On This Day

Sunday 17th April 1960

60 years ago

The Ford Consul taxi driven by George Martin taking rock ‘n’ roll legends Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent to London Airport crashed, killing 21-year old Cochran and injuring Vincent. Cochran's hit single at the time was 'Three Steps to Heaven'. Tour manager Patrick Thompkins and Eddie’s fiancée, songwriter Sharon Seeley (she wrote Ricky Nelson’s #1 hit “Poor Little Fool”) were also in the Ford Consul that was later estimated to have been traveling in excess of 60 mph through a dark and winding section of the two-lane A4 in the village of Chippenham. Gene Vincent would break a leg and walk with a limp for the rest of his life, but beyond that, the only serious injuries among the passengers were Eddie Cochran’s. Having been thrown from the vehicle when it smashed into a light post, Cochran sustained a serious head injury and died at hospital in Bath in the early hours of April 17, 1960. Cochran was on a triumphant concert tour of Britain in the spring of 1960—a tour that had been extended 10 weeks beyond its scheduled run due to intense demand for tickets. In America, a tamer brand of pop was in fashion, exemplified by the likes of Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka and Bobby Darin. In England, however, harder-edged rhythm-and-blues artists and rock-and-rollers like Eddie Cochran and his tour-mate Gene Vincent (of “Be Bop a Lula” fame) were far more popular. Theirs was the kind of music that the future members of the British Invasion were listening to in the late 50s and early 60s. It was “Be Bop A Lula,” in fact, that John Lennon was playing at the 1957 garden party where he first met Paul McCartney, and it was Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” that Paul taught John to play that same afternoon, shortly after being invited to join Lennon’s Quarrymen. At least one Beatle, George Harrison, saw Eddie Cochran in Liverpool during his final tour, and both his guitar-playing and his stage persona made a strong impression. “He was standing at the microphone and as he started to talk he put his two hands through his hair, pushing it back,” Harrison later recalled. “And a girl, one lone voice, screamed out, ‘Oh, Eddie!’ and he coolly murmured into the mike, ‘Hi honey.’ I thought, ‘Yes! That’s it—rock and roll!”