When The Odeon Hosted Larry Parnes’ Pop Package Tours In The Early 1960s

Published on: 23 Jan, 2018
Updated on: 24 Jan, 2018

Dave Reading recalls the pop package tours that hit Guildford during the early 1960s

Before Brian Epstein gave us the Beatles, there was Larry Parnes. The intense fan frenzy that marked every Beatles concert from 1963 onwards was just an extreme version of what Parnes had brought earlier to provincial towns like Guildford.

Larry Parnes.

Parnes was the British pop manager who developed the idea of the package tour. Instead of just one or two acts appearing at each venue – a headline star and a support act – the evening would feature up to a dozen singers and bands.

Parnes’s stars would hit the road together in a tour bus, taking in concert halls right across the country, playing for just one night at each venue. Those venues included Guildford Odeon, which was located at that time at the top of the High Street at the junction with Epsom Road.

For as long as I can remember, pop music has been an obsession for kids in their teens so when the Larry Parnes’ package tour hit Guildford in the early 1960s this was a big event.

Guildford Odeon. David Rose Collection.

The creative genius of the Beatles and Rolling Stones was still a couple of years down the line, but we made do with what we had. Each week we would pick up the New Musical Express from the doormat and find the usual crop of brown-eyed boys in the charts, most of them US imports like Tommy Roe doing his Buddy Holly impersonation on Sheila and Johnny Tillotson with his jaunty Poetry in Motion.

But Britain was also beginning to produce some good pop music talent, and it was Larry Parnes who was leading the way. Parnes was a starmaker – a sharp Londoner in his thirties who was the brains behind many of the British pop acts before Epstein came along.

He understood that finding a good song was only half the battle. The image his stars presented to the world was also critical.

It seems likely that he used Elvis Presley as a model because his stars’ clothes and hairstyles all reflected the rock ’n’ roll fashions that had been imported from across the Atlantic.

Parnes changed the names of many of his acts to give them a sense of danger and drama. Ron Wycherley was re-christened Billy Fury; Reg Patterson became Marty Wilde; Tommy Hicks became Tommy Steele; Ray Howard became Duffy Power; and Clive Powell became Georgie Fame.

It’s said that Parnes tried to persuade Joe Brown to change his name to Elmer Twitch, but Brown was having none of it!

Cover of the programme for Larry Parnes’ The Big Star Show of 1962. Picture: Ben Darnton of Ben’s Collectors’ Records.

In April 1962, Billy Fury headlined at Guildford Odeon. Here was a singer with good looks and serious musical talent. On stage his hip-swivelling movements displayed shades of Elvis Presley and to many fans he was Britain’s very own Elvis.

He was joined on the bill by hit-makers John Leyton, Karl Denver, Eden Kane and Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers.

These may not be remembered as star names today, but at the time this was huge for Guildford.

And then there was Joe Brown, the “the chirpy cockney”, who opened with a rocking version of the old music hall song I’m ‘Enery the Eighth, I Am. This may suggest he was some kind of novelty act but Joe Brown was far more than that: a proficient guitarist who was as good as any of the American greats.

The concert was a sell-out, if I recall correctly, but within a year we had all moved on. The Beatles, the Stones, and the Animals, had raised the level of music up several notches. And many of those hit-makers of the early 1960s were soon forgotten.

Billy Fury on the front page of the New Musical Express.

Billy Fury’s career continued in a more low-key way, but sadly he died of a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 42.

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