Mike Edwards: the musician ELO lost to a cult before he was crushed to death by a hay bail
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“Mike Edwards was unlike your average balaclava-wearing cellist in a rock group,” Jeff Lynne once said in tribute to his former bandmate. What a eulogy.
But the thing was, it was actually very true. Edwards was absolutely not your average musician, and probably also the opposite of the average person in general. Everything about the man was done with more than a hint of the absurd, the zany, and often the downright weird – both in life and in death.
Because, of course, why wouldn’t you make a career playing a cello with a grapefruit? Yes, you read that right – Edwards was an original member of ELO, performing at their first-ever gig in Croydon in 1972, but in an attempt to up the ante of strangeness and intrigue, he would appear on stage wearing a balaclava and play his cello, somehow, with either an orange or a grapefruit.
In some ways, the cult celebrity status of this oddball may have proved too much to bear as ELO rose in status, so Edwards nobly bowed out of the band in 1975. But his life of eccentricity couldn’t just stop there, as he then went on to join a cult and changed his name to Pramada after becoming a sannyasin in the Rajneesh movement under the Indian godman Osho. As you do.
During this enlightened period of his life, Edwards lived in a myriad of exotic places, from Pune in India, Hamburg in Germany, across the US… and Suffolk. While much closer to home, the quaint country village of Herringswell was actually home to the group’s large Medina commune during the 1980s.
Read more https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/mike-edwards-musician-elo-lost-cult-crushed-death-hay-bail/
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