From Liverpool to Anfield: Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Song That Outlived Everyone

Imagine this. It's nineteen sixty three. You're an unknown band from Liverpool. Your manager has just landed you a record deal. Your producer hands you a song and says, trust me, this will be number one. You look at each other and you say, no, thanks, we'll write our own. Now. That is either breath taking confidence or the most spectacular gamble in pop history. And when you find out who that band was, well, I think you'll agree it was both. Welcome to Educating Isabella rock and Roll one oh one. I'm Michael, and this show exists because my friend's granddaughter. Isabella, who is eighteen years old, loves music with every fiber of her being, has a vinyl collection that would make most adults jealous, and once flew from New Zealand to Melbourne just to see Taylor Swift in concert. Knows almost nothing about the music that made all of this possible. We're changing that one episode at a time. In our last episode, we set the scene for one of the most extraordinary moments in music history, the British Invasion of nineteen sixty four, when a wave of bands from the UK crossed the Atlantic and quite simply changed everything. Today, we meet one of the first groups through the door. They came from the same city as the biggest band in the world. They shared the same manager and the same producer, and they pulled off something that even the Beatles never managed. Their name was Jerry and the Pacemakers, and that song, the one the other band turned down. It went to number one, and ticky sales of the It's a Rock spring in ledger told from the risk to the ricks and Rebels, coss hard and soul of it all. To understand Jerry and the Pacemakers, you have to understand Liverpool in the late nineteen fifties. This was a port city, a working class city, a city where the music coming over from America on the ships, the rock and roll, the R and B. The country was landing in the hands of a generation of young men who'd grown up in the shadow of the Second World War and had absolutely nothing to lose. Gerard Marsden Jerry was born in nineteen forty two in Talks Death on the south side of Liverpool, right by the River Mersey. His dad played ukulele and sang, and young Jerry was performing for the neighbors while standing on top of air raid shelters before he was even a teenager. His older brother Freddie was on drums. By nineteen fifty six they had a little band together. Now here's where it gets fun. The band's original name was Jerry Marsden and the Mars Bars. Yes, named after the chocolate bar. And you can probably guess what happened next. The Mars Confectionery company heard about it and, let's say politely, ask them to pick something else. So around nineteen fifty nine they became Jerry and the Pacemakers, an honestly much better name. Liverpool in those years was buzzing. There were hundreds, literally hundreds of bands playing the local clubs. The Cavern Club on Matthew Street was the heartbeat of it all, and two bands were fighting it out at the top of the local pecking order. One of them you've definitely heard of, the other. That's who we're talking about today. In a poll run by the local Mersey Beat newspaper in December nineteen sixty one, readers were asked to vote for their favorite local act. The Beatles came first. Second place Jerry and the Pacemakers. These two bands were genuine rivals, playing the same clubs, the same stages, even crossing paths when they both went to Hamburg, Germany to hone their craft in the notoriously demanding club circuit. There Isabella. You know how Taylor Swift built this incredible community around her music, the Swifties, the whole ecosystem that grew up around her from her early days. Well, Liverpool in nineth teen sixty two was doing something similar, but for a whole city's worth of bands simultaneously. There was something in the air there, something that would very shortly take over the world. Now, if you listen to our British Invasion explainer, you'll remember the name Brian Epstein, the man who managed the Beatles. Well in June nineteen sixty two, Epstein signed Jerry and the Pacemakers as his second act. He also brought them to the same producer the Beatles were working with, a quiet, methodical, brilliantly talented man named George Martin. George Martin had a song he wanted someone to record. It had been written by a songwriter named Mitch Murray and had already been turned down by pop singer Adam Faith. Martin then offered it to the Beatles. And here's the thing he actually made them record it reluctantly. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and the boys were not happy. They'd been writing their own songs and they weren't about to be pop puppets. Paul McCartney later said, quote, we knew that the peer pressure back in Liverpool would not allow us to do that kind of song, so they dragged their feet, made their views known, and eventually George Martin relented. The Beatles' version sat in the vault, unreleased for over thirty years. That song then went to Jerry and the Pacemakers and Jerry Jerry leaped at it. He recorded it without a moment's hesitation. In April nineteen sixty three. How Do You Do It went to number one in the UK and stayed there for three weeks. It was then knocked off the top spot by the Beatles own from Me to You. You honestly could not make this up now. Jerry's second single was I Like It, also written by Mitch Murray, also went to number one. So that's two from two and at this point every music fan in Britain was watching to see what would happen with single number three. For their third single, Jerry chose a song that was about as far from a rock and roll record as you could imagine. It came from a nineteen forty five Broadway musical called Carousel, written by the legendary songwriting duo Rodgers and Hammerstein. It had been recorded by Frank Sinatra by Elvis Presley. It was a sweeping, orchestral, almost operatic ballad and Jerry Marsden had loved it since he was a kid, since he'd first seen the show performed. The song was You'll Never Walk Alone, and in October nineteen sixty three it went to number one, spending four weeks at the top of the UK charts, three consecutive