Corby's latest group The Cascades supported the country’s most current top female singer at the Welfare Club, Cilla Black, and virtually stole the show. Cilla, an ex cloakroom assistant of the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool was the latest ‘big name’ acquired by ‘Taffy’ Reid for the Welfare Club, and as history would have it, it would be her last ever gig in a dance hall. Buoyant with her success of Anyone Who Had A Heart which was her first chart topper just a month before she graced the Welfare stage, she told the wide eyed Corby Leader reporter Alex Gordon after the show, “I'm going to concentrate on television appearances and package tours from now on”. It was the kind of ‘scoop’ that Alex was famous for, though on reflection, it could have been a response to the lukewarm reception she received from the Corby crowd that prompted the remark but whatever, it was a statement that was greeted with a ‘lorra lorra’ laughs by some people who thought that she had as much singing talent as a proverbial lawnmower. “She wouldn’t last five minutes in the Legion, they’d kick her out” was my dad, Cyril Smith’s verdict of the Liverpool diva as he sat impatiently through a ‘Top Of The Pops’ for his favourite show ‘Z Cars’ to begin. Nevertheless, though Cilla didn’t stand up to Cyril’s assessment as a worthy addition to the Sunday night bill of entertainment and bingo at the British Legion, she did of course, go on to be one of the country’s most popular TV presenters and stars of her era.
Cilla’s backing group at the Rec. was the highly rated Sounds Incorporated who had previously played in Corby at the Drumbeats’ Beanfield dance a year before, but both the Cascades and the Midnighters, who were also on the bill, were received better than Cilla Black it was said.
Midnighters' drummer Billy Mathieson gave an insight into the petulance and whims of some of these stars, recalling that sax player Pat Casey had told the rest of the Midnighters that Cilla Black had been trying to get out of playing at the Welfare for weeks, ever since she had hit the big time with Anyone Who Had a Heart. Billy; “I was seventeen at the time, and starstruck. I was working in a shop in Rockingham Road and decided to make a brooch out of some bull horn for her. I shaped it, and polished it and was dead chuffed with it. When I went up to Cilla Black at the Welfare to give it to her and said, ‘I made this for you’, she took one look at it, and sneered back at me dead snotty, ‘what do I want that for?’, and walked off. I was deflated, I thought, what an ignorant cow. When I told Pat and the boys, that’s when he told us that she didn’t want to be there in the first place, and the reason she had a gob on like a smacked arse."
