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It began in 1980 with anonymous calls
to the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.
The mystery caller would offer juicy in-
formation about the activities of the far
right in Leicester. On one occasion he
provided the complete membership of
the British Democratic Party, an off-
shoot of the National Front.
His name was Ray Hill and he was a
leading light in several racist and neo-
Nazi organisations. Except that he had
now recanted and was eager to atone
for his hateful past.
For the next four years Hill worked as
a mole, helping to destroy the very or-
ganisations that he had founded or
helped to build. He then came clean in
a Channel 4 documentary that left his
former far-right colleagues stunned
and furious.
Hill received death threats and sur-
vived actual attempts on his life. Un-
daunted, he spent the rest of his life cam-
paigning against racism and right-wing
extremism. Searchlight wrote of him:
“No one (or at least no one that can yet
be spoken of) has inflicted such damage
on the extreme-right movement, nor
provided such an inspiration to subse-
quent generations of anti-fascists.”
Raymond Hill was born into a work-
ing-class family in Mossley, now part of
Greater Manchester, shortly after the
start of the Second World War in 1939.
His father, Frank, worked in a woollen
mill. His mother was Marion (née
Clarke). At Stamford secondary school
in Ashton-under-Lyne he was a rebel
and habitual brawler who was often
caned. “Punch-ups in the playground
were a daily way of life,” he said.
He left without any qualifications
and did three years National Service in
the army, where he learnt to box. In
1965 he moved to Leicester where he
met and married Glennis Shapcott, a
waitress. Their first child, Suzanne, was
born in 1967, and the couple later had
two sons, William and Charles. All
survive him.
Hill struggled to provide for his
family, doing various menial jobs and
earning a few extra pounds in fair-
ground boxing booths. “As a breadwin-
ner I was inadequate,” he said. Leicester
was at that time absorbing a substantial
number of Asian immigrants, and he
soon discovered that “that feeling of
shame evaporates quickly if you can
identify someone else who is to blame
for your misfortunes”.
He joined first the Anti-Immigration
Society, then the more hardline Racial
Preservation Society. “In my own mind,
racial prejudice restored my standing as
head of my family,” he said. “The diffi-
culties we had no longer reflected badly
upon me as a provider. The blame lay
with the immigrants, and it followed
that to fight immigration was to fight
for my family.”
In 1968 he joined the neo-Nazi Brit-
ish Movement whose leader, Colin Jor-
dan, became his mentor. Hill was an
able organiser and powerful speaker.
He rose fast. He became Jordan’s body-
guard, then served as his agent in the- It began with the kindness shown
to him by members of Johannesburg’s
Jewish community when he was strug-
gling financially. It was sealed when he
saw a destitute Indian family being
evicted from their home in the poor, ra-
cially mixed Hillbrow area of that city.
The eviction was the direct result of a
SANF campaign for tougher enforce-
ment of apartheid rules. Consumed
with shame, he went home and spent a
sleepless night agonising. That night he
decided: “It’s over”, wrote Andrew Bell,
co-author of Hill’s memoir, The Other
Face of Terror.
Hill returned to Leicester in 1980
where he was welcomed by his former
neo-Nazi colleagues. He rejoined the
British Movement (BM) and the fledg-
ling British Democratic Party (BDP),
mark ‘Julee Cruise voice’ before I
worked with Angelo and David,” Cruise
later said. “I was always a real belter, lots
of throaty power.” Three packets of cig-
arettes a day helped give her voice its
rasping, lived-in quality and her last job
had been playing Janis Joplin in an off-
Broadway musical about the gravel-
voiced singer.1969 Birmingham Ladywood by-elec-
tion where Jordan came fourth with
3 per cent of the vote.
By the end of that Hill had been ar-
rested for causing actual bodily harm
after a fracas with some left-wing stu-dents, so he fled with his family to
apartheid-era South Africa. There he
worked in the goldmines and as an in-
surance salesman. He also joined the
South African National Front (SANF),
rising to become its chairman before
undergoing his dramatic conversion inHe used racism to salve
his shame at being unable
to provide for his family
Julee Cruise
Ethereal voice of the 1990s Twin Peaks theme tune who transformed her gravelly vocal to suit the show’s haunting quality
In a scene in the first episode of Twin
Peaks, Julee Cruise appeared fronting a
band in the town bar, a role that earned
her a generic billing in the acting credits
as the “Girl Singer”.
Yet it was not as an actress that she
made her mark on David Lynch’s cult
1990s TV series but as the voice of the
show’s extraordinary soundtrack. Over
haunting music composed by Angelo
Badalamenti, Cruise sang Lynch’s often
surreal lyrics in an ethereal voice on
songs like The Nightingale and Into the
Night, which became integral to the
series’ spooky atmospherics.
When Lynch wrote some lyrics for
the Twin Peaks theme tune Falling,
heard in the series as an instrumental, it
gave Cruise an international hit single.
She sang it on Top of the Pops and the
Twin Peaks album became the biggest-
selling television soundtrack in chart
history. Badalamenti and Lynch also
wrote the songs on her albums Floating
into the Night and The Voice of Love,
coaching her into a dreamy vocal style
that became her calling card and influ-
enced the genre that came to be known
as dream pop.
