Steve Wilson talks to Trevor Simpson about Football and Elvis Presley

Steve Wilson talks to Trevor Simpson about Football and Elvis Presley
As aired on Steve Wilson's Saturday Afternoon Show on Red Rose Radio  DAB+, Online www.redroseradio.uk
Trevor talks about his time as a referee & a writer of books on Elvis Presley & more.
A Big Thank You to www.elvis-eckardt.com

https://www.redroseradio.uk

Transcript

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Red Rose radio Saturday afternoon I want to turn our attentions now to a gentleman of sport or should I say a retired gentleman of sport he actually started his sporting career playing football for Halifax Town but never quite made the first team uh and gave up gracefully took on referee in and became a very successful referee retired just before the Premier League started but that's when this story starts because he took uh pen to paper and started writing initially it was articles about the music scene in Halifax and then it got a little bit more serious let's say a very warm welcome to my guest Trevor Simpson thank you for joining us Trevor oh it's a pleasure to hey what an introduction I think I ought to go now we're going to say anything else well you don't know hi yeah that's right yeah so tell us the story I mean first of all you were an Elvis Presley fan weren't you well I bought Heartbreak Hotel when it came out in 1956 and uh it was on an old 78 that my dad let me play it on his radio gram yeah um before I had a record player of my own and uh I uh I got hooked on the new music and you know remember growing up in the southern 50s um there wasn't really any pop music it was all sort of um after the war dance band yeah for the vocal group and when Elvis came along well he shook the whole thing up and we got a new music especially for teenagers oh and what made you put pen to paper then well I I retired um you you know you you mentioned that from refereein um I was 48 you have to retire at 48 at the referee right but I managed to sort of get a bit of an extension to my career as a referee coach and working with referees and trying to develop them in fact Howard Webb who went on to do the World Cup final uh was one of my prodigy when he got on the Football League for a start so I was doing a little bit there but I managed to get out of the day job when I was 55 uh and I had this idea of uh researching uh all the things that were influential to me my youth thought which was mainly music and football yeah and I was still involved with football but I went into the library in Halifax and researched every artist who ever came and performed in Halifax from 1956 when Rock Around the clock the film came right through to the end of the 1960's so I wrote those two books it took about couple three years to write and and they sold out and I gave all the money to charity so it was a bit of a foretaste of what was to come yeah but it served me in good state Steve because uh went on to write four books uh initially about Elvis finished up writing five books about him and um those were delight to do but you did you did most of those books at the request of Gracelands didn't you how did that happen well I I was watching for a magazine called Essential Elvis in the UK um and the the editor of the magazine was well connected in Memphis with uh quite a lot of people um and he used to go over there every year and one particularly year when he went over um his wife was pregnant and the baby was due on the anniversary when he should have been in Memphis so etc I've got 50 people on a bus and and I can't go on room the tour can you go to Memphis and room the tour for me so I jumped on this bus and sort of pointed out all the sites all around Memphis went to Graceland obviously and and met a guy there who uh was connected through a company called Follow That Dream in Scandinavia they were doing all the CDs and collectors soap for Elvis fans and he said oh I've seen your articles in the magazine uh would you write a book through the official channel that follow that dream so I said well yeah what what shall we well he said what do you know about I said I'm really into all the music I don't care about him eating hamburgers or ha ha ha ha ha or anything like that yeah uh it's the music fantastic he said that's exactly what I'm wanting uh and that's how he started things wow we're talking now about the time when he wrote books for Elvis Presley for Graceland and the opportunity had a meeting at Priscilla Trevor tell us a story about how that actually happened well it happened through the boat and I I I mean just getting back to the football um you know it was before the Premier League and I was looking up to referee every team in the Football League with the exception of West Ham United they were the ones who escaped that's my goodbye let's get back to Elvis ha ha ha ha um yeah well uh that I I've started research in this book and it's called Elvis the best the British uh it was written about every song that was released every record that we was released uh in Great Britain in the year from 1956 to 1958 and so it was just a two year time span but it it was the book weight five pounding weight uh it had 400 pages and they produced it so wealthy with all of illustrations the um the pictures of Elvis from the era yeah and Priscilla Presley saw it on sale at Graceland and she got in touch with the magazine editor who who with she she and he were friends already and she said oh look I'm coming to the UK and can we meet up can you bring Trevor along to meet me and I said and he said yeah that will be no problem and she was in a pantomime in Manchester really and yeah in Snow White in the Seven dwarfs and um she she was staying uh at the Wildridge Hotel in Manchester and I went along with my wife and this other chat um a couple of other friends and we met her in a hotel we went to see her in the Pancho oh yes we did oh no you didn't and and it was it was fantastic after the pancreas was over we went back to a hotel and again had some food with her and it was just she was such a charming likable lady you could see why I always fell in love with her really yeah and and when she went back to America my other books started to come out then and they were on sale in Graceland uh well they're all sold out and they're they're all gone now but I wrote two group books uh two of the books about gospel music Elvis's gospel music and Priscilla said that had he been alive that's probably what he would have been he would have carried on and been a gospel singer rather than just a pop thing really that was an interesting side to it yeah definitely so how many books did you write in total on Elvis then well there were five altogether and the the first one covered the year 56 to 58 and then the second one was 58 to 60 and then 60 to 62 and then three gospel books where I researched every gospel song that Elvis ever sang and