But the band which last came to Britain four years ago was still touring this summer and consistently topped the rock circuit in

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But the band, which last came to Britain four years ago, was still touring this summer and consistently topped the rock circuit in the United States both in terms of attendances and revenue.It was extraordinary achievement for a group that never had mass appeal outside its own fan base, nor a single song that was widely known outside that same fan base. For three decades, whatever the prevailing fashion, they maintained an uncompromising allegiance to the hippie and drug culture of the Sixties.In a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Garcia said: "To get really high is to forget yourself and to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. They became cornerstones of the hippie counter culture in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where they lived. The Dead Heads, as they came to be known, followed the band across America and across the world, often leaving home as teenagers to do so, and getting temporary jobs wherever the band might be playing.Thousands of concert-goers would come equipped with notebook and pen and note down every one of the band's ever-changing repertoire of numbers.As the first chords of a song were played, there would be a yell, followed by the sight of thousands of heads bent over pieces of paper.The Grateful Dead first came to notice at the Trips Festival in San Francisco in 1966, and were later to play at most of the key rock events of the decade including Woodstock and Altamont. He was pronounced to have died of natural causes.The Grateful Dead have been a perennial touring band, and to attend a concert was to watch not just a strikingly good band playing improvised rock and roll, country and jazz music It was also to absorb an audience like no other. Yesterday, he lost the battle when he was found dead in his room at a drug treatment centre in California A nurse had attempted to revive him.

DAVID LISTER Arts Correspondent If the death of Jerry Garcia yesterday marks the end of the Grateful Dead, it will end a phenomenon which has involved a massive cult following for nearly 30 years.Garcia, 53, was lead guitarist, singer and songwriter with the group and had fought against heroin addiction for 20 years. One hopes that a nation that can forgive Jim Davidson his binges and wife beating can do the same for a man who may only have been lying to himself about why he feels hurt, vulnerable and confused.. It would be something more than ironic if the very qualities that first brought Michael Barrymore adoration were now to be held against him as evidence of deceit. They thought it was old-fashioned sentimentality when it might be terribly modern sexual anxiety. Like Bruce Forsyth, another happily married comic, he has a sure grasp of the codes of camp, flinging a wrist here and an eyebrow there, snapping a spot-on Danny La Rue impersonation whenever the moment demands it. It's never overtly queer, but it's equally devoid of machismo."Which may be what Barrymore's audience were inadvertently reacting to in the first place; that lack of machismo.

He's caricature, but he's not outrageous, though as acute cultural analyst Andy Medhurst recently noted, "Kenneth Tynan used to argue that the greatest comics had an inbuilt androgyny, a disdain for conventional gender roles that drew on male femininity and female masculinity, and Barrymore clearly belongs to that line. He's a nice man, but he's throwing his life away." Or...His people may feel betrayed: did Mr Honestcon them? He's definitely confused them. For if Michael Barrymore is gay or bisexual, he simply doesn't fit the showbiz stereotypes: Kenneth Williams, Larry Grayson, Julian Clary. It could be that many will agree with his former assistant John Davis: "Michael must face up to the truth of just who he is... Indeed, taken on trash Freudian terms, it would explain the breach with his formerly beloved mother, the volatile relationship with a spouse widely believed to the dominant partner, the illnesses and collapses and that odd incident back in February 1993 when the star had "one nightcap too many" and nosily tried to break into a fellow (male) hotel guest's room. It might be that his constituents don't care if he's revealed to be gay or bisexual.