The First One: Bill Haley's 1957, Australia and Britain

Everybody who followed had a first tour. Bill Haley had the first tour — twice over, on two continents, inside five weeks.

In January 1957 he took the Comets around Australia for the promoter Lee Gordon. On 5 February he came down the gangway of the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton into a crowd reported at around five thousand people, and became the first American rock and roll act to tour Britain. The tours that followed — Eddie Cochran in Australia that October, Cochran and Gene Vincent across Britain in 1960, Duane Eddy on the same circuit weeks later — all ran on a road Haley opened.

Thirty dates in five weeks. Both itineraries are below, venue by venue.

Why him, and why so late

Haley was not the obvious candidate to be first. He was thirty when "Rock Around the Clock" broke, a former western swing bandleader with a kiss curl and a band of grown men in tartan jackets. The record had been cut in April 1954 and gone nowhere; it was its use over the opening titles of "Blackboard Jungle" a year later that turned it into the thing that made rock and roll a global business rather than an American genre.

So when the promoters went looking for someone to send abroad in 1957, Haley was who they had: the man with the song the entire world had already heard.

January 1957: Australia, for Lee Gordon

Lee Gordon put Haley and the Comets on the road with LaVern Baker, Big Joe Turner, Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys and the Platters — a bill you would take today, never mind in 1957. Note Big Joe Turner's presence in particular: Haley's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" was a cover of Turner's record, and here they were on the same stage.

The tour advertising survives, and it is pure Lee Gordon: a red sheet, the names in hand lettering, the faces cut into white stars trailing comet streaks. LEE GORDON presents BILL HALEY AND HIS COMETS in The "BIG SHOW", with La Vern Baker, Joe Turner and Freddie Bell and the Bellboys in smaller stars below, and along the bottom, 1st Australian Tour 1957.

Anyone who has seen the programme for Gordon's October 1957 package will recognise it instantly — same red, same hand lettering, same "1st Australian Tour 1957" along the foot. It is a promoter's house style, and Haley's was the first outing of it.

One caution: that sheet bills four acts and the compiled tour listings give five, adding the Platters. Advance advertising routinely went to print before a bill was final, so their absence from it is not evidence they were not there.

The Australian itinerary

8 January — Newcastle Stadium, Newcastle. Two shows.
9-10 January — Brisbane Stadium. Two shows each night.
11-12 January — Tivoli Theatre, Adelaide.
14-16 January — West Melbourne Stadium. Two shows each night.
17-19 January — Sydney Stadium.
21-23 January — West Melbourne Stadium again.
24-26 January — Sydney Stadium, closing the tour.

Gordon liked what he saw. He ran the identical formula that October with Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, and again in January 1960 with Duane Eddy. The same stadiums appear in all three: Sydney, West Melbourne, Brisbane, Newcastle. If you want to see an Australian promoter inventing a circuit in real time, it is right there in the addresses.

February and March 1957: Britain

The Comets sailed rather than flew, which now reads as the most 1957 detail of the whole story. The Southampton dockside crowd, the mobbing at Waterloo station that the papers called the Second Battle of Waterloo, the questions in the press about whether this music would cause riots: all of it happened to Haley first, and set the template for how Britain would receive every American act that followed.

The tour ran from 6 February to 10 March, opening and closing at the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road, and took in twenty-three engagements across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The British itinerary

6-9 February — Dominion Theatre, London.
10 February — Gaumont, Coventry.
11 February — Odeon, Nottingham.
12 February — Odeon, Birmingham.
13 February — Odeon, Manchester.
14 February — Odeon, Leeds.
15 February — Odeon, Sunderland.
16 February — Odeon, Newcastle upon Tyne.
17 February — Odeon, Bradford.
18-19 February — Odeon, Glasgow.
20 February — Odeon, Liverpool.
21 February — Capitol, Cardiff.
22 February — Odeon, Plymouth.
23 February — Gaumont, Southampton.
24-26 February — Gaumont State, Kilburn, London.
1-2 March — Hippodrome, Belfast.
3 March — Regal, Edmonton, London.
4-5 March — Davis Theatre, Croydon.
6 March — Carlton, Norwich.
7 March — Gaumont, Doncaster.
8 March — Gaumont, Wolverhampton.
9 March — Gaumont, Cheltenham.
10 March — Dominion Theatre, London. Closing night.

Look at what that is: a month of one-nighters in Odeons and Gaumonts, the exact circuit that Larry Parnes would use for Vincent and Cochran three years later and Arthur Howes for Bobby Darin and Duane Eddy a fortnight after that. The Regal at Edmonton, the Gaumont at Doncaster, the Odeons at Leeds and Manchester — the buildings that took the first American rock and roll tour of Britain went on to take every one that followed it.

Three Big Shows in three years

Lee Gordon ran the Big Show three times in as many years — January 1957, October 1957 and January 1960 — and the escalation reads off the dates. Same stadiums, bigger bills, the crowds never shrinking. Gordon died in 1963, at 40.

And the British story runs unbroken from Haley's Dominion in February 1957 to Cochran's Bristol Hippodrome in April 1960: one circuit, one set of buildings, four tours, and a generation of British musicians standing in the queue outside.

What we still want

Ticket prices, showtimes or handbills from any of the 1957 British dates. The itinerary survives; almost none of the paper does.
The supporting bill for the British tour. The surviving itineraries name Haley and the Comets and nobody else, and there was certainly a support bill.
Confirmation of whether the Platters played the Australian dates. The surviving advertising does not name them; the tour listings do.