Misery

Before Abbey Road There Was Teme Street’ is an account of the visit by the Beatles to the small country town of Tenbury Wells in April 1963. Next April will mark the 60th anniversary of that landmark event and a three-day festival will be held in the town to celebrate all things Beatle including a talk by Mark Lewisohn, the world-renowned Beatles historian, poets, tribute bands and I will be talking about this book.

I was born in Tenbury Wells in 1951 and grew up on Berrington Road with two older siblings, Rosemary and David. It was a happy time in a loving family. However, in the context of this story it was a problem. I had an early immersion into rock n roll via my older brother who played records by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, he danced to Chubby Checker and ‘Let’s Twist Again’ was essential listening. So, I became a fan of pop music earlier than many of my schoolfriends and I watched ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’, ‘Six Five Special’, Juke Box Jury and anything else that covered pop music. On radio the hit parade show Pick of the Pops counted down the top 20 every Sunday evening.

In this way I was an early adopter of pop music and read New Musical Express each week. I first saw the Beatles on the ITV programme Thank Your Lucky Stars on 19th January 1963. They sang Please, Please Me and looked and sounded like no one else I had seen. Furthermore, they were defiantly English with no trace of the Elvis Presley impressions of Cliff Richard or Billy Fury. I started to hear them on the radio and wanted to know more about them.

April 15th was a bank holiday and my parents were at home. I spend the day pleading with my father to be allowed to attend The Beatles concert that night. At 11¾ and the son of a man born in 1910 who denies my brother elastic sided shoes when he was eighteen years old, I knew it was a hopeless cause. Nevertheless, I went through the usual “cinema routine” getting my friends with more liberal parents like Chris Tompkins, to call me – Tenbury 159 – to say they are going and want me to accompany them. It’s an old trick usually used for Dracula and Quatermass films which sometimes worked, but this was not cinema, this was the Riverside Dancing Club! the venue for everything decadent, licentious and generally disapproved of. In short, absolutely banned for his son.

My brother David wrestles with a personal dilemma. He had gone down to G.E. Bright Electrician and Television Engineer to buy “From Me To You” on its release date, Friday, 12th of April. He had also bought The Rhythm of the Rain by The Cascades and Misery by Kenny Lynch. This last named has a marginal note in the history of pop as being the first cover record of a Beatles song when it was released on 15th of March. Lynch, a minor entertainer and friend of the stars, had just been with The Beatles on their first UK Tour and had seen Lennon and McCartney writing the song on tour bus. They offered it to ‘top of the bill’, fifteen-year-old Helen Shapiro with whom they had been very impressed. When she declined, Lynch snapped it up. “John and Paul told me they were going to sing ‘ooooh’ together.” I said, “You can’t do that. People will think your poofs.”

Lynch was a popular character who later had a hit with Up On The Roof and even later, appeared on the cover of Paul McCartneys post Beatles album Band on the Run. However, Misery was the word that defined my day, a day that defined an aspect of my life. I was so proud that this most important and influential cultural phenomenon had visited my little hometown and yet the telling was always accompanied by a crestfallen response to the first questions - Did you see them?¬ What were they like?

Misery indeed!

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