleads with us to 'enter my priest hole and see where Satan lives, we serve all sorts and sell the best Spanish olives'.

The track ends with Terry Quick throwing one of his harpsichords against the studio wall, accidentally killing an engineer.

Hephzibah Goldblatt

‘Doggy Dentist’ c/w ‘Eventually There Is You’
Released 22nd April 1959. Parlophone R4021

The daughter and protégé of popular bandleader Harry Goldblatt, Hephzibah ‘The Girl with the Cough in Her Voice’ Goldblatt was only fourteen when this, her first single, hit the top ten in May 1959.

Despite her tender years, Hephzibah had a mature, deep singing voice somewhere between the normal male ranges of bass and baritone. She was inclined to cough when attempting higher notes, hence her charming soubriquet.

This cough was partly caused by smoking seventy-a-day Capstan Full Strength. The habit had been encouraged by father Harry in an attempt to compete with the influx of deep-voiced Jamaican calypso singers who monopolised the UK charts in the late nineteen fifties. Singers like The Mighty Lord General Sir Captain Prince Charles with ‘How Many Fingers, Darlin’?’.

At a time when the lyrics of popular songs were taken literally, Hephzibah’s first single caused some controversy when she sang :

‘I want to be a doggy dentist
Holding dog jaws open with my knees
I’ll drill their teeth with a doggy drill
Then find me a man that I can please – yee-hah!

“I was never really sure what that song was about", says ‘Doggy Dentist’ arranger Dennis Vaccari. “I just thought that if I stuck enough pizzicato strings on it, nobody would care. Reading those words today, they don’t really make much sense and rarely rhyme. At the time, veterinary surgeons all over the country were up in arms about the inference that a fourteen year old singer could easily do their job, but I think they missed the point. There’s something deeply disturbing going on here”.

We decided to ask composer Harry Goldblatt about his unusual lyrics but he is dead, so we can’t.

Hephzibah’s only album ‘The Girl with the Cough in Her Voice’ went gold on Christmas Day 1961 and was the first long player to spin at 113 rpm.

Sadly, Hephzibah was not around to enjoy this success; she had died of an overdose of laxatives in early 1960. Strangely, her death was kept secret by father Harry. It was only when he passed away in 1983 that his papers revealed Hephzibah’s death and the lengths he had gone to in order to avoid disappointing her fans.

This included answering the phone pretending to be her, kissing souvenir photographs while wearing her lipstick, wearing her clothes and recording many waxings under her name, doing the singing himself.

Hephzibah was secretly buried in Harry Goldblatt’s back garden by her father. Thanks to a resurgence of interest in this wonderful, jaunty single, fans have marked where she is buried with a statue of a dog having its teeth fixed – a fitting tribute to a much loved teen star.