English Singer & Musician
Gerry Marsden
Gerry Marsden (1942-2021) was a singer and songwriter from Liverpool who achieved the greatest heights of commercial success in the 1960s with his band Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Gerry was born on 24th September 1942 in the Toxteth area of central Liverpool, as the second son of Mary Marsden (née McAlindin) and Frederick Marsden, a railway clerk.
He began to enjoy singing in his infancy, and claimed to have recalled singing on top of an air raid shelter while World War II was still in progress. Subsequently, he honed his singing skills as a member of the choir in his local church. His father, Frederick, was a ukulele player who frequently performed in a local pub and taught Gerry how to play the same instrument.
As a teenager in the late 1950s, Gerry was influenced by the sound of best-selling skiffle artist Lonnie Donegan into forming his first band, the Gerry Marsden Skiffle Group. However, he subsequently changed his musical style after listening to Elvis Presley, who may perhaps have become a role model for his strong, clear and characterful singing style.
By the age of 17, in 1959, Gerry had formed the band with which his name has since become inseparably associated, alongside his elder brother Fred Marsden (1940-2006), the group’s drummer; pianist Arthur MacMahon (known as Arthur Mack) and bassist Les Chadwick (1943-2019). Their initial name, Gerry Marsden & the Mars Bars, had to be revised when the American confectionery giant, whom they had politely approached with a written request for permission to use their name, ordered them by return of post to stop using it.
McMahon, hearing a sporting commentator use the common reference to the frontrunner in an athletic race as a pacemaker, decided he liked the image this conveyed, and suggested it to the others for the band’s new name, with the result that they became Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Alongside his participation in the band, young Gerry, after leaving school, held down a day job as a railway porter, taking after his father who had worked for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway prior to the nationalisation in 1948 of the four regional railway companies as British Rail.
The Pacemakers in their very early days frequently performed live across the Merseyside region, and would often perform cover versions of the chart hits of the day by other artists, as well as their own songs.
In May 1960, Gene Vincent, an American singer who had three UK hit singles in the first half of that year, was booked to perform in concert at Liverpool Stadium, and Gerry’s band was selected as one of their support acts.
In 1961, MacMahon was replaced by Les Maguire (1941-2023), who alongside his keyboard skills was also a capable saxophonist.
The Pacemakers began to be booked as regular performers at the famous Cavern Club, alongside the Beatles; and that same year, the Pacemakers and Beatles joined together for a one-off gig as supergroup The Beatmakers in the town of Litherland, north of Liverpool, playing improvised cover versions of rock’n’roll standards.
In 1961, the Pacemakers also went on tour to Hamburg, Germany, at a time when the Beatles were playing there, and Marsden socialised with John Lennon, later recalling an unsavoury incident while they were walking together through the city streets. What happened was that Lennon knocked on the door of one of the houses in Hamburg’s red light district, where scantily-clad sex workers were paraded behind windows, and entered into failed negotiations with a pimp over the cost of entry.[1]
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone.
In May 1962, the Pacemakers became the second prominent signing, after the Beatles, of music promoter Brian Epstein. This paved the way to the release in 1963 of their debut single ‘How Do You Do It?’ in 1963, a song written by young English songwriter Mitch Murray (born 1960) that had been rejected by the Beatles for being too jaunty, but that Epstein thought would be a perfect fit for Gerry’s band. In the event, it topped the UK singles chart for three weeks that April, and spent a further two weeks at No. 2. As debut singles go, it was a runaway national success.
The band’s sudden propulsion into the limelight was no flash in the pan, as follow-up single ‘I Like It’, another Mitch Murray composition, also reached No. 1 in June, in this case for four weeks, with another two weeks at No. 2.
That December, the Pacemakers pulled off an unprecedented hat-trick when their cover version of the standard ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which came from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, became their third successive UK No. 1 hit, also spending four weeks at No. 1 and two weeks at No. 2. This success marked out Gerry and the Pacemakers as the first ever musical group whose first three singles had all topped the UK singles chart. This feat that would not be repeated until 1989, over 25 years later, when it was achieved by the rather less distinguished novelty act Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, who specialised in rock’n’roll cover version medleys.
