THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

So, here we are – publication day!
This is a notable day for many reasons, principally for me because it has taken such a long and winding road to get here. My book published yesterday concerns events that occurred almost sixty years ago and was inspired in 1998 when browsing in a bookshop I picked up a copy of Rock Around Britain a county-by-county gazetteer of rock music. What caught my eye was that in the pitifully slim entry for my home county of
Worcestershire.

Alongside the Buddy Holly Concert at the Gaumont Cinema in Worcester in March 1958 and the Jimi Hendrix concert which I attended at the same venue nine years later, was an entry for my hometown –
• Tenbury Wells, population 2000.
For reasons that have never been explained, The Beatles appeared at The
Riverside Dancing Club, Bridge Hotel, on Teme Street in April 1963 – the
week From Me To You rocketed into the charts.

So did they ever explain why they played Shea Stadium??!!*
This short piece at first infuriated me then prompted me to set about answering his
question. My first thought was to do a short web page and launch it on the internet,
but the more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that this concert –
which I never attended – was a central event in my life and in the life of this small
town. Accordingly, I set about trying to answer Pete’s question while at the same time
answering a few of my own. I did a lot of research and spoke to organisers and participants and wrote an article for the local newspaper.

A year passed and I decided to write a book. I was inspired by The Day John met Paul by Jim O’Donnell which provided an hour-by-hour account of 6th July 1957 when the boys met at a garden fete. While this approach appealed to me in its obsessive search for detail, I wanted something different. I wanted to weave together the story of the concert and its origins with some local context, some autobiographical detail and most of all, I wanted to expound a theory that my life was irredeemably changed on that day.

You see I was born in 1951, I started my secondary education one month after Ringo joined the band and finished my first year at university when the called it a day in the early summer of 1970. My progress through my adolescence could be tracked by reference to songs, films and events created by these young men.

I was making progress until a new promotion at work meant a move to Scotland and a heavy schedule. I would occasionally look at it and refine it but it was only during the pandemic in 220, now living in Germany and confined to the house that I settled down to finish the task set all those years before.
So here is an opportunity to visit the 1960’s, the decade of social change and capture some of the excitement that came to one small rural community, one bank holiday Monday in 1963.

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