Chart entered : 25 April 1963
Chart peak : 23
This is our first posthumous goodbye hit.
Eddie's light went out on 17 April 1960 when he died in St Martin's Hospital , Bath after a car crash near Chippenham early that morning. He was just 21. Eddie had been on a package tour in the UK with Gene Vincent since January. The two Americans were supported by various young British acts including Joe Brown and Georgie Fame. Eddie was accompanied by his girlfriend Sharon Sheeley a 20 year old songwriter , the first female (at 18 ) to write a US number one ( Ricky Nelson's Poor Little Fool ). They were not, as is often reported, formally engaged. The final show was at the Bristol Hippodrome on Saturday 16th April and Eddie wanted to return to London that night before flying home. A taxi was ordered and set off with Eddie, Gene, Sharon and the tour manager Pat Thomkin sharing the cab. At Rowden Hill near Chippenham ( already an accident black spot ) the driver lost control and skidded into a lamppost boot first.
The driver and Thomkin in the front were not hurt. Sharon's injuries were not serious. Gene had broken his collarbone. Eddie was thrown out on to the road , suffered severe head trauma and never regained consciousness. Reports that he threw himself over Sharon at the last moment are probably fanciful. Famously, one of the first policemen on the scene was the young David Harman who decided to become a performer himself -and we'll meet him in due course - after playing on Eddie's guitar while it was impounded. The taxi driver was convicted of dangerous driving and lost his licence until 1969.
"My Way " was actually Eddie's sixth* hit since his untimely death in April 1960, two more than he had in his lifetime. There was a fair amount of unreleased material in the vaults to play with although lately they hadn't been making the charts - "Pretty Girl", "Undying Love" and "Never" had been released and failed - so this one's success was probably unexpected.
It's not, mercifully, the Sinatra song but a Cochran / Capehart composition, a sax driven romp where "always got to have my way" translates as "I'm always going to want sex ". Regardless of the unedifying message it's not his best record, too much sax not enough guitar and a rather boring melody.
Liberty continued releasing Eddie Cochran singles but they were generally re-releases of earlier hits or early US singles like "Skinny Jim" and "Drive-In Show" that hadn't been released in the UK before. "Summertime Blues" was actually a hit again reaching number 34 in April 1968. The one exception was "Three Stars", Eddie's eerie 1959 recording of Tommy Dee's maudlin tribute to the Buddy Holly plane crash victims which was finally released in 1966 after being held back a few years for fear it would seem tasteless in the circumstances. It's hard to listen to in either version.
In September 1979 Rockstar Records released his rock'n'roll version of "What'd I Say" licenced from the BBC who had recorded it for their Saturday Club and continued finding Eddie-related curiosities to release for the rest of the eighties. In 1988 he returned to the charts with "C'mon Everybody" after its use in a Levi's commercial.
* Both the Official Charts Company and Guinness list "Sweetie Pie" and "Lonely" as separate hits but they were actually two sides of the same single and "Lonely's single week at number 41 should be treated as a re-entry. This means Eddie really only had 9 hits but we'll let him off.
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