24 April 2015

AS the stars gathered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Neighbours last month few if any would have known that singer-songwriter Jackie Trent lay dying.

The woman whose lyrics are still heard around the world on the Neighbours theme was losing her long battle with illness.

There was no fanfare for Jackie Trent’s cremation. The only mourners were her devastated husband, Colin Gregory, and her two children, Michelle and Darren, from previous marriages.

It was a sad and inauspicious end for the once-famous and successful singer-songwriter, who early in her career had managed the seemingly impossible task of dislodging the Beatles from the top of the British charts.

Not only was Trent the lyricist on hits such as Don’t Sleep in the Subway and Colour My World, she also dated Elvis Presley, worked with Frank Sinatra and counted Sammy Davis Jr as a friend.

“Jackie was a true star,” her oldest friend, Margo Thatcher, recalls. “She was glamorous and talented. It’s no wonder so many people loved her.”

In her later life, Jackie had slipped into obscurity, retiring to the Spanish island of Menorca, battling ill health brought on by her addiction to alcohol and cigarettes.

Lurking, too, in the background was an expensive and heartbreaking legal battle with her ex-husband, Tony Hatch, over the rights to some of their many hits.

They had split in the most acrimonious fashion on Jackie’s 55th birthday, when her husband announced he was ending their 30 years of marriage and leaving her for a mutual friend he had secretly loved for many years.

British-born Trent was once the toast of the town in Sydney where she and Hatch made their life together for more than a decade in the 1980s.

There, Hatch and Trent were regular fixtures in the social pages performing at Carols by Candlelight, doing charity work for the Variety Club and enjoying late-night sessions around the piano with their friends Maria Venuti and Barry Crocker.

It was during their years in Australia that the couple were invited by another friend, producer Reg Grundy, to write a theme song for his new series tentatively titled Ramsay St.

Trent was later to reveal that it was her idea to rename the show Neighbours after arguing that Grundy’s original title sounded too similar to the British soap Coronation St.

Trent also claimed to have written those famous Neighbours lyrics while peeling the vegetables for dinner.

And then inviting their own neighbour, Crocker, over to record it for them and make TV history in the process.

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