John Bindon
John Dennis Arthur Bindon was born in Fulham in 1943. He left school early and was known for fighting while still a teenager, which earned him the nickname Biffo. He went to Borstal and was in and out of trouble. What set him apart from ordinary street fighters was not just that he could fight, but that violence became his first answer to everything. He once said that as a wild young man he had hit an awful lot of people, mostly policemen, and that he had done most of his prison time for hitting coppers.
Other dangerous men rated him. Freddie Foreman once called him London's hardest man. One night, in a pub behind the mews house Bindon rented in Belgravia, years of bad blood with a big Paddington villain finally went off. The other man's son later said his father started it after a drink. Bindon kicked him so hard he went down the stairs and broke his arm, then got on top of him and kept punching until a showgirl stopped it. Bindon walked away virtually untouched.
In the mid-1960s the director Ken Loach spotted him in a pub and thought he looked right for the screen. With no training at all, Bindon was cast in Poor Cow. Performance and Get Carter followed, along with television work and a steady run as one of British cinema's natural heavies. The industry did not change him. It pointed a camera at what he already was.
Off screen he lived two lives. In one he drank with actors, directors, models and socialites on the King's Road. In the other he was still the Fulham hard man, fighting in pubs and mixing with villains. The actor George Sewell remembered him as one of the funniest men he had ever met, and a liability.
In 1977 he was hired to run security on Led Zeppelin's American tour. A good security man lowers the temperature, and Bindon raised it. At the Oakland Coliseum, tension between the band's camp and the promoter's crew boiled over, and Bindon knocked out the stage crew chief. Charges followed. The band's manager, Peter Grant, later said hiring Bindon was the biggest mistake he made.
The turning point came back in London, outside a yacht club in Fulham, in a knife fight with the London gangster Johnny Darke. Darke was stabbed nine times and died. Bindon was wounded too, and he fled to Dublin with his injuries covered up. He gave himself up and stood trial at the Old Bailey. The prosecution said it was a £10,000 contract killing dressed up as self-defence. The defence said he had feared for his life. In 1979 the jury accepted self-defence and acquitted him.
Legally that was the end of it. In reality it was the start of the collapse. Directors now saw him as a risk, and the work dried up. The menace that had made him famous made him unemployable. He died in 1993, aged 50. He could batter a feared man in a pub, turn up in major films and drink with celebrities, then stand in the dock on a murder charge. He did not just play Britain's violent underworld on screen. He carried it with him. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.