BBC Essex Website - John's Journey Back in Time

THE US HITS

1	Blue Velvet - Bobby Vinton (In the UK we'd have to wait for a TV advert and airplay by an Essex DJ called Chris Best before it made No.2 many years later)
2	My Boyfriend's Back - The Angels (One hit wonder and had just spent 3 weeks on the US No1 spot)
3	If I Had A Hammer - Trini Lopez (Would make No.4 in the UK in October)

NEWS HEADLINES

It was September 1963 and a new banking card was launched in the UK. American Express began, five years after the equivalent had started in the US. The only catch was - you had to be earning more than two thousand pounds a year to apply for one. However American Express had a rival in the UK. The Diners Club card, which had launched the first ever credit card in the United States in the Fifties. There was a fee for joining American Express - and if you think you know - enter this week's How Much Was It Then competition with Linda.

In other news…....Princess Anne had just started school at Benenden …. In cricket Sussex won the first one day final. And in motor racing Jim Clark, aged just twenty seven, became the youngest man to win the world drivers' championship.During the season, the Scot had won seven Grand Prix.

It was September 1963 and there was sad news coming in from Alabama where four black worshippers were killed by a bomb as they attended church in Birmingham. Another twenty three were injured including the minister who was blown out of his pulpit at the Baptist church. The FBI was sent to investigate the killings and protests started which ended in a black teenager being shot by police after he threw stones at them.

The civil rights leader Doctor Martin Luther King called on people to remain non violent in the face of what he called the terrible provocation. He sent a telegram to the Governor of Alabama George Wallace which read "the blood of four little children and thirteen others critically injured is on your hands."

It was September 1963 and the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs was arrested.

MUSIC FEATURE

THE FRENCH AIRLINER WHICH SOARED INTO THE BRITISH POP CHARTS !

Lois Wilkinson and Andrea Simpson were two London office girls working in the same company, and in their spare time, used to entertain friends at parties by singing as a duo.

They called themselves The Caravelles - after a French airliner !

So popular were they that friends persuaded them to have a crack at it professionally.

They begun rehearsing and decided to make a demo of an old B side recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1956. The A side was only too well known - it had been a huge hit. But on the B side of Sixteen Tons was the lesser known You Don't Have Top Be A Baby To Cry, written by Bob Merrill and Terry Shand.

A record company called BPR Records haerd the demo and got the girls to record it again, this time in a professional studio and it was commercially released, making No.6 on the Decca label.

But more success was to come - across the Atlantic. The Caravelles claim to fame was that they invaded the United States a year before The Beatles.

Smash Records contacted them and before the year was out, The Caravelles were sitting in the Billboard Hot 100's Top 3.

Their career launched, they began recording other old songs, but further success was very hard to come by. They tried various approaches - the tough girl singing sound on Lovin' Just My Style, a return to that girlie style with Don't Blow Your Cool and even a touch of rock and folk on Hey Mama, You've Been On My Mind.

But that early success they couldn't repeat, and they split, Lois leaving for a solo career under the name Lois Lane.

Andrea Simpson continued as The Caravelles into the 1980's.

You don't have to be a ba-a-aby to cry
All you need is for love to go wrong
You don't have to be a ba-a-aby to cry
Or to lie awake the wh-o-le ni-i-ght long
When you leave me my golden rainbow disappears
And you leave me a broken heart that's full of tears
These ain't rainbows in my eyes, why should I lie
You don't have to be a ba-a-aby to cry
When you leave me my golden rainbow disappears
And you leave me a broken heart that's full of tears
These ain't rainbows in my eyes, why should I lie
You don't have to be a ba-a-aby to cry
You don't have to be a ba-a-aby to cry
You don't have to be a ba-a-aby to cry

Join John Hayes for his Journey Back In Time, a nostalgic look back at music and memories from a chosen year, this Sunday from 9am on 103.5 & 95.3FM - BBC Essex.

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