As an old git I was thinking about this and unfortunately all my claims go waaaaay back and due to the "Liverpool Sound" have similar links.
In the 50s I lived back-to-back with Jacky Lomax.....lead singer of The Undertakers.
In the road opposite our house lived Les Maguire.....pianist with Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Leaving school in 1961 I joined The Royal Liver Insurance.......just as Tony Crane was leaving to go full time with The Merseybeats.
Stretching it now.....I was once introduced to Hank Marvin.
I can't say I know or knew any famous people but I worked for a spell as a reporter in Liverpool in the 1990s and did get to meet the odd footballer, politician or celeb at work. Your mention of Les Maguire reminds me of when I went on this wild goose chase of a story one time.
I'd heard a tale in a pub about this bloke who'd 'found' a vintage Harley Davidson motorcycle in a shipping container down the docks. The story went that sometime later the bike needed a spare part so he called Harley and was told to look underneath the saddle to find the serial number. Lo and behold, underneath the seat was a plaque saying the bike was presented as a gift to Elvis Presley by James Dean. The bike was probably worth millions.
It was one of those 'a mate of a mate knows this fella' tales that you hear all the time but what the hell I thought, I'll follow it up. So I start calling these mates of mates until one says I should speak to a lad called Billy because he knows the guy who has the bike. He adds Billy is Billy Hatton who used to be in the band The Fourmost.
As luck would have it my old driving instructor (Pacemaker School of Motoring!) was Freddy Marsden who'd been the drummer in Gerry and the Pacemakers. (As an aside those lessons would fly by as he regaled me with tales such as the time the band was bottled off at the Harlem Apollo by a crowd impatient for James Brown.) When I told him the Harley story Fred said he wasn't going himself but there was a Merseybeat reunion coming up and this Billy was probably going to be there. He said Billy was a grumpy bastard so he'd ask Les Maguire to introduce us.
In fact it was Les' wife who took me under her wing and if it wasn't for her this Billy wouldn't have said anything. As it was he told me the bike was in the possession of a character known as Big Paddy who owned a garage in West Derby. All's I'll say is I was also left with the impression that this Patrick was the sort who might not appreciate someone sniffing around his business and was not the sort of guy to be on the wrong side of.
I left a few messages at the garage but never got a call back. i popped around there but Big Paddy wasn't in. Of course all this mysteriousness and evasion convinced me the story was true. Of course it was true! I mean it makes sense that a 'well-known local businessman' would get their hands on a valuable items, fallen off the back of a boats down the docks. But I'm not brave. I'd run up against a wall of silence and the story was dead. Or so I thought.
A handful of years later when the internet was a thing and I had access to it I remembered Elvis' Harley. Surely there'd be some reference to it somewhere on the web. Well, indeed there
was....
Maybe it's the drugs i'm on?
