No! Day the music was born, not died

REVIEW: Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, September 9 to Saturday, September 13).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * * *

ONE day back in 1958, I sneaked into the village boys’ club that my father used to run, little knowing that I was about to undergo a life-changing experience.

I shouldn’t have been there in the first place, as I was aged only nine, there being an age limit on club membership.

But having never been one to respect any form of authority, I had at last managed to penetrate the village hall’s defences, these being two adjoining doors with peeling blue paint. I’d nicked my father’s keys, you see.

Oh yes. It was the best achievement of my childish rebellion record so far, even more dramatic than scrumping in Mrs Burt’s apple orchard. For pounding out of a battered old radiogram was the most infectious, exotic and energised sound that had ever collided with my young ears.

It was Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be the Day, beating and thumping its way out of this wooden chunk of 50s furniture, a liquorice black 78rpm record crazily spinning around on a green baize, and speaking a wonderful language that I immediately understood.

It was rock ‘n’ roll. Twelve bountiful bars of naked truth that still resonate loud and clear down the intervening seven decades since that never-to-be-forgotten day.

And the same old, familiar long-ago buzz came barrelling back this week, courtesy of this incredible tribute to the ill-fated star, as each milestone, magnificent and immortal number makes the very same journey that it did way back in 1958.

For Buddy Holly and his irrepressible music defies time and distance, scorns the vagaries of shifting, fickle taste, and hits the same spot just as it did during all our yesterdays.

This multi award-winning show has been doing the rounds since 1989 and is now displaying all the signs of becoming a sort of rock ‘n’ roll Mousetrap, predictably piled high with the lazy, reach-for adjectives at which the national Press excels. Yes, Buddy’s legacy deserves better epitaphs, you morons.

And besides, what was Don McLean chuntering on about when he sang ‘the day the music died’ in American Pie? No, it didn’t, it was born! Please keep up, Don.

A J Jenks as the great man himself cannot be faulted. He chops, twirls and romances his painted lady of a Stratocaster guitar, drops in that tell-tale sobbing hiccup at the end of a line, and does the funny little bits of footwork that were the Holly trademarks.

Now the band comes under forensic examination. Have they earned the right to back the boy from Lubbock, Texas? Oh yes, they have. Melker Nilsson as Joe B. Mauldin spins that big ole bull fiddle, climbs up it, turns it upside down, and does everything bar pick his teeth with it.

Meanwhile, Stephen Alexander-Kerr’s take on drummer Jerry Allison is uncannily accurate, snare and rim shots cracking like rifle fire, tom-tom booming and beating out the glorious jungle bom-de-bom of Not Fade Away.

Ah yes, but you will know the numbers. At least I hope you do. If not, I will have to put you in rock ‘n’ roll remedial class. Everyday, Oh Boy!, Heartbeat, Peggy Sue – she who ties the knot with Jerry Allison in Peggy Sue Got Married, remember? – Rave On, Maybe Baby… and many more hardy perennials that defiantly deny the passage of the years.

Buddy’s last gig during that fateful 1959 Winter Dance Party tour takes place in Clear Lake, Iowa. He’s sharing the bill with J P Richardson the Big Bopper (Joshua Barton), and Ritchie Valens (Miguel Angel), the 17-year-old boy from the barrio who has just hit paydirt with the Latino rocker La Bamba.

The atmosphere is electric, which makes it all the more poignant. For we know what lies ahead just a few hours later in a frozen Nebraska field, the Bopper having taken that doomed flight because he had a cold and didn’t want to travel in the tour bus, Valens’ fate being sealed on the wretched spin of a coin.

And yet… Holly’s music transcends the tragedy, even if it is notated in cold, graveyard stone, because this fabulous, smash hit of a musical more than does the man and his legacy justice.

Oh yes. It's simply not to be missed. And that applies whether you’re coming to the gig from the years 1958 or 2025.