Mag April 36

April 2009 Issue No. 36 Celebrating Maybe Tomorrow THE SOUND OF FURY Official Billy Fury Fan Club 1 Billy on ‘Oh Boy’ in 1959 2 THE SOUND OF FURY Official Billy Fury Fan Club Billy Fury Patron: Ms Lisa F. Voice If you wish to provide information and articles for future magazines please contact the following :- PO Box 1117 Hutton Preston PR2 ODT E-mail: [email protected] Website : www.thesoundoffury.org Please do check out Harry Whitehouse’s excellent Billy Fury Website: www.billyfury.com The Sound of Fury Team are: Chris Eley – Team Leader, Editor, Contributor, Music business and media contact etc Jackie Clark – Media Contact (South) Peter Davies – Treasurer,Media Contact (North), Contributor etc Jen Davies – Main Correspondence Secretary Cecilia and Ken Darvell – Magazine Production and Dispatch, etc Remember this is your Fan Club Copyright of photographs and articles unknown unless stated. Should anyone have any further information please let us know. 3 Billy Fury on the Jean Carroll Show by Chris Eley, with special thanks to Harry Whitehouse, Ron Furmanek and Paul Rumbol For many years I have had a couple of black and white shots of Billy performing on what is obviously a TV programme set and which I had thought (a letter was obscured) was the Dean Carroll Show. It turns out that this was of course the Jean Carroll Show, Jean being a comedienne on US TV during the 1950’s it seems. Quite why I neglected to tell Paul Pierrot about the show in 1998, or even Odeon DVD a couple of years ago I really don’t know. Perhaps if I had, some clips would have been found long before now, although I doubt it, given how elusive such pre- cious items can be to locate. I told Paul about Billy’s Shindig Show, but that was a more clearly defined highly popular and well known thing to target, and of course we came up with that fantastic clip of I’m Lost Without You, still not com- mercially and legally available in its entirety. Anyway, during February 2009 a truly incredible find appeared on billyfury.com the world’s premier Billy Fury site run of course by Harry Whitehouse. This was a clip of Billy from 23rd June 1960, singing That’s Love on the Jean Carroll Show. If you do not own a computer you must really go into a library or Internet café and look up this clip – it is truly amazing. What as- tounded me the most was how sophisticated Billy looked and sound- ed, and how unlike our general perception of him in that year. From the photos in this article and the show itself you would swear that it was at least 1961, yet this was just three months after the final shows of the Eddie Cochran/Gene Vincent Tour where Billy still rocked and snarled with the best of them. It seems an American freelance producer of film and archive material, Ron Furmanek, discovered this programme in New York. He contacted Harry and then got the show digitalized in Los Angeles and 4 transferred to DVD. There is a copyright issue of course and whilst Harry has placed a very small but quite clear copy on his site it is my understand- ing that it cannot be downloaded. Also it is slightly out of synchroni- zation, whether deliber- ately or not I don’t know. All we can hope is that it will appear before we are all too old, together with the known existing un- shown clips from All That Jazz and who knows, whatever else is turned up. We don’t know much about the show partly because hardly anyone can remember anything about the comedienne or the show in particular. When I contacted my friend Chase Webster who was a singer in the USA around that time (he wrote and recorded Moody River, the Pat Boone major hit and had the original version of Like I’ve Never Been Gone of course) he could not recall the show. He loves the clip and rates Billy very highly. Long time fan and friend Frank Bull cannot recall seeing any Jean Carroll Shows even though it is believed that this was not a US show as such but one recorded over here by the Val Parnell (Sunday Night at the Lon- don Palladium) Organisation for probable transmission both here and in the USA. The presence of Dave King in the programme (not shown but obviously in part of it from the half time caption) also reinforces the Parnell connection. Frank does however recall seeing Billy on a TV programme during 1960, wearing a dark suit with tie and singing That’s Love! This programme was apparently themed around the River Mersey but unless we find that the show on Harry’s site has more to it, including other artists and a Mersey theme, it may not be the same show that Frank remembers. He certainly does not recall ever hearing of Jean 5 Carroll but does remember Billy, on a TV show, talking about Tommy Steele. Of course, perhaps he has some shows mixed up and this one did air over here and this was the one he recalls, the Mersey theme being from another show. Those memories going back over 40–50 years can really let us down. For those who don’t have ac- cess the clip of around seven minutes goes as follows, or ap- proximately so, because some of the audio is not as clear as it might be. The scene/set is supposed to be a record shop and the clip starts with Jean Carroll doing a skit on several songs current at the time such as That’s My Desire and I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby. Next she asks if there is anybody in the house and up pops Billy from be- hind the counter, looking great and wearing a dark suit and tie. Now the in- teresting thing is that on the TV clip from the show there is a Nat King Cole LP (which I have somewhere) shown in the record rack. In addition Billy has a pocket hanky in his jacket but on neither picture that I have from the two old ‘pop’ books are these items visible. In addition Billy’s hair looks different in those two photos, shown in this article, from the more perfect quiff with the typical falling lock of hair shown in the film clip. Billy also wears a neck microphone clearly in the TV clip and this is evident only in one of the photos. Just to compound the problem, Jean is wearing exactly the same outfit in one of the pictures, that she is on the TV show clip. Now, what woman is going to wear the same outfit for two shows! (unless those shows are months apart perhaps or, if flown in, perhaps she lacked more wardrobe – unlikely though). This leaves us with several options. Either the two photos are from totally different shows and Jean did repeat the outfit or, perhaps more realis- tically but disappointingly, the photos are rehearsal shots from the same show. Seeing as Jean is absent from one photo, and with so many technicians 6 about a rehearsal is the most likely scenario. Another possible option is that Billy did two numbers for that show but if so, did Ron find the whole show with two numbers, or if not, where is it and why was the whole show not together on the tape he found. Will we ever know, let’s hope so. Back to the clip. Jean says “I would like a record for my daughter; she wants one of the top British singers, ok.” Billy; “That would be Billy Fury!” Jean; “Billy who?” Billy: “Billy Fury.” Jean: “You’re kid- ding; you mean there is actually a guy walking around out there with a name like that?” Billy (Uncharacteristically) “Well I think he’s the greatest.” Jean: “Greatest what?” Billy: “Singer of course.” Jean: “Well you would! I was under the impression that the top British singers were Tommy Steele or Adam Faith” (What about poor old Cliff who was voted the top British singer by this time – Ed?) Billy: “Well your daughters quite an old woman then?” Jean: “Old woman, she’s fifteen, just a normal healthy mixed up teenager, that’s all. What are you trying to do, bury me?” Billy’s reply is indistinct but appears to be something about Tommy being a bad effect on her daughter. 7 Jean: “Billy Fury, Billy Fury”. She then asks if the ‘shop’ has the latest record Somebody Else’s By By. This is sure- ly a mickey take for Adam’s hit, Somebody Else’s Baby (Buybee!), which had reached No.2 in the NME Chart but was on the way down (at number 16) five days before this programme was recorded and out of the Top 30 by the 25th June. Billy: “Well it’s a good song but unfortunately Billy Fury hasn’t recorded it yet.” Jean (laughing): “Billy Fury hasn’t recorded it yet. Who is this Billy Fury kid any- how? Just another hunk of stuff with a blond lock of hair that hangs down in front of his eyes, scowls all the time and has a twitch, tight trousers and knocks his knees a little!”Billy, leaning forward really close to Jean gruffly says “Well I think he’s fabulous.” Jean, indicating Billy, “And I think he’s Billy Fury!” Jean then asks if Billy Fury has made a record and says she would like to hear it.

Load more