“I actually never sang in that trade-
Lynch asked her instead to “sing like
an angel”. She claimed that she tried to
give him what he wanted by imagining
herself to be a eunuch or a choirboy. On
other occasions Lynch would instruct
her to sound “kinda scary” or “kinda
Russian” although his whispered sug-
gestion to “think of what it’s like when
you have an orgasm” was more explicit.
Another time he yelled “Wagner!” at
her when he wanted her to evoke a little
more melodrama.
At first she dismissed the songs as
“artsy, elevator music”. In time, how-
ever, she came to appreciate how the
juxtaposition of surface beauty and
something far darker and unsettling
lurking underneath gave the Twin
Peaks songs their unique appeal.
By the mid-1990s she had tired of
Lynch’s controlling tendencies and
moved on, although they remained
friends. “It’s like I’m his little sister,” she
said. “You don’t like your older brother
telling you what to do. David’s foppish.
He can have these tantrums. But I love
him.” They reunited in 2017 when she
was both seen and heard in Twin Peaks:
The Return, the long-delayed third
season of the show.Away from what the media called
“the Lynch mob” she toured with the
B-52s as Cindy Wilson’s stand-in and
released The Art of Being a Girl (2002)
and My Secret Life (2011), solo albums
that featured her own compositions. In
2018 she reported on Facebook that she
was suffering from lupus and was un-
able to walk her much-loved dogs. She
is survived by her husband Edward
Grinnan, a playwright and magazine
editor, whom she married in 1988.
There were no children.
She was born Julee Ann Cruise in
1956 in Creston, Iowa, a midwestern
farming community where her father,
John, was the town dentist and often
took his fee in his neighbours’ produce
rather than in cash. Her mother, Wil-
ma, was his office manager. Cruise
studied music at Drake University in
Iowa, where she majored in French
horn. When she realised she was not
going to make a living in a professional
orchestra, she turned to acting and
singing and moved to New York in 1983.
She came into Lynch’s orbit three
years later after singing in the chorus of
a country-and-western musical written
and produced by Badalamenti. Shortlyafterwards the composer was asked by
Lynch to score his 1986 film Blue Velvet
and he brought Cruise in to sing on the
soundtrack. The three then worked to-
gether on Industrial Symphony #1, an
avant-garde stage production that was
first performed at the Brooklyn Aca-
demy of Music’s New Wave Festival.
Billed as “the Dreamself of the Heart-
broken Woman” a bleach-blonde
Cruise performed in a prom dress while
suspended 80ft above the stage.
Several of the songs were later used
in Twin Peaks, which had its premiere
in 1990 and swiftly became the most
talked-about show on television. Ac-
cording to Paul McCartney, even the
Queen was a fan. “I’m sorry, Mr
McCartney,” she allegedly told the
former Beatle at an event to celebrate
her 65th birthday. “But have you seen
the time? I must go upstairs and watch
Twin Peaks.”Julee Cruise, singer and actress, was
born on December 1, 1956. She took her
own life on June 9, 2022, aged 65Cruise also toured with the B-52sEmail: [email protected]Ray Hill
British neo-Nazi who secretly recanted his racist views and worked as a mole to destroy organisations he had helped to found
Hill addressing a neo-Nazi meeting at Smithfield Market, east London, in 1981. His 1988 memoir told of his change of heartonly now he was working as a
Searchlight mole bent on destroy-
ing them. He largely succeeded.
In 1981 he worked with the ITV
World in Action programme to ex-
pose gun-running by members of
the BDP, and the organisation im-
ploded. The following year he
challenged Michael McLaughlin
for the leadership of the BM, and
was expelled for his temerity. He
sued, draining the BM of its resour-
ces and forcing McLaughlin to shut
it down. That same year Hill joined
the new British National Party
(BNP), where he maintained his
subterfuge by hijacking an episode
of BBC Radio Four’s Any Questions
and standing as the BNP’s candi-
date in Leicester West at the 1983
general election. He received 469
votes, or 1 per cent of the total.
His day jobs included taxi-driving,
managing a betting shop and running a
guesthouse with his wife. He also em-
barked on the perilous task of infiltrat-
ing a European network of neo-Nazis
and fascists that had been responsible
for a wave of bombings in Bologna,
Paris and Munich in 1981. In that role he
helped to thwart a bomb attack on the
Notting Hill Carnival in London and to
expose a network of British safe houses
used by Italian terrorists.
Hill finally admitted he was a mole in
the 1984 Channel 4 documentary, also
entitled The Other Face of Terror, which
dealt another severe blow to Britain’s
far right by exposing its links to inter-
national terrorism.
Thereafter his house was firebombed
and he had to live in hiding for a time.
He wrote columns for Searchlight,
spoke at schools and universities across
the country to warn of the appeal of
political extremism for the underprivi-
leged, and called attention to the rise of
Islamist antisemitism.
The reformed fascist also earned a
degree in history from Lancaster Uni-
versity, and became the first non-Jew-
ish honorary life member of the Union
of Jewish Students.Raymond Hill, anti-fascist campaigner,
was born on December 2, 1939. He died
on May 14, 2022, aged 82o
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