Here's an article from Sunday's Guardian:
Sound and Fury over Billy
Bob Stanley on the quiffs, hits and bitter quarrels
He may be the original bequiffed poster boy for such cultural arbiters as Morrissey and Michael Bracewell, but it was still a shock to see Billy Fury in the Top 20 album chart, incongruously lodged between Radiohead and Amy Winehouse. Twenty-five years after his death, Fury has become a shorthand representative for a pre-Beatles pop world of gold lamé, coffee bars, and unscrupulous managers from Stepney. Hits such as Halfway to Paradise and Last Night Was Made for Love - melodramatic bedroom pop for a more innocent era - appear to resonate louder and stronger than The Young Ones or Come Outside.
Fury was in poor health from childhood (he contracted rheumatic fever while bird-watching in the rain) and died in 1983, having never - unlike his contemporaries - found God, written a financial column for the Mail On Sunday, or starred in Are You Being Served?. He was more suited to a post-fame cameo as a rocker in That'll Be the Day, alongside Ringo Starr, Keith Moon and David Essex. The best of his premature retirement years were spent on his farm in Wales - like a Scouse Bardot, he often seemed happier around animals than people. An early-1980s tour, brought on by penury, was finally too much for his frail frame.
That Fury's golden image is almost entirely untainted is no thanks to an unseemly spat over his legacy. Chris Hewitt, a self-confessed prog fan who had been working with Hawkwind, was introduced to Fury's family - mum Jean and brother Albert - a decade ago. "They were disgruntled by the thousands of cheap CDs coming out with the same old tracks. And they had boxes of tapes of Billy's, as well as stuff they'd been given by other people."
Hewitt got to work, issuing demos and outtakes - some crystal clear, some that take the concept of "lo-fi" to new extremes - on his Ozit/Morpheus label. He's at Volume 10 and counting.
But while Fury's family own a third of his estate, the rest is in the hands of his ex-girlfriend, Lisa Voice. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the singer's passing, she gave an interview to the Sunday Express, which told of his alcohol and cannabis problems, and how he'd hit her over the head with a metal lampbase. It wasn't quite Jane Birkin eulogising Serge Gainsbourg. Fury had gone bankrupt at the end of the 70s facing a £16,780 tax bill that manager Larry Parnes falsely claimed he'd paid; Voice became the breadwinner and rationed out money to keep debt collectors away from her financially inept lover. She saved his bacon, but it's easy to see how bitterness and rancour entered the equation.
The family feud has only got worse since Fury's death. After much fund-raising and campaigning, a statue of Fury was erected in his native Liverpool; the family say Voice never contributed to the fund. Although she lived with him for more than a decade, Voice says she has no gold discs or awards; his family has them all.
After fans entered the statue debate, things got so grisly that the fan club splintered in two. Then there's Tony Reid, Fury's former road manager, who, after selling items of the singer's clothing, found himself saddled with legal threats. The story sits somewhere between the Princess Diana saga and a particularly catty episode of Brookside.
The worst aspect of all the mudslinging is that large chunks of Fury's catalogue, notably his psychedelic pop and tortured ballads from the late 60s, are tied up by the dispute and have never made it to CD, let alone iTunes. "My solution," says Chris Hewitt, "is that it's about time the two sides sat down in a room to plot a way forward. Billy came from a working-class background and was a gentle sort of person, not a businessman. He relied on people around him. Those people should sort this out for his sake. It's pathetic, really."