In 1964, the hits continued in a slightly lower-key manner, with ‘I’m the One’, their first single to have been self-penned by Marsden personally, reaching No. 2 for two weeks in February, and soulful ballad ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’ peaking at No. 6 in May, although it performed better in the United States, where it rose to No. 4 after becoming their debut hit there. The Pacemakers’ sixth single, ‘It’s Gonna Be All Right’, proved less commercial, stalling at No. 24 in the UK chart that September.
Also in 1964, a documentary film about Gerry and the Pacemakers and their life in Liverpool, Ferry Cross the Mersey, was produced by Tony Warren, better known as the original creator of the long-running TV soap opera Coronation Street. The proposed title of the documentary provided Marsden with the inspiration for writing what would prove to be the Pacemakers’ last Top Ten hit (of six), ‘Ferry Cross the Mersey’, which charted in December and peaked at No. 8 the following January. This song, which has since become extremely well-known, is a langorous, wistful ballad redolent of nostalgia and local pride, as it describes an experience familiar to most residents in Merseyside, that of taking a ferry boat to travel between Liverpool and Seacombe, home to a substantial conurbation in the Wirral peninsula.
Later in 1965, the Pacemakers scored their final hits with a cover of Bobby Darin’s song ‘I’ll Be There’ (which reached No. 15), and ‘Walk Hand In Hand’ (which could only manage No. 29).
1965 was also the year when Gerry married his long-term girlfriend Pauline Behan. They had been dating since at least 1963, but Epstein had warned Gerry off marrying her during their early days of chart success on the grounds that it might alienate their hordes of female fans. Perhaps their declining levels of success in 1965 proved him right. Nonetheless, Gerry’s marriage to Pauline proved long-lived. Together, they had two children, both daughters, named Yvette and Victoria.
No further singles were released by the Pacemakers in 1966; and the following year, when Marsden was offered an opportunity to star in a London West End musical and decided to accept the role, the Pacemakers disbanded. Sources differ as to the exact circumstances of their end, with some suggesting that the other members at first wanted to continue with a new singer, before thinking better of the idea and moving into other lines of business. It was an unceremonious end to a band whose blistering rise to chart-topping success just a few years earlier had proven unsustainable.
The musical in question was a comedy called Charlie Girl that had been running since December 1965; and it was in 1968 that Marsden took over the role of Joe Studholme from original star Joe Brown.
In 1973, Gerry reformed the Pacemakers with new musicians, and went on tour in New York, but they did not enjoy any further chart hits in this new guise.
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Tony Barnard, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Cropped)
John Lennon
Musician, Peace campaigner & Co-founder of The Beatles
During the 1980s, however, Gerry became associated with big charity records. In 1985, following the Bradford City stadium fire, in which 56 spectators lost their lives, he formed a supergroup called The Crowd, alongside a host of other stars, to record a cover version of the Pacemakers’ own hit ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in remembrance of the victims of the tragedy, with proceeds being distributed to their families. It spent two weeks at No. 1 that June.
A similar response by Marsden greeted the Hillsborough disaster, a crowd crush incident that killed 97 spectators at a football match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on the 15th April, 1989. This time, he got together with Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, pop group The Christians, and producers Stock, Aitken & Waterman, to record a cover version of the Pacemakers’ song Ferry Cross the Mersey. It entered the UK singles chart at No. 1 that May, and stayed there for three weeks.
Marsden’s autobiography, I’ll Never Walk Alone, was published in 1993 with the help of a co-writer. In 2003, he was awarded an MBE. In subsequent years, he assisted in a successful bid that saw Liverpool crowned European Capital of Culture in 2008, following which he was honoured with the Freedom of the City.
Gerry frequently gave impromptu live performances of his song Ferry Cross the Mersey while taking the ferry it described until very late in life, much to the delight of other passengers. He also continued to perform formal live concerts until well into his mid-60s.
In 2003 and 2016, he underwent heart surgery, the first operation being a triple heart bypass and the second to replace a valve. Then in 2017, he collapsed on stage while performing in Newport, South Wales, as part of a national tour of the UK., and he finally announced his retirement in November 2018. However, he only survived for just over another two years before succumbing to a blood infection in his heart, and dying on 3rd January 2021. This was a sad way to go out for such a big-hearted, larger-than-life character.