Description
‘Granny Takes A Trip’ was the name of The Purple’s Gang’s debut single, subsequently banned by the BBC, that had been taken from the trendy King’s Road boutique in Chelsea at the height of Swinging London.
Joe Beard explains that the original title for the song was ‘Sabby Goes To Hollywood’ – Sabby being the pet name for Sabrina, the British glamour model and actress who was the cousin of Purple Gang jug player Trevor ‘Ank’ Langley.
Sabrina was the stage name of Norma Ann Sykes who was born in Stepping Hill Hospital in 1936. She lived on Buckingham Street in Heaviley, Stockport until the age of 13, attending the nearby St George’s School.
Norma moved to London when she was just 16 and was discovered by glamour photographer Russell Gay for her extreme hourglass figure with 41-19-36 vital statistics, which were featured in glamour magazines and on saucy playing cards where she was the ‘5 of Spades’ girl.
In 1955, aged 18, Sabrina became a household name when she appeared in episodes of Arthur Askey’s ‘Before Your Very Eyes’. She often had roles as a ‘blonde bombshell’ where she didn’t speak and was dubbed ‘the British Marilyn Monroe’.
Joe Beard had been fascinated by Sabrina’s real-life ambitious desire to make it big in Hollywood but as the song lyric goes “she always turns up but is always turned down”. To write the lyric he also drew upon a scene he’d witnessed while out on his rounds as a butcher boy.
“I’d stopped to watch an affluent lady being helped into her Rolls Royce by her chauffeur,” remembers Joe. “A story started to enter my conscious about a well-heeled lady wanting to go and meet her screen idol Rudy Vallee in Hollywood.”
Sabby certainly succeeded in meeting her idols in Hollywood and was rumoured to have dated Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, even members of the Royal Family. She was a guest of Fidel Castro in Havana and she used to shop with Lucille Ball.
In the late 1950’s Sabrina had a number of minor film roles including ‘Blue Murder at St Trinians’. She moved to Hollywood in the 1960’s but kept her connections with Stockport through being a patron of The Plaza Theatre. Sabrina eventually retired from show business but stayed living in Los Angeles until her death in 2016 aged 80.
Ironically Sabby’s high glamour look is about as far away as you can get from the image of a “Granny’! The decision was made to change the song title to ‘Granny Takes A Trip’ and despite the lyrical story of the would-be movie star’s journey being very clear, the BBC interpreted the title as having drug references and banned the record from its airwaves.
Since that twist of fate, the band have continued to be prolific over the years and Joe has written new songs about Sabby as part of an ongoing project ‘The Hourglass Girl – .The Story of Sabrina’.
