One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock

Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, rock

Nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, rock

We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight

 

Bill Haley was an unlikely rock ’n’ roll pioneer. Chubby and blind in one eye, he looked more like an avuncular uncle than a threat to family values.

But the country singer with a love of swing music became a star when Rock Around the Clock became a hit in 1955 after it appeared on the soundtrack to the juvenile delinquent film Blackboard Jungle.

When the film was released in cinemas in Britain, young people across the country were reported as going ‘wild in the aisles’ – dancing and even tearing up cinema seats, setting off what would become a familar moral panic about rock ’n’ roll.

In America, fans in Cleveland aged under 18 were banned from dancing in public (unless accompanied by an adult) and in England, Londoner Sidney Adams was fined £3 and 10 shillings after playing Haley’s Shake Rattle and Roll all day at full volume.

In Scotland, fans shivered in an all-night vigil outside Glasgow’s Odeon Cinema in 1957 to get tickets to see Haley and the Comets play on February 18.

Those fans who didn’t bring enough clothes to keep themselves warm decided a nearby waste paper basket would do the job if they set it alight – requiring a cinema attendant to smother the flames with his gloved hands.

Our report at the time commented on the Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando haircuts among the music fans in the queue, though the odd tartan rug was also seen so perhaps style gave way to old fashioned common sense for some.

Around 700 people were in the queue when the booking office in West Regent Street opened 45 minutes early.

A self-admitted alcoholic, Haley fought a battle with alcohol into the 1970s. and on February 9, 1981, he was found dead on his bed at his home in Harlingen, Texas, from a heart attack.