Zoot Money, musician who moved from R’n’B to psychedelia and played with the Animals and Peter Green

In 1971 the New Musical Express lauded ‘this most lovable of hirsute looners’ with his ‘legendary aura’

Zoot Money, who has died aged 82, was a singer, keyboard player and songwriter whose Big Roll Band rode the R’n’B wave of the 1960s before morphing into the psychedelic popsters Dantalian’s Chariot, who shone briefly but brightly in the Summer of Love; he was also one of rock’s great sidemen, his long list of collaborators including Eric Burdon and the Animals, Steve Marriott and Humble Pie, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, Georgie Fame, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Long John Baldry, Peter Green, the Scaffold, Spencer Davis and Alexis Korner.
He had a winning stage presence that brought him a loyal following. As Roy Carr pointed out in the NME in 1971, “When having the pleasure of seeing Zoot Money perform, one is inclined to try and separate the artist from the enigma which has grown up around this most lovable of original hirsute looners. Only to realise that it is this near legendary aura that makes him the incomparable entertainer.”
George Bruno Money was born in Bournemouth on July 17 1942 to Italian parents, Oscar, a hotel waiter, and Maria. He attended Portchester Secondary School, where he sang in the choir and played French horn in the orchestra.
But his real passion was for the raw, thrilling sounds emanating from across the Atlantic, and like so many similarly inspired teenagers he joined a skiffle band – in his case the Four Ales, formed by a Bournemouth Grammar School boy, John Goggin, who taught young George his first guitar chords.
When he was 14 his elder brother Carlo bought him tickets for a jazz concert at the Gaumont in Bournemouth which featured the saxophonist Zoot Sims, from whom he took his stage name. He then formed the six-piece Portchester Road Jazz Band, playing banjo.
On leaving school he signed up for a four-year apprenticeship with an optician, while playing in bands including the Stormers and the Blackhawks, for whom he assumed lead-vocal duties as well as keyboards (he would go on to become an accomplished Hammond organ player).
In 1961 Money co-founded a new rock’n’roll outfit, the Big Roll Band, who took their name from a misheard line in Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode, “Someday you will be the leader of a big ol’ band”, which they heard as “a big roll band”. Around this time he also began playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.
The Big Roll Band, meanwhile, became a fixture on the London and South Coast club circuit, and by 1964 they were a regular attraction at the Flamingo Club in Soho alongside the likes of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and Graham Bond and the Organisation.
With their jazz- and soul-infused r’n’b the Big Roll Band toured exhaustively, at one point playing 13 gigs in eight days. They became a fixture on Ready Steady Go! and made a few records, their biggest success coming with the single Big Time Operator, which reached No 25 in 1966.
Like the revolving-door blues-rock outfit led by Money’s contemporary John Mayall, the Big Roll Band became a finishing school for up-and-coming musicians. One of them was Andy Summers, with whom Money had briefly played in the Stormers. The guitarist was on board when the Big Roll Band converted themselves into one of the finest psychedelic outfits of the era, Dantalian’s Chariot. Their 1967 single, The Madman Running Through the Fields, with its backwards drums, lilting organ and sitar-like guitar, failed to chart, but is now fondly remembered as a psych classic.
Summers would later move on to Soft Machine, the great experimentalists of the Canterbury Scene, before teaming up – to considerably greater fame and fortune – with Sting in the Police. Money, meanwhile, returned to his blues and R’n’B roots, becoming a sought-after session player and a touring sideman with a huge variety of musicians. He later oversaw the soundtrack for the hit TV series about a veteran rock’n’roll band, Tutti Frutti.
From the 1970s onwards Money developed an extensive acting sideline, taking bit parts on big and small screen: he was in the 1979 film adaptation of the sitcom Porridge, played a pop PR agent the following year in the Hazel O’Connor vehicle Breaking Glass and was a barman at the Chez Nobody night club in Absolute Beginners (1986). On television, he appeared in such series as EastEnders (as the aging rocker Johnny Earthquake), Bergerac, London’s Burning and The Bill.
Zoot Money was married to Veronica, known as “Ronni”; she died in 2017; he had a daughter and two sons.
Zoot Money, born July 17 1942, died September 8 2024