Vic Emerson, who has died aged 69 of pancreatic cancer, was a keyboard player with Mandalaband, Sad Café and 10cc. He co-wrote the single Every Day Hurts, which was a huge hit for Sad Café in 1979. As a music writer, I interviewed Vic numerous times.
He was born in Prestwich near Manchester, the son of Ben Emerson, a tailor, and his wife, Myra. Vic was always a talented musician; he had his first piano lessons at four and passed his grade six exam at the age of 12, while at Bury grammar school. In the early 1960s he bought a Hammond organ to play at home, and when he left school he became a cinema organist in Stockport.
In the 60s Vic worked the cabaret circuit, playing keyboards, and became a session musician at Camel Studios near Stockport, where he met the drummer Tony Cresswell, guitarist Ashley Mulford and bass player John Stimpson, later to form Sad Café with him. The engineer at the studios, Dave Rohl, was working on an album called Mandalaband and asked Vic to put some keyboards on it. “Not long after, Dave went down to London,” Vic told me. “He came back with a record deal with Chrysalis Records. I was apparently a member of a band [Mandalaband] when I didn’t know there was one.”
By 1976 Mandalaband had broken up. Vic moved into a flat in Manchester with Stimpson, and they were looking to form a new band. “We needed a singer. John told me there was a friend of his playing at Manchester Polytechnic students’ union. There were two acts on. The first act didn’t happen. The next singer sang two lines. That guy had it. The band was Gyro. The singer was Paul Young. We offered Paul a deal.” It was the birth of Sad Café.
According to Vic, the story behind Every Day Hurts is that, “The music was mostly mine. The melody on the verse is Paul Young’s. The sad truth of Every Day Hurts was I wrote it at my house in Blackpool when my dad was dying, although the lyrics are Paul’s.” The song was also co-written by Stimpson. It reached No 3 in the UK charts.
In the early 80s Vic toured with 10cc and played on their albums Ten Out of 10 and Windows in the Jungle. He stayed with Sad Café until 1984.
The following year he went to Paris to do some sessions and a tour, and decided to stay. He lived and worked there for 33 years. After Young died aged 53 in 2000, Vic contributed a handful of tracks for a posthumous Paul Young album, Chronicles, which was released in 2011.
He is survived by a cousin.
