When all the top bands played Worthing straight after Top of the Pops

Trevor Payne (IAN RICHARDS 2020 - Pembrokeshire Photography)

An Evening With Trevor & Gary at Worthing’s Pavilion Theatre on Sunday, June 23 at 7.30pm will take you behind the scenes of the hit music and comedy nostalgia show That’ll Be The Day.

Director, producer and lead vocalist Trevor Payne dreamed up the show not so very far off four decades ago, and he is loving the thought of talking about it all in Worthing, the town he grew up in.

First performed in 1988, rock ‘n’ roll extravaganza That’ll Be The Day is beloved by fans worldwide. Trevor met Gary Anderson met at a holiday centre in Cornwall in the 1980s and persuaded him to join the newly-created show. Together they will look back.

Trevor said: “This (spin-off) show was something we had discussed, just talking about how we would do it, and when I thought about it the fact is that Gary had an interesting career before he joined the show and I had a 23-year career before I started the show.

“I was a Beatles man. When I started in music, leaving school, The Beatles had just broken out, and having a band at that time was a time when you could make a living from it. I just went on from there and it took me all over the world before I even started That’ll Be The Day. It’s what they call the butterfly effect, isn't it, how things happen. I was talking to my lead guitar player who is a mere 38 years old and I realised he was just a little baby when That’ll Be The Day started. It's really weird how things work out.”

But the fact is that everything in life was effectively preparing Trevor for the show: “I knew all the tracks that were popular at the time. I would support all the big bands when they came down to the pier in Worthing and then when I could see that the pop business was going into disco, I realised I had to move into doing something else and so we moved into doing cabaret. We started doing comedy and impersonations and then the cabaret clubs disappeared and so myself and the two girls went off all around the world, playing everywhere. And then we came back and were invited to join a rock ‘n’ roll show but I said to the guy ‘Let me have a go at producing and directing and let’s make it into a much more integrated show.’”

From that That’ll Be The Day emerged: “It's really an extension of the old comedy show bands. But we were always much more musical and we just knew how it should be played. We started off in clubs but Butlins was our big success. We would play there. We would do a 50s and 60s night one day and then would have us back later in the week to do a 70s and 80s night. That gave us encouragement to go full time, and the stuff that we did was just a breeding ground for the comedy. We did that until the early 90s and then we started to move into theatres.”

Trevor's Worthing night will have a special resonance for him given he's a Worthing boy. He well remembers the legendary Mexican Hat and all the bands there.

“And then on Pier Pavilion in Worthing my band would support all the bands that were on Top Of The Pops on a Thursday evening. They would finish Top Of The Pops and come down to Worthing, and we would play until they arrived. I saw them all.”