'One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock...'
It's the intro to one of the most famous songs in popular music and, 65 years ago, American star Bill Haley, the creator of Rock Around The Clock, was performing in Newcastle.
By 1957, post-war Britain was on the up, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that year would tell people they'd "never had it so good".
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Rock'n'roll, a wildly exciting form of music recently originating in the United States, would provide the soundtrack for this hopefully brave new world.
If fellow rockers such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard cut perhaps more vibrant, stylish figures at the time, it was the avuncular Haley who had scored the first ever rock’n’roll hit - Shake, Rattle and Roll in 1954.
His most famous song, the genre-defining Rock Around The Clock, had come a year later, and by the time 31-year-old star and his band performed at Newcastle Odeon six and a half decades ago, Don’t Knock The Rock was in the charts. It would be his last top 10 hit.
Haley with his band the Comets stopped off in Tyneside in the middle of a 31-date UK tour. Also on the bill were the Vic Lewis Orchestra, Kenneth Earle and Malcolm Vaughan, and Desmond Lane who played the tin whistle.
But the singer's arrival in Newcastle for the show on February 16, 1957, couldn't have been any more low-key.
"Bill Haley stepped from the luxury motor coach that had brought him to Newcastle from Leeds today, and found only a dozen fans and three policemen waiting to greet him," the Chronicle reported.
"With Mr Haley, famous for his kiss curl, were his wife, and the seven members of his band with their wives and children."
The singer said that he believed rock'n'roll had not yet reached its peak and that he had shows booked in his diary for the next five years.
"As long as you give them good songs, and as long as artists come up with cute ideas, I don't see why rock'n'roll should not be here for a long, long time."
Haley, meanwhile, was impressed with the Chronicle's special souvenir edition, published to mark the star's visit to Newcastle. "They do me a great honour and I wish I had more papers like this," he said
As for the show at the Odeon cinema on Pilgrim Street, one reader recalled years later: “The band came on to rapturous applause. Then Bill shouted ‘on your marks’ - and that was all I heard from the whole concert because the screaming and shouting was so deafening.
“Of course amplification in those days was primitive compared with today. People were dancing in the aisles, standing on seats and generally being absolutely nutty.”
Going on to sell more than 25 million records worldwide, Bill Haley died in Harlingen, Texas in 1981, aged just 55.
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