Phdobit: Jim Diamond

BBC News is reporting that Jim Diamond has died.

Diamond's breakthrough came as part of PhD, formed with some offcuts of the Jeff Beck Band - Beck even turning up to guest on one track. This one:

PhD split in 1984, and Jim went on to a degree of solo success, most notably with I Should Have Known Better - a million-plus seller, despite Diamond's attempt to get people to buy a different record:

I'm delighted to be number one, but next week I don't want them to buy my record, I want them to buy Band Aid instead.

People did do that. It's unclear how many purchases were transferred from Jim to Bob, though.

Diamond's official biography skips some details - Hi Ho Silver is mentioned as a top ten hit, but there's no space to even mention Boon. And the whole of the first decade of this century is just a gap.

More recently, Diamond has been working on soul music; but still touring. Lesley-Anne Jones saw him play earlier this year:

He's still got it. 'One of our great underestimated talents,' as the great Keith Altham describes him. Yet another of rock's unsung heroes, the voices that got away. Voices that should have soared all the way to Coutts and beyond the international space station, but never quite did. He's still Jim. Unshakably rooted in the Scottish homeland he eulogises as he remembers his Daddy, the late fireman whom he adored. He acknowledges the song that 'bought the house.' He dedicates songs to his friends, his children, his beautiful wife Chrissie – 'the one thing that is always there, that has always been there, constant, no matter what.' We all have that, Jim? No, we don't. We'd all like that.

Jim Diamond was 63; the cause of death has not been shared with the public.