THINGS DO GO WRONG
by Spencer Leigh

Sample Text
The Anglo-American Beat Show Hits Liverpool

On Sunday 13 March 1960, the touring party travelled to Liverpool. The shows were at the Empire Theatre on Lime Street and just a few hundred yards away, on the same street, was the Adelphi Hotel. The huge hotel was built at the turn of the century to give clients an idea of what staying on a liner would be like before they travelled to New York. The rooms were, and still are, like state rooms. The hotel is unique, still is, but for different reasons today as any reader of tripadvisor.com will tell you. It was the natural place for celebrities visiting Liverpool to stay. Bill Haley, Tommy Steele and Roy Rogers were there in the 50s and indeed, the local papers pretended that Trigger was a guest as well. He put his hoof print in the visitors’ book but he was really staying in the police stables in Smithdown Road. Flanked by hundreds of children, Roy Rogers rode Trigger down Lime Street to the Empire Theatre.

Jim Sullivan: “The Adelphi was like a big old, show-biz hotel but we couldn’t afford the hotels. We would stay in boarding houses that were used to actors and actresses and music hall performers. We were with the cast from one of John Hanson’s operettas, and these people never classed us as being in show-business. The dinner might be like a family gathering before the show and so that was quite homely, but the rooms would be something else again. They were very cold and we would have to put a shilling in the meter. I’ve also stayed in transport cafés to save money where it would be 10 shillings a night and 30 to a dormitory.”

This time Eddie was closing the first half. The curtains opened in darkness and the intro of ‘What’d I Say’ played. The three guitarists turned round as one and there was Eddie, legs braced as the sound swept over him. He asked if there were any 16-year-olds in the theatre and dedicated ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ to them. For the first time on the tour, Eddie sang ‘Sittin’ In The Balcony’ and impressed the audience with his guitar-picking. A young John Peel was in the audience and he later remarked, “Eddie was great and Gene was even better.”

Nik Cohn in his book, ‘Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom’, says of Eddie, “He was a mover and a writer and voice. He played his own things on guitar, he was really a musician. He sang songs that weren’t crap but did somehow manage to get across a real basic attitude. All of that was new. No poncing about, no dressing-up or one-shot gimmicking: he was something solid happening. So Billy Fury saw him and woke up. Or the Beatles saw him, or the Stones, or the Who, or the Move. That’s how things got started.” Paul McCartney was not at the Empire, but young George Harrison was most impressed with Eddie Cochran’s guitar playing.

Well-known rock’n’roll writer, Jim Newcombe, was very impressed by what he saw on the Tuesday night, although Gene was wearing his bright green suit that night. He especially recalled Eddie shrugging his shoulders during ‘Somethin’ Else’ and playing a chilling solo on ‘Milk Cow Blues’.

The most savage of all the regional reviews of the tour was published in the ‘Liverpool Daily Post’ on 15 March. It was written by ‘G.E’, actually a staid, old-time reporter named George Elgin. He wrote, “The only man fitted to review this show at the Empire, Liverpool last night would be a psychiatrist. No one else could possibly understand or explain it. Larry Parnes, whose claim to fame is that he has discovered more teenage pop singers than anyone else, has conceived the idea of putting a whole flock of them into one show. Mr Parnes’s claim is dubious because on the evidence of last night’s effort any untalented kid who can clutch a microphone or guitar is a potential starlet.”

Elgin, who had lost his marbles, comments on the complete absence of talent but he couldn’t hear them above the screams. With one exception. “I did at one point, while one of the Americans, oddly attired in a black leather suit, was crawling about the stage clutching a microphone, catch a few phrases of a fearfully maltreated version of ‘Over The Rainbow’. Apart from that, I have no idea what anyone was singing about.”

The evening paper, ‘Liverpool Echo’, was similarly critical but, perhaps with a nod to ‘G.E’, said that nobody but teenagers had any place in the Empire that week. The singers “entrance the teenager audience and even get down to creeping about the floor and performing the strangest contortions.”

Commenting on the local hero, Billy Fury in his silver lame suit, George Elgin wrote, “What will the boys on the tugs say about that?” Sam Hardie, the pianist with Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes: “I remember seeing Billy Fury at the Liverpool Empire. I thought he was dreadful. He was caressing the microphone and I was very embarrassed about it. I suppose by booing him, I was showing off in front of my girlfriend, but a lot of others were booing him too.”

Privately, Larry Parnes, on one of his occasional visits, was booing him too. “These are good clothes,” he would argue, “and you are ruining them with your antics. If they have to be replaced, you will have to pay for them.” Indeed, Billy was to wear the silver lamé jacket with black trousers once the original ones were beyond repair. Pete Townshend used to play his act with a decent guitar and then swap to a cheap one for the destruction. Maybe Billy should have done something similar.

Billy was treated as a star in Liverpool, especially when he returned home to the Dingle with a police escort. “He was as overwhelmed by his success as much as we were,” says Billy Hatton. Billy brought home a pile of fan letters and asked his mother to answer them for him. This is rather better organised than Gene and Eddie who were happy to speak to fans at the theatres but rarely responded to letters.

Not all the shows were consistently good (or appalling, depending on who you are). Gene hated the rain in Liverpool and said that it affected his leg. He was in a bad, self-pitying mood for most of the week. Eddie who had had that hunting accident in his youth also had pains in his leg, which he attributed to the bad weather. He described his next single, ‘Three Steps To Heaven’ as a calypso so it was from calypso to collapso.

