Where was Buddy Holly’s last ever concert in the UK, and why did it include getting punched in the face by his bassist?
At 21, Buddy Holly was already a very famous fellow when he headed out on his first-ever tour of the UK in March of 1958.
Backed by his band, the Crickets, the Texas native managed to book a gig on all 25 days of his visit, playing to packed venues despite relatively little coverage in the British press. American rock and roll was still seen as the soundtrack of teenage delinquency by some, and a lot of newspapers preferred not to boost the chances of this bespectacled cowboy beatnik corrupting the youths of England.
Nearly 70 years later, there is very little surviving physical evidence of Holly and the Crickets’ British performances. The audio recording from their televised set on the BBC’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, along with a few still images from the broadcast, does exist, but has the general quality of your average sasquatch video. Otherwise, the historic tour has remained mainly the stuff of legend, kept alive through the anecdotes of the people who were there, and one of those individuals was the famous British comedian, singer, and future chat show host Des O’Connor, who had the unique distinction of being Holly’s opening act through the entirety of that 1958 tour.
“I’d never seen amps before, so it was sensational,” O’Connor, who died in 2020, recalled to Birmingham Live in 2012, “It was so exciting to see the beginning of something new”.
O’Connor was only 25 himself, and instantly bonded with the young musicians from the ‘Lone Star State’. Since he was mainly there to tell jokes before the Crickets took the stage, he also spent time on the tour bus teaching Buddy and his pals the art of English comedy. “I’d give Buddy a few gags, and his Southern drawl would make them funny. In return, he’d teach me a few things about the guitar. He was a very nice man, and I feel privileged to have worked with him.”
He, like everyone else who saw Holly that spring, assumed this would merely be the first of many tours to come, but instead, the singer’s introduction to the UK was also his farewell, as he’d be dead less than a year later, killed in the infamous plane crash that also claimed Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. This would forever seal Holly’s two-set performance at London’s Gaumont Palace, on March 25th, 1958, as his final gig in Britain.
The Gaumont would later change its name to the Hammersmith Odeon in 1962, and these days, Londoners know it as the Hammersmith Apollo. What made Holly’s performance there particularly memorable, at least to Des O’Connor, wasn’t just that it was the final day of the tour. After the band’s first set of the night, when everyone was hanging out backstage before the second show, Buddy and his bass player, Joe Mauldin, got into a bit of a disagreement, a kerfuffle of sorts.
According to one account of the incident, Mauldin lit up a cigar to celebrate the occasion a little prematurely, and Holly took issue with it. They might have been horsing around or seriously engaged in fisticuffs, but either way, the result was that Mauldin managed to knock the caps right off Holly’s front teeth.
As the singer realised the state of his chompers, O’Connor heard a stagehand say the band would be back on in 20 minutes. “So I suggested to Buddy that he might get some chewing gum to fix them back in!” O’Connor said, and according to Buddy Holly lore, that’s exactly what happened. For his final set ever in the UK, he sang with chewing gum stuck to his teeth. If it had any effect on his pronunciation of ‘Peggy Sue’, no one seemed to mind.