number ones with your first three singles. No act had ever done it before, and it wouldn't be matched for twenty years until another Liverpool band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, did the same thing in nineteen eighty four. Now here's where the story of You'll Never Walk Alone takes a turn that nobody could have predicted. Before the single had even dropped off the charts, it had found second home. Anfield, the home stadium of Liverpool Football Club, was one of the first grounds in Britain to have a PA system that played the top ten chart hits before matches, so when You'll Never Walk Alone was in the top ten. The fans at Anfield were hearing it before every home game, and they started singing along, and they kept singing it even after it dropped out of the charts, even after it was no longer technically current. The song had gotten into the soul of the Liverpool supporters and it was never leaving. The accepted version of events is that Jerry himself presented a copy of the single to Liverpool manager Bill Shankly during a pre season trip in the summer of nineteen sixty three. Shankly, one of the great football men of the twentieth century, heard it and was reportedly in awe. He said to Jerry, and this is a quote I love, Jerry, my son. I have given you a football team and you have given us a song to day. You'll Never Walk Alone is inscribed on the Shankly gates at Anfield. It's on the Liverpool FC crest. It sung before every home match, scarves held high by tens of thousands of voices. It's been adopted by Celtic in Scotland, by Borussia Dortmund in Germany, by football clubs across the world. It was sung in cathedrals after the Hillsborough disaster. It was sung during the COVID pandemic as a message of solidarity. And it all started because a young man from Talks Death heard it in a theater as a child and decided to make it his third single. When the British invasion hit America in nineteen sixty four, Jerry and the Pacemakers were right there in the wave. They had seven singles reached the US top forty. They appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, the same show that had made the Beatles the biggest thing in America. They were the second most successful Liverpool group on the American charts, behind only the Fab Four themselves. In nineteen sixty five, they made their own film, Ferry Cross the Mersey, which was essentially their version of the Beatles A Hard Day's Night. It starred the band playing the Liverpool club scene. Written partly by the creator of the long running British soap opera Coronation Street, the title song, written by Jerry himself, became one of the most enduring love songs ever written about a city. But by the mid sixties, the landscape was changing. The Beatles were evolving at an extraordinary pace. Rubber Soul, revolver Sergeant Pepper, the Rolling Stones were getting heavier and edgier. The whole British invasion was splintering into something more complex and experimental. Jerry and the Pacemakers, for all their charm and energy, were a bright, breezy, sing along pop band that world was moving on. They never had another UK number one after those first three, and by nineteen sixty six the band disbanded, but Jerry Marsden wasn't done, not by a law way. In nineteen eighty five, after the Bradford City Stadium fire killed fifty six people, Jerry assembled a group of musicians and radio DJs called The Crowd and re recorded You'll Never Walk Alone as a charity single. It went to number one. He became the first person in history to top the charts with two different versions of the same song. Then, in April nineteen eighty nine, three days after the Hillsborough disaster in which ninety seven Liverpool supporters lost their lives, Jerry picked up the phone and started calling friends. Within days he had Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson of Frankie goes to Hollywood and Liverpool banned the Christians all in the studio together recording a charity version of Ferry Cross the Mersey. It went to number one. All proceeds went to the Hillsborough Disaster Fund. In two thousand three, the Queen awarded Jerry Marsden the MBE, a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for his services to charity, not just for his music, for the way he'd used his music to help people. Jerry Marsden died on the third of January twenty twenty one, age seventy eight. Paul McCartney posted a tribute online, writing that Jerry was a mate from their early Liverpool days, their biggest rivals on the local scene, and that his performances of You'll Never Walk Alone and Ferry Cross the Mersey remain in many people's hearts as reminders of a joyful time in British music. The surviving members of his final lineup now tour as Jerry's Pacemakers, exactly as Jerry requested before he retired. The music goes on. So what's the takeaway from all of this? Jerry and the Pacemakers were not the Beatles, they weren't trying to be. What they were was a band of enormous warmth, energy and personality who happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, with exactly the right place people around them. They got the ball rolling on the British invasion, they gave the world You'll Never Walk Alone, and they showed that Liverpool wasn't a one band city. Now, Isabella, homework time, and this one is a little different from usual. I want you to do two things. First, go and listen to the three singles, how do you do It? I Like It? And You'll Never Walk Alone. They're all on the show playlist. Listen to them back to back in order, just as Britain heard them in nineteen sixty three. Get a feel for what that run felt like. Then. Second, the next time, Liverpool FC are playing at anfield and you can find that easily enough. Watch the start of the match. Watch what happens when that song comes on. You'll understand something about music and community and belonging that no history Lesson can quite capture on its own. Let me know what you think. For everyone listening along with Isabella, same homework for you and As always, the full playlist is on Spotify, YouTube Music, and Deezer linked in the show notes. Next time, we're heading deeper into the British invasion. There's a lot more to come. Until then, walk on