Billy Hatton, a childhood friend of Billy Fury’s: “Billy got me backstage at the Liverpool Empire and I got to meet Eddie and Gene. Eddie saw me eyeing his guitar, his famous Gretsch, and he had two pick-ups on it, a Gretsch one and a Gibson. He asked me if I wanted to play it, and I was holding the guitar I had seen in ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’! There’s me, Billy Hatton, playing Eddie Cochran’s guitar. Billy Fury said to me, ‘Put your hand out of the window’ and all these girls screamed. I thought, ‘I have got to get some of this.’” And he did. A few years later, Billy Hatton had hit records as part of the Fourmost.

There was no local radio then, apart from hospital radio. Monty Lister had been broadcasting to listeners at Clatterbridge and Cleaver hospitals on the Wirral from the 1950s and he would manage to get a few minutes in a dressing-room here and there, having Bill Haley, Marvin Rainwater, Freddie Bell, Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele among his many guests. Usually he did not set them up in advance and relied on friendly stage door keepers. His none-too-portable tape recorder weighed 35 pounds and had to be plugged into a light socket. He got Gene and Eddie to cooperate and I asked him how he found them. “Rather scruffy was my impression. They were lolling around and I had to chase after them with a microphone. They were both smoking and they weren’t very tidy with their cigarette ends, but they were both very friendly.”

Gene said that he would be in the UK until September and he promoted his latest record, ‘My Heart’, which was written by Johnny Burnette. Vincent did not care for the song but it had just entered the charts and every little bit helps. Commenting on ‘Boy Meets Girls’, Eddie said, “It is a very well produced show. It is superior to American rock’n’roll shows.” He selected his current hit, ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’, from his own records, and said that he was going home for 10 days on April 17 and then returning for 10 more weeks of touring.

The interviews sound quaint today but despite their brevity, Lister has captured the essence of their personalities: Cochran’s eagerness, Vincent’s disinterest, Brown’s East End bonhomie and Fury’s concern for hospital patients. While Monty is interviewing Billy Fury, you can hear the screams outside the window. Later in the week, Monty took two of the performers to meet factory workers in Port Sunlight and he recalls, “I took Billy Fury on a walking tour of Port Sunlight village and he asked me confidentially if he could buy one of the houses. They were tied cottages then so I said, ‘Only if you work for Lever’s’. He was a most likeable youngster, very shy and he wasn’t fussy about talking on stage. He wasn’t very happy with me when I introduced him with ‘Gonna Type A Letter’ which he thought was dreadful but I still like it. After we had done the lunchtime record programme, we went to the Bridge Inn, a posh hotel in Port Sunlight village for lunch and the service was dreadful. Joe Brown had a starting pistol on his person, as the police would say. We had had our soup and main course and we were waiting for the sweet. The Bridge Inn was like a cathedral, very quiet and very sober, but Joe fired his starting pistol in the air and people came crashing through doors from all around.” An indication too that Joe was picking up on Gene Vincent’s wayward behaviour.

Monty Lister had caught Gene and Eddie on a good day. When Gene said that he wanted a Coke, it usually meant Scotch. He would take both half-a-bottle of whiskey and sleeping pills to bed with him.

One evening Hal Carter took a cab to the hotel to collect them and found that Eddie was drunk. Hal poured black coffee down him and laid him out on the floor of his dressing room. The Wildcats dressed him and lifted him up, put a guitar around his neck, put on his dark glasses, stood him behind the curtains and hoped for the best. They hoped that the adrenalin would kick in once he heard the applause. It did but halfway through the scheduled set, he fell to his knees but continued playing. Hal Carter pulled the curtains across and they lifted him up and he continued as though it was an encore.

Big Jim Sullivan: “Eddie and Gene used to drink a bottle of bourbon before they went on stage. They were the first men I'd ever seen who really drank. They drank shorts so they weren’t like beer drinkers. Eddie was so drunk at the Liverpool Empire that we weren't sure that he'd make it to the stage. It had one of those microphones hat comes up from the floor. We positioned Eddie so that it would come up between his body and his guitar and he could balance on it. He sobered up after two songs and untangled himself. He gave a good show, so he never had anything to apologise for.”

But Gene did. ASBOs could have been invented for Gene Vincent. Big Jim Sullivan: “I can remember Gene having a go at the stage manager in Liverpool and he had his knife out. I only saw the end of the incident so I don’t know what happened, but Gene would go off his head now and again. I’ve known him to smash up a dressing room because something upset him.”

Let’s turn to the fans out front. First, David Deacon: “I can remember the evening well as I couldn’t believe it. They looked so fabulous and they were everything that we thought American rock’n’roll should be. They were competent, very exciting and they looked great. I was especially impressed to see Eddie Cochran in his leathers.”

John Cochrane: “I remember having high expectations as I worshipped Gene and Eddie. It was a great show but it would have been enough to have been in the same building as them.”

Mick O’Toole: “I went to the show with some lads and we were surrounded by girls who were screaming their heads off. I felt like standing up and saying, ‘Why don’t you listen to it?’ as we were there for the music. The girls, I suppose, were there for different reasons. I thought Billy Fury’s business of wrapping himself around the microphone and rolling on the floor was well over the top, especially for a British artist as the British were a lot more staid and reserved than the Americans. I thought Eddie Cochran was great and that had he lived, he could have given Elvis a run for his money. He had style and class and excitement. Gene Vincent was exciting in a different way – nobody wanted to be Gene Vincent, but we all wanted to be Eddie Cochran.”

While the tour was in Liverpool, the owner of the Jacaranda coffee-bar, Allan Williams told Parnes of his plans to have a huge beat show at Liverpool Stadium. It would star Eddie and Gene and would feature other Parnes’ acts as well as the cream of local talent. Williams was hyping it up but Parnes was intrigued to learn about the burgeoning of local talent. The concert was set for 3 May 1960.