Mike Taylor: 60s British jazz's mysterious Syd Barrett

Tragic story of the piano genius who played with Cream and Graham Bond but, fried by LSD walked into the sea in 1969. Thanks to the late Pete Brown for telling me about another lost 60s legend.

Although his body was found washed up on the beach at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex in the first week of January 1969, I wouldn’t discover the unearthly genius of a jazz pianist called Mike Taylor until 47 years later. His tragic death avoided the music papers and took decades to be acknowledged beyond his small circle of friends and fans.

Mike Taylor had been British jazz’s bright young hope, studious in his spectacles and smart in his suit, who’d transformed into the bedraggled barefoot acid casualty sleeping rough who showed up at London’s hip psychedelic clubs banging a clay hand-drum. He was only thirty when he died and it was that long again before Taylor started his ascension from little-known footnote to enigmatic lost genius, doomed to be cited as British jazz’s acid-fried answer to Syd Barrett.

Taylor was brought to my attention while interviewing veteran poet Pete Brown for a feature about pioneering R&B colossus Graham Bond, another criminally overlooked key figure in 60s music who also fell victim to drugs (in his case heroin) before dying mysteriously under a tube train in ’73. The abrasively eloquent Pete Brown, who sadly passed himself in 2023, was one of those resilient 60s survivors who kept health and marbles by binning drugs during make-or-break ’67 and survived to become the fierce creative force who carried onwreaking smaller-scale havoc while former comrades and fellow musicians crumbled around him.

“Mike Taylor was friends with various friends of mine,” recalled Pete. “There was a flute player called Mike Burke who played on some stuff that (fellow pioneering poet) Michael Horovitz and I did, and John Mumford. They worked with Mike Taylor, who was semi-pro for a long time. He had a brief thing of being professional then fell to pieces and disappeared. He was a peripheral figure, but Graham liked him and they were friends. Ginger also liked him and collaborated with him on a couple of Cream things. There was a plan to do a record with me, but Graham wasn’t in great shape and Mike wasn’t either so that never came off.”

Those few words were enough to fire up the kind of quest that’s kept my soul alive for decades, usually involving gleaning scraps of info and tracking down relevant records. Taylor’s story opened into one those rabbit hole flows that traversed similar ground to his friend Bond’s rise and fall, both being orphans who rose brightly through precocious talent before darkness descended; prodigious geniuses left hanging on to reality by the flimsiest of threads after drugs moved in.