MORE than £5,000 has been raised in three days, to give a Kentish Town music promoter a “big fat funeral”.

Jon “Fat Beast" Driscoll, who ran the highly influential Timebox club at the Bull and Gate pub in Kentish Town, died on Sunday at the age of 51.

He was probably best known as the warm-up act for indie pop band Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, during which he would strip to his pants while the crowd shouted “You fat bastard” at him before he insulted them back.

Timebox was a key indie music venue in the 1980s, and often gave unsigned bands a London stage to perform on. 

Jim Bob Morrison, the vocalist in Carter USM, set up the fundraising page on website GoFundMe.

He had aimed to raise £5,000 to help Beast’s family with funeral costs, but by yesterday had raised £5,660. 

Mr Morrison referred to Jon as a “massive pain in the arse” but said he would be “very, very missed now he is gone”.

He said: “To say he was an attention seeker would be an understatement. He had a huge ego, but that was all part of being a colourful character. Again, that’s an understatement.”

He said that Beast had been suffering from septicemia and pancreatitis, and had gone in for a routine operation and not come out again. 

“I met Jon in the Eighties at the Bull and Gate. He was part of the lighting team, and he’d often heckle us through a mic while we were on stage or turn the lights of in the middle of a gig. Then he turned up at the beginning of our tour one day, and he just wouldn’t go away," Mr Morrison said. "So we had to get used to him, then we got to like him. There is a lot I have probably chosen to forget about Jon, because if you told him not to do something he would go out of his way to do it. 

“If you said don’t throw things at us, he’d do it. HMV Oxford Street said absolutely no stage diving when our band was there because it’s a shop. What did he do? He shouted ‘Stage dive’ and caused a mini riot. 

“At our Zagreb gig [Croatian capital], they were in the middle of a civil war. There were armed soldiers at the side of the stage, things were very tense. His reaction, and I don’t know why, was to come out wearing nothing but a paper Pepsi cup over his private parts. It did manage to break the tension.”

Mr Driscoll is survived by a younger brother, according to Mr Morrison. His funeral will take place in Blackpool, where he spent most of his life. 

Mr Morrison added: “He didn’t make any plans. I bet he would have loved to be fired up in a rocket, or turned into vodka, or something mad like that. But he didn’t tell us what he wanted because I don’t think he was expecting to go so young. We want a big fat funeral, but it will all be up to his brother.”