This fellow made the big time in the States long before the Beatles came on the scene, 1957 to be exact.
Listen Here- Click anyone remember him?
Obituary: Russ HamiltonOct 16 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post HIS life was like a rock and roll song – a handsome holiday camp Redcoat yearned for his lost love and wrote lonely ballads, which made him a huge star on both sides of the Atlantic.
Women loved his sad eyes and broad shoulders.
Then his record stopped spinning on the juke-boxes and people didn’t speak any more of how he had crashed into the American Top Ten when The Beatles were still playing church fairs.
But his name still came up at pub quizzes: which Briton had the biggest hit in the US before the Fab Four? Ah yes, it was Russ Hamilton.
Russ’s real name was Ronnie Hulme, a fine young footballer who worked as a costing-clerk in the local Metal Box factory, before his National Service, when he was a leading aircraftsman and dated a telephone operator called Pat Hitchin, whom he loved dearly.
After their split, Ronnie began strumming his guitar to poems he had written about their happy times. These were heard back in Liverpool by Clive Kendall, a concert-party comic, who suggested he should become a Butlin’s Redcoat. At its Clacton camp, Ronnie was in a Redcoat troupe, which recorded at Oriole’s London studio. He also recorded two of his own songs.
The result was the 1957 single, We Will Make Love, with the poignant lines: “When the sun takes the place of the moon in the sky, we'll go on a journey, you and I, to a far distant land, where our dreams were planned, in the clouds up above we will make love.”
Oriole released it as a single, under the name Russ Hamilton. It reached number two in our chart, selling a million for a gold disc. The flip-side, Rainbow, was a US number four. The follow-up, Wedding Ring, made the UK Top 20. Russ complained later that he had earned a fortune for others, but very little for himself.
He joined a Redcoats’ tour in 1967 and in 1986 he sang We Will Make Love in a performance of Grease, at the Chester Gateway. By then, he was living in a council flat in nearby Buckley.
Russ Hamilton, singer; born January 19, 1932, died October 11, 2008.
