Barry Ryan made an international hit out of his brother’s baroque rock song

Barry and Paul Ryan disrupted radio rules with their hit song Eloise, which not only featured an orchestra but also ran more than five minutes.

Singer Barry Ryan first became famous in the mid-1960s performing with his twin brother Paul. As a solo artist he had one of the biggest selling songs of 1968-69 with Eloise, a song his brother wrote and that topped charts in 17 countries.

When Barry Ryan’s single Eloise topped the Australian charts in January 1969, it bested 39 other songs, as every chart-topper must. But few had faced such competi­tion. In the shadows of his elaborate pop confection that week were what can be described only as classics: White Room (Cream), Going Up the Country (Canned Heat), Hey Jude (the Beatles), I Started a Joke (Bee Gees), Son of a Preacher Man (Dusty Springfield), Those Were the Days (Mary Hopkin), All Along the Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix), Wichita Lineman (Glen Campbell), For Once in My Life (Stevie Wonder) and With a Little Help From My Friends (Joe Cocker).

It wasn’t the last time the Yorkshire lad, born Barry Sapherson, would do well. In the 1970s Ryan was involved in a minor car accident in London. Just who was at fault hardly matters, but as a result he started dating the driver of the other car: Princess Miriam binti al-Marhum Sultan Sir Ibrahim, daughter of Malaysian Sultan Ibrahim of Johor, who had been one of the world’s wealthiest men. By the time they married the sultan was long dead, but Ryan might have been bemused to think his father-in-law had been born in 1873.

Ryan and his twin brother Paul were born to Frederick and Marion Sapherson, but Frederick was a philanderer and soon had moved on. They never saw him again.

Their single mum started singing around Yorkshire clubs in the 1950s as Marion Ryan and an unlikely career evolved as a jazz and later pop singer making regular appearances on British television and even appearing in a film alongside Tommy Steele. One of her later pop hits, It’s You That I Love, was written by music promoter Harold Davison, whom she married.

Barry Ryan always said the brothers were not academically inclined and when they pulled out of boarding school they were at a loss, so, encouraged by their mother, they left for Israel, where they joined an English band called Sing Sing – a hardened group of Eastenders in their 30s – and played across the country, often sleeping on the beach between gigs.

This lasted about a year “until my grandmother came out and rescued us”, Barry Ryan remembered in 2017.

Back in London the boys became part of the London music underground, flatted with Cat Stevens (the artist now known as Yusuf Islam) and adopted Carnaby Street fashions as they became a fixture of the second-division scene. They issued a series of singles as a duo, the best of them rising to No.13 on the British charts. They were popular, and enthusiastic crowds mobbed them at shows, which all became too much for Paul Ryan and he decided in 1968 to write songs for others and produce them.

Early in 1968 the brothers were invited to a party at the home of Irish actor Richard Harris, a friend of their mother, at which he played a rough tape recording of an unusual song he had completed in Hollywood months before. MacArthur Park would become one of the biggest sellers of the year. Paul Ryan was struck by its length (7:21), its complexity and that it had distinct movements with radically different time signatures.

Across the next three days he locked himself away to write something similar, an almost operatic rock song in three clearly identifiable parts and came up with Eloise – knowing that with a running time of 5:50 it would be a challenge for radio.

It was recorded in two takes at the end of one of their mother’s studio sessions with the help of an orchestra and Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones moments before they formed Led Zeppelin. Barry Ryan’s electric vocal performance, fired up by a bottle of Jack Daniels, is unforgettable.

Eloise sold three million copies going to No.1 in 17 countries. Versions in French, Spanish and Italian also topped charts. An equally melodramatic follow-up, Love is Love, also sold strongly, but thereafter music fashion left Ryan behind. He was always popular on the continent and often sang in Germany, where his fame lingered (helped by a publicity stunt there with an exploding telephone that singed the star who, nonetheless, returned to London bandaged in the manner of the Invisible Man).

Ryan’s union with Miriam was short-lived. He became a fashion photographer, remarried and had two children, and performed from time to time.

His death was announced by Islam, who recalled that Ryan introduced him to Patti D’Arbanville – about whom Islam wrote the hit Lady D’Arbanville – and set him on his religious journey by giving him a book, The Secret Path, when Islam was ill with tuberculosis. Paul Ryan died in 1992, aged 44. The identical twins each died of lung disease.

Barry Ryan. Singer, photographer. Born Leeds, Yorkshire, October 24, 1948. Died London, September 28, aged 72.