Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #150150

When:

Short story:

Fats Domino makes his live British debut, starting a one-week stint at The Saville Theatre, London, England, UK, Europe, supported by Gerry And The Pacemakers and The Bee Gees. Paul McCartney of The Beatles is in the audience. Tickets are from six shillings to one pound, and Record Mirror reports that, "The show was opened by The Bee Gees, an attractive Australian group with an excellent lead singer. Unfortunately, the rocker minority in the audience spoiled their act completely."

Full article:

Barry Gibb (Bee Gees) : From our earlier childhood in Australia, all we heard was American rock And roll. We didn't really hear many English records so Fats Domino, Bobby Vee and Ritchie Valens, people like that, were idols in Australia, Oceania. They may not have meant quite so much in England but Australia was very Americanised so those were the main records we heard...

So Fats Domino comes to England and he is doing a night at The Saville Theatre and Robert Stigwood needs somewhere to showcase us so he could get a feel as to what the audience gets from us when we play. We'd just formed the band so we didn't really have much to go on. We had Colin Peterson and Vince Melouney, who had just joined us, and we'd done about a week's rehearsal as a band. We were not a band until a week before.

So we played and we opened the show. The shock was ... and it shouldn't have been a shock … that the whole audience was leather jacketed rock And roll freaks. You know, bikers and people like that who only really wanted one thing in life and that was Fats Domino - and as soon as possible please! So missiles started flying and then I think Robin got an egg. He still has that egg by the way.

Gerry And The Pacemakers were second on the bill which was another incredible thrill for us, because whilst we were back in Australia the whole Mersey boom had happened. We hadn't been in England and we were just getting all of this vibe from England about The Beatles, the Stones, Gerry And The Pacemakers, and The Summer of Love. We were getting this whole thing and we wanted to be a part of it. We thought we can do it we're good enough to do it. The Easybeats went to England from Australia and they had a hit and we thought well if they can have a hit so can we.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, February 9, 2001)

Robin Gibb (Bee Gees) : It wasn't a very good night for us. It was our first English gig, it wasn't our audience, and they didn't even know who we were. They were there for Fats Domino, heavy 50's rockers, and I remember McCartney (of The Beatles] was there that night in the box. Really Stigwood just wanted to see what we were like on stage. We'd only got Vince and Colin into the band a week or so before.

We were developing our image, and it was kind of a try out, so it wasn't depressing for us. McCartney told us that he loved what we'd done, which was very encouraging.