“When I was at his memorial party,” says Wallace, “there was somebody there who had known him very well, who said that when he was younger he had been prescribed lithium and this had really numbed him and he decided that it was more worthwhile for him to suffer and be creative.
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Wallace is frank about Hazlewood’s failings, detailing his frequent nervousness around a man who wielded his temper “like a sock full of pool balls”. “We would just sit with a guitar and come up with ideas, and a lot of them came out of experiences that we’d had.” Hokom says she co-wrote Some Velvet Morning and (another Lee & Nancy duet) Sand. "Trust me! What did I know? We’d sit around for years, and write these songs, and ‘Trust me!’” So he said ‘I’m going to give you a third of the publishing, that’ll be much better – trust me.’ “Lee and I wrote a lot of those things together,” she told me in 2013. The Sinatra hits were demoed with his then-girlfriend Suzi Jane Hokom, who says her contribution has never been fully recognised. The reappraisal of Hazlewood is not without its controversies. “There was this kitsch element to the easy listening revival, and Lee never fitted in with that” says Wallace, “because the kitschiness was always undercut with this mysterious element, or these strange, warped double meanings that he used. Musically, Hazlewod is unique, crafting a peculiarly twisted version of easy listening. Sinatra recently told BBC Woman’s Hour that Hazlewood “painted beautiful fairytales … they’re evocative and you go off on another planet somewhere.” Wallace’s book is constructed from extensive interviews, and offers an intriguing portrait of a man who is best known for his collaborations with Nancy Sinatra, most notably the transatlantic number one hit, These Boots Are Made For Walking, and Some Velvet Morning, on which Lee and Nancy traded semi-classical innuendo. That was a big awakening for him, and a big pleasure too.” “He’d dismissed them as silly little country records, and suddenly he realised that people really cared about them. “That’s one of the things that was so extraordinary for him in the last years of his life - people did value what he’d done,” says Wallace.
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Wallace suggests there is a mass of material from Hazlewood’s exile in Sweden which has yet to enjoy a wider release, including a “breathtaking” TV special in which he reinterprets the songs of Harry Chapin with Swedish singer Lill Lindfors.
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