August 8, 1960 –
Decca Records in England refuses to release Ray Peterson’s latest single, Tell Laura I Love Her, going so far as to throw away 25,000 pressings of the teen-tragedy song, which they feel is “too tasteless and vulgar for the English sensibility.“
A cover by Ricky Valance proves them wrong by going straight to #1. (The grisly song, in which a stock-car driver mutters the title words before he dies, ironically only reaches #7 in America.)
And so it goes
The Haus of Dcaligari 