Billy Fury
Ronald William Wycherley , better known by his stage name Billy Fury, was an English singer from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, and remained an active songwriter until the 1980s. Rheumatic fever, which he first contracted as a child, damaged his heart and ultimately contributed to his death. An early British rock and roll star, he equalled the Beatles record ofhits in the 1960s, and spent 332 weeks on the UK chart, without a charttopping single or album.
Ronald William Wycherley was born at Smithdown Hospital , Smithdown Road, Liverpool. He commenced music lessons on the piano before he was a teenager, and was bought his first guitar by the age of 14. Wycherley fronted his own group in 1955, but simultaneously worked fulltime on a tugboat and later as a docker. He entered and won a talent competition, and by 1958 had started composing his own songs. Wycherley first attended a concert at the Essoldo Theatre in Birkenhead, run by impresario Larry Parnes, in the hope of interesting famous singer Marty Wilde in some of the songs he had written. Instead, in an episode that has become pop music legend, Parnes pushed young Wycherley up on stage right away. He was such an immediate success that Parnes signed him, added him to the tour, and renamed him Billy Fury. However, his early sexual and provocative stage performances received censure, and he was forced to tone them down. In October 1959, the UK music magazine, NME, commented that Furys s
Source: Wikipedia