Kevin DuBrow tasted chart success with the American heavy metal band Quiet Riot. The band's version of Cum on Feel the Noize gave them an American Top 5 single in 1983 and the accompanying album, Metal Health, shot to No 1, eventually selling a reported four million copies. A flamboyant figure with a charismatic stage personality, he continued to sing on and off with various incarnations of the band for the remainder of his career.

Born in Los Angeles in 1955, DuBrow had by his mid-teens become an obsessive fan of the second wave of British rock groups conquering the American rock scene in the early 1970s, most notably Rod Stewart and the Faces and Humble Pie, fronted by the singer Steve Marriott, whose gritty blues-rock vocal style he sought to emulate.

In 1975 he joined the guitarist Randy Rhoads in forming the heavy rock band Quiet Riot, a name suggested by the Status Quo guitarist, Rick Parfitt. The group recorded two albums for Columbia, which were only released in Japan and are now collectors' items, but broke up — for the first of many times — in 1979 when Rhoads left to join Ozzy Osbourne's band.

DuBrow formed a new band called simply DuBrow with little success, but after Rhoads's death in an air crash in 1982, he decided to revive the Quiet Riot name, even though he was the only member of the original band involved in the new line-up. With a change of sound and image based on the harder-rocking British “glam” acts of the early 1970s, the second incarnation of Quiet Riot almost instantly enjoyed the success that had eluded the original band. A revival of Slade's 1973 hit Cum on Feel the Noize made the Top 5 of the American charts in 1983, and the parent album, Metal Health, became the first heavy metal album to reach No 1.

The band's symbol, a figure wearing a metal mask and straitjacket, became a familiar heavy metal motif and DuBrow adopted a similar image as part of the band's stage shows. Yet Quiet Riot failed to build on the success of Metal Health. The follow-up album, Condition Critical (1984), disappointingly made only No 15 in the American charts and QR III in 1986 failed even to make the Top 30.

Finding it difficult to come to terms with the decline in the group's fortunes, DuBrow responded with a series of bitter interviews in which he criticised younger, better-selling heavy metal bands and claimed they owed their success to Quiet Riot's trailblazing. Tiring of the controversy generated by these outbursts and frustrated by poor record sales, his colleagues sacked him at the end of a tour in 1987, abandoning him in a hotel in Hawaii and heading for home on an early flight without informing him.

He was replaced as lead singer by Paul Shortino but there was no upturn in record sales and in 1989 the group broke up. DuBrow, meanwhile, had briefly formed a band called Heat, but still claimed the rights to the Quiet Riot name and engineered a reunion on the 1993 album, Terrified. This was followed with the 1995 album Down to the Bone, which generated enough interest for the release of a collection of greatest hits, but after a further series of bewildering line-up changes Quiet Riot split again in 2003. DuBrow released his only solo album in 2004 with the covers collection In for the Kill, but inevitably there was another reunion the following year, which led to the release of the 2006 album Rehab. He was found dead of unknown causes in his Las Vegas home.

Kevin DuBrow, rock singer, was born on October 29, 1955. He died on November 25, 2007, aged 52