This Week in Music History

April 16th 1972 – ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) make their debut at The Fox and Greyhound in London. Former Move members Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne formed the new band to create modern rock and pop songs with classical overtones. Roy would leave the band following their debut record. Lynne wrote and arranged all of the group’s original compositions and produced every album.

April 17th, 1972 – Keith Richards' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg gives birth to their second child, a baby girl. They named her Dandelion.

April 18th, 1975 – Four Bay City Rollers fans are taken to a hospital and 35 others required on site treatment after they attempted to swim across a lake to meet the band. The group were making an appearance at the Mallory Park racetrack for BBC Radio.

April 19th, 1974 – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band appear at the State Theatre in New Brunswick. Tickets are just $4.50 and the promoter of the event takes a gamble that word-of-mouth will be enough to fill the 550 seats, however, only 250 attend.

April 20th, 1969 – Drummer Benny Benjamin dies today, he was a session drummer for ‘The Funk Brothers’ and played on many Motown hits in his career, recording with The Four Tops, Temptations, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes and Stevie Wonder.

April 21st, 1984 – Phil Collins starts a run at No.1 in the US singles chart with the theme from ‘Against All Odds’. It was Phil’s first US No.1 and lasted 3 weeks. Originally titled “How Can You Just Sit There?”, the song was initially from the sessions for Collins’ debut solo album Face Value, and it was one of about a dozen written for his first wife, who had left him.

April 22nd, 2008 –  Die hard Elvis Presley fans learn that Elvis had spent time in London on a secret tour given by his friend Tommy Steele. Steele took him around London in 1958 showing him landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament. It wasn’t until 2008 that this information was relieved as it had originally been believed that Elvis had never visited the UK except for a stop-over flight.