Ringo's Summer at Butlin's
A Minus 65 Post
Coming Monday! Part One of “Then and Now with Billy J. Kramer!”
Butlin’s Pwllheli
For 12 weeks starting on the 5th of June 1960, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were the house band at Butlin’s Pwllheli. Pwllheli is a beach town in northwest Wales near where Cardigan Bay opens up into the Irish Sea. It’s about 100 miles west of Liverpool. For those of who may be unfamiliar with Butlin’s (likely American), I’ll try to give a very brief explanation (which I’ll likely get somewhat wrong since I’m more than likely American…) 😉.
Butlin’s is a chain of seaside holiday camps. The first camp was opened in Skegness, England, about 140 miles north of London, in 1936. This was followed by two more camps, located in Clacton and Filey. The three camps were turned over to military use during World War II. After the war, several more camps were added, including Butlin’s Pwllheli in Wales, which opened in 1947. Families would come for their summer holidays, generally for a week, and engage in water sports, music, stage shows, eating, drinking, playing pool and snooker, etc. If you want to know what it was like to be at Butlin’s, I would suggest that you get The Who’s Tommy movie and watch the section about Tommy’s Holiday Camp… 😊 Disclaimer: For those of you who have not seen Tommy, that was just a silly little joke. Tommy’s Holiday Camp was a horrible place. Butlin’s was awesome! Maybe watch That’ll Be the Day with Ringo and David Essex instead! Ha!
The slogan at Butlin’s in the 1960s was “You’ll have a really wonderful time at Butlin’s by the sea.” And from all accounts, that was certainly true for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Johnny Guitar, he of the amazing diaries, had so much fun that he didn’t make a journal entry for the entire time they were there, from early June to early September of 1960. The set up was pretty simple. Rory had his own room. Johnny Guitar shared with bass player Lu Walters and Ringo shared with guitarist Ty Brian. They played three hour sets, six nights per week. They also served as the backing band for an hour every weekday afternoon at the Player’s Bachelor Starmaker Contest, which was exactly what it sounds like, an amateur singing contest.
Rory Storm
We’ve talked a bit about Rory before, but just as a reminder, Rory was born Alan Ernest Caldwell on the 7th of January 1938 in Liverpool. He was a tremendous athlete who grew to 6 feet 2 inches tall and competed at the very least in football (soccer), skating, swimming, and cross-country running. His athleticism was no surprise to anyone who saw him perform on stage. He would jump off pianos and anything else on stage, kick, put his head into the drum kit, anything to be a showman. Incidentally, on one particular evening at The Casbah Coffee Club, he jumped and put his head through the low stage ceiling. If you visit The Casbah, and you should, the hole is still there. What many may not know is that Rory had a speech impediment, a stutter so bad that his friends would joke that they wouldn’t let him buy rounds of drinks because it would take too long. But when he sang, the stutter went away completely. As you may know, this is not an unheard of occurrence. According to The Stuttering Foundation of America, several renowned singers have been stutterers, including Carly Simon, Bill Withers, and Nancy Wilson.
By the time they arrived at Butlin’s, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes had a pretty specific stage show set up. They played songs made famous by Elvis, The Everly Brothers, Conway Twitty, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and others. During the rockers, Rory would crash around all over the stage, but during the ballads, he would sit in a backwards chair and croon while combing his hair. I must say that the more I have learned about the Liverpool music scene in 1960, the more I think that if I could go back in time and see just one Liverpool band other than The Beatles sixty years ago, it would be Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, without a doubt.
Starrtime!
Every night, as part of the Butlin’s show, Rory would at one point set up his microphone over the drums and announce “Starrtime!” before taking a little break. Most of the time Ringo would sing “Alley Oop,” the funny little novelty song by The Hollywood Argyles, whose version would make it to #24 on the UK charts during the summer of 1960. If you remember, the song is about the very popular comic strip character of the time (at least in the US), Alley Oop, a time-traveling caveman from the prehistoric town of Moo. Occasionally, Ringo would also be known to sing Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox,” which The Beatles would eventually record for the Long Tall Sally EP in the UK, and the Something New album in the US, with Ringo singing, of course.
As an aside here, I’ve seen Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band six times, once outside of Chicago, three times in Nashville, once outside of Boston, and one incredible time in Paris, at L’Olympia, where The Beatles did a week long residency in 1964 just before going to the US for the first time. One of the standards that he often does is “Boys,” and he tells a little joke beforehand, saying that he’s going to do a song he used to sing in a band he used to be in. He waits for the audience reaction (thinking he obviously means The Beatles) before saying: “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes!” So he may not have sung it at Butlin’s in 1960, but he certainly would later.
Anyway, back to Butlin’s. They lived a real rock star life that summer. They (especially Ringo) slept late, played music, drank a lot (well, Rory actually didn’t so much), gave autographs, and waited every Saturday for the new group of campers to come in for the week. As Ringo said on the Beatles Anthology DVD, “A new coachload of girls would arrive every week and we’d be like, ‘Hi, I’m with the band.’ It was paradise for that…it was growing up.” Maybe it’s a good thing Johnny Guitar wasn’t writing in his diary…
As always, thanks for being here and reading. I really do appreciate it. Please leave comments to let me know what you think and to add any relevant information to the discussion. Please follow or subscribe to
Though Substack is a subscription service, my content at this point is absolutely free.
Next up: Then and Now With Billy J. Kramer, Part One. Written by Billy J. Kramer. Really looking forward to that!
- Adamson
Photo: L’Olympia Paris, by Andrew Martin Adamson, 6th of June 2018.