Biography
Born in 1940, Jerry Wilcox played lead guitar in the Fentones alongside rhythm guitarist Mickey Eyre, who entered the world two years later, while William Walter Edward ‘Bonney’ Oliver handled bass and Tony Hinchcliffe, also born in 1940, sat behind the drums. Although these musicians supplied support for vocalist Shane Fenton, they developed a following independently by cutting a series of instrumental singles. Two of those tracks, ‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Breeze And I’, both appeared in the UK Top 50 during 1962. For a short time the group was floated as a possible counterpart to the Shadows, yet those expectations proved unrealistic, and, like many other acts from the pre-beat period, the Fentones soon found themselves overtaken once the Beatles and the wave of artists who followed them arrived.