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On this day, 21 November 1960, singer Emile Ford & The Checkmates, played Cardiff’s Gaumont Theatre. Also performing in the package was, Ricky Valance, Patty Brook & The Diamonds, Dean Rogers & The Rebel Rousers, Alan Randall, with Norman Vaughan (compere).
Emile Ford, was a musician and singer born in Saint Lucia, British Windward Islands. He was popular in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the leader of Emile Ford & the Checkmates, who had a number one hit in late 1959 with "What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?".
He was also a pioneering sound engineer.
Forming Emile Ford & the Checkmates. The band appeared on the TV programme Sunday Serenade, which ran for six weeks. They won the Soho Fair talent contest in July 1959, but turned down a recording contract with EMI because the company would not allow Ford to produce their records, and instead agreed to a deal with Pye Records.
Their first self-produced recording, "What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?", a song originally recorded by Ada Jones and Billy Murray in 1917, went to number one in the UK Singles Chart at the end of 1959 and stayed there for six weeks. Ford was the first Black British artist to sell one million copies of a single.
The readers of the British music magazine New Musical Express voted Emile Ford & the Checkmates as the "Best New Act" in 1960.
