The Singer and Showman

He was the epitome of the aspirational working class: not a clownish cockney music-hall revivalist like his contemporary Tommy Steele, but a neatly dressed, businesslike, articulate harbinger of Mod: a stylish bookend to the faux-Elvis rockerisms of Billy Fury and Cliff Richard. His ideal was to get on in life, and he used everything he had to further that aim.

He may not have been as pretty as Cliff Richard, or as smooth and versatile a singer, but he was arguably the most distinctive British pop vocalist of his era: his hiccupping glottal stops and eccentric pronunciation rendered him instantly recognisable.

Faith was a smart underdog who never stopped trying, a characteristic he carried into his signature role as Budgie in the 1970s TV show, though, unlike Budgie, he succeeded more often than not.

Like most of his contemporaries, Terry Nelhams from Acton received his first taste of the joys of music-making with the skiffle group the Worried Men. History does not record what became of the rest of the group, but their singer changed his name to Adam Faith and became, thanks to the ear-catching combination of John Barry's ingenious orchestrations and Faith's own idiosyncratic vocals, one of the biggest stars of pre-Beatles British pop.

It speedily became apparent that the camera liked his chiselled features and blond mop rather better than the microphone did his one-trick-pony vocals. He appeared in such low-budget British movies as Beat Girl and Mix Me a Person in the standard juvenile-delinquent roles alongside the more conventional "popsploitation" flicks, kicking off the acting career that ultimately rescued him from pop has-been-dom. Significantly, he became the first pop star of his era to appear on the heavyweight chat show Face to Face, politely and articulately assuming the mantle of Spokesman for Youth.

Like all British pop singers of the time (with the exception of the invincible Cliff Richard), Faith was rendered obsolete by the arrival of the Beatles. Faith attempted to move with the times by assembling a guitar-based backing band, the Roulettes, but the new team didn't take.

In the 1970s he diversified into pop management, discovering and promoting the then unknown Leo Sayer.The failure of a mid-1970s comeback album, Survivor, effectively closed his musical career. His next major screen role was as David Essex's manager in the pop parable Stardust, but his dramatic breakthrough came with the title role of the TV series Budgie, written by Keith Waterhouse, which chronicled the misadventures of a petty-crime chancer.

The show was enormously successful and led to still more acting work, which ran in parallel with his entrepreneurial activities, and which peaked in the early 1990s with three series of BBC1's Love Hurts, with Zoë Wanamaker, and the sitcom The House that Jack Built, alongside Gillian Taylforth. At the time of his death he had yet more acting work in the pipeline.

Adam Faith was well named: throughout his life he was frequently down but never out. His unshakeable self-belief led him to reinvent himself countless times. His ingenuity, energy and tenacity may have outweighed his talent, but the combination of those qualities took him a long way from Acton. Most importantly, he had a good haircut e'en unto the last.

Charles Shaar Murray has written several books on rock music and modern culture. His most recent is 'Boogie Man', a biography of John Lee Hooker