SEVENTY years ago, a small record shop in the heart of Hartlepool gave Elvis Presley his first breakthrough hit in the United Kingdom and saved one of his most famous singles from flopping.
Heartbreak Hotel made it into the shops in this week in 1956 but no one was interested in this new American form of rock n roll – until the trendsetters of Hartlepool became the first in the country to start buying it and so set “the King” on the way to his debut hit.
The amazing, and unlikely, story of how the people of the Pools saved Presley is told in a new book, written by Alan Jennings, about the pop charts of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the book, Mr Jennings has rediscovered some of the damning reviews of Heartbreak Hotel when it was first released in late January 1956.
“Bandleader Cyril Stapleton relegated Heartbreak Hotel to a dismissive footnote in his Daily Express column,” says Mr Jennings, before quoting the Stapleton’s review: “Vera Lynn’s diction provides a great contrast to an American record I have here. The label informs me that it’s called Heartbreak Hotel, which is just as well because I’ve listened to it six times and I can’t understand a word.”
But by the end of February, in the US, the song began to break into the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and so the record company in the UK persisted, despite the public’s indifference, and got the vinyl seven inch into the shops 70 years ago this week.
Still, though, there was little interest until the Daily Mirror’s Lionel Cane witnessed the full frenzy of an Elvis concert in New Mexico and was moved to write a full-page feature on April 30, 1956.
Says Mr Jennings: “Four days later, the detonation: a full-page advert for Heartbreak Hotel, quoting the Mirror report, leapt from newsstands on the front page of New Musical Express. On the same day, Heartbreak Hotel made its first known appearance in a British newspaper Top 10.”
That newspaper was the Hartlepool Mail which printed a Top 10 compiled by Hoggett’s Record Shop in Lynn Street.
Hoggett’s had first opened on Musgrave Street in 1850 as a music shop, specialising in pianos and sheet music, before moving onto records in Lynn Street in 1911 where it billed itself as “The Gramophone House”. It regularly provided local newspapers with its Top 10 charts, and on May 4, 1956, it listed Heartbreak Hotel at No 9.
At No 8 in the chart was Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins, which is considered to be one of the first rockabilly records and which Elvis recorded later that year. Hartlepool really was days ahead of the rest of the country.
Mr Jennings, the former head of news at Tyne Tees, writes: “A week later, Heartbreak Hotel entered the NME national chart at No 15. It was to peak at No 2 in June. Elvis had arrived. And "The Cat" would soon be the King.”
Hoggetts and Hartlepool were the first to recognise his potential.
Stop Press Hits: How the UK Pop Charts Became Front Page News 1956-69 by Alan Jennings (£16.99) is available now. It tells how the printed press brought the first music charts to life.
