‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ singer whose band suffered from Beatles comparisons
Gerry Marsden, who has died aged 78, was the lead singer of Gerry and the Pacemakers, a band indelibly identified with the ‘‘Merseybeat’’ sound and briefly the Beatles’ closest rivals.
The first act to top the charts with each of their first three singles, Gerry and the Pacemakers emerged from the innovating Liverpool scene at the same moment as the Fab Four. But although they shared the bill when the two bands toured together and had recorded the three No 1s in 1963, the distance between the Pacemakers and the Beatles swiftly grew.
While the third of those hits, You’ll Never Walk Alone, became the unofficial standard for
Liverpool
Football Club, the band’s light, catchy pop, upbeat lyrics and clean-cut image could not match the power and originality of Lennon and McCartney.
Nor could it compete with the increasingly complex sounds emanating from Britain and America. By the late 1960s, Merseybeat was for music historians chiefly, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, alongside other exponents, like the Searchers, were largely relegated to the cabaret and variety club ghetto.
In the 1980s, Marsden returned briefly to the limelight when You’ll Never Walk Alone and Ferry Cross the Mersey recharted as charitable records, released to raise money for the victims of the Bradford City and Hillsborough football stadium disasters.
Gerry Marsden was a singer who lived to perform. For more than 60 years after his golden year he cheerfully trooped around draughty concert halls, delighting ageing fans with renditions of his most famous hits. He revived memories of his part in that joyful moment when Liverpool exploded in creativity, and rock music and R & B crossed the Atlantic and established themselves permanently on these shores.
He was born in Liverpool in 1942; his father was a railwayman who played ukulele in a bar on Saturday nights. At 14 he formed a skiffle group called Red Mountain Boys. They morphed into Gerry and the Pacemakers after their initial choice of name, The Mars Bars – selected to attract corporate sponsorship – elicited the threat of copyright litigation.
In 1960, they relocated to Hamburg where they performed – on and off – for the next three years. There, like the Beatles, with whom they became close friends, they honed their craft playing seven hour-long sets each night, with a 15-minute break.
Back in Liverpool, they enjoyed residencies at the Cavern and the Casbah and quickly became leaders of an exciting music scene. Marsden recalled: ‘‘Every street had a pub filled with music and seamen home from the States and all over the world were playing music.’’ That music, the early rock‘n’roll inspired by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, was quickly dubbed the ‘‘Mersey Beat’’.
Such was the similarity of their sound that Gerry and the Pacemakers appeared regularly on the same bill as the Beatles and on one occasion even played with them, performing together as the Beatmakers.
In 1962 Marsden gave up his job as a teachest maker, having previouslyworked on the railways and in Woolworths, and the band was signed by the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. He never made them rich, according to Marsden, ‘‘because he couldn’t even look after himself financially’’. But he did teach them ‘‘to wear a suit, smoke filters instead of Woodbines and, mainly, how to talk friendly to people’’.
He also introduced them to George Martin, who recorded their first single, How Do You Do It?, which unexpectedly topped the charts in March 1963.
That year the group toured with Roy Orbison and the Beatles. But Beatlemania was under way and the Fab Four were soon the undisputed headliners. The Pacemakers’ second single, I Like It, topped the charts in May. Their third single, the Rodgers and
Hammerstein classic You’ll Never Walk Alone, taken from the musical Carousel performed immediately after the announcement of the assassination of President Kennedy, took on a life of its own.
All in all it spent 22 weeks in the chart and gave the band the distinction of reaching No 1 with their first three releases. Regularly played before kickoff at Liverpool’s Anfield home ground, with its surging feeling that was never far from hokum, You’ll Never Walk Alone was embraced by a stadium in which football was consideredmore than amatter of life and death. Over 60 years there was no denying its emotional pull.
Having performed the song on several emotive occasions, notably the memorial service in Liverpool Cathedral for the former Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly, in 1985 it was re-recorded by ‘‘The Crowd’’, a host of pop stars with Liverpudlian connections, to raise money for the victims of the Bradford football disaster. Again climbing to No 1, it made Marsden the first man to top the chart with different versions of the same song.
Trailered by this success, the band’s first album How Do You Like It? (1963) reachedNo 2 and their next single, I’m the One, the first to be written by Marsden, was only denied the top spot by the Searchers’ Needles and Pins.
An underrated songwriter, largely on account of his identification with You’ll Never Walk Alone, itwas still unfortunate when Marsden’s hit ballad Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying was successfully sued for breach of copyright by Ray Charles, who had composed a song with the same title.
The band also starred in their own film, Ferry Cross The Mersey (1964), written by Tony Warren, the creator of Coronation Street, featuring a roster of local acts including Cilla Black and the Fourmost. The band split in 1967, victims not only of the Beatles phenomenon and endless unflattering comparisons, but of their inability to break out of the one-paced cheeriness of Merseybeat.
Marsden continued to pound the nostalgia circuit, and released anniversary versions of his greatest hits. Embarking on a 41-date tour in 2014, he told the Daily Express: ‘‘I still get a buzz from performing live.’’
Gerry Marsden was appointedMBE for services to charity in 2002.
He married, in 1965, Pauline Behan, the secretary of his fan club. They had two daughters.