It is a little known fact (certainly to me) that when George Formby achieved the number forty slot in the official UK pop charts in July 1960, the 'B' side of the record, "Banjo Boy" was already in there! Not sung by our George though! It was released by a Danish duo called Jan & Keld who the previous week had climbed to the dizzy heights of number 36 on the chart. I can clearly remember the vast majority of the songs on the chart in that week. As a fourteen-year-old lad I was heavily into pop music and can probably sing a few words from most of those songs as well. I can also clearly remember George appearing with The Deep River Boys and also I have vivid memories of The Friday Show. Even though George Formby had enjoyed great success for forty years in every aspect of entertainment, it was still perhaps slightly unusual for him to share chart status along with people like Cliff Richard and Gene Vincent but this was before The Beatles exploded onto the scene and George’s chart shows a real cross-section of entertainers. I put this down to the fact that pop music in those days was not what one would usually hear on BBC radio. The only way to keep in touch with pop music would be to listen on Radio Luxembourg - and the signal in Batley was atrocious! Nevertheless, I was undaunted and having a much better pair of ears in 1960 than I do in 2020, I could still enjoy all that pop music had to offer. These days, all those hits of July 1960 are confined to the pop history books and are curios that one might recall whilst attempting the pop quiz in the local pub, ironically, George and Happy Go Lucky Me/Banjo Boy have loomed quite large in my life over the last thirty years, along with all the other songs in the Formby discography. I am playing the chart from 60 years ago via a wonderful app called Spotify as I write this article although I am not sure if I have the time or energy to trawl all the way down to number 40! Maybe I will just skip a few and go to the song that all GFS members still sing and in 2011 was the Sainsbury's Christmas advert on UK television, so enjoyed a mini-revival of interest. Happy 60th anniversary to George Formby’s Happy Go Lucky Me and Banjo Boy! Happy days!

gf in the pop charts