Maureen Evans
Pop singer
Maureen Evans was born on 23 March 1940 in Cardiff, Wales, and became one of the most consistent British pop chart presences of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She began performing as a teenager with Waldini's Gypsy Band, singing summer seasons at Welsh holiday resorts including Llandudno, before signing to Embassy Records in 1958, the budget label that recorded cover versions of contemporary hits for sale exclusively through Woolworths.
Evans moved to Oriole Records in 1959 and had her first chart hit with "The Big Hurt" in 1960, before scoring her biggest success two years later with "Like I Do", which reached number 3 in the UK singles chart in early 1963 and sold over 300,000 copies. She went on to notch up four UK Top 40 hits in total and sold more than a million records across her career, also competing in the British trials for the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest with "Pick the Petals", finishing third.
After her recording career wound down in the late 1960s, Evans stayed close to the performing arts back home in Wales, founding and running the Maureen Evans Theatre School in Cardiff, which taught children singing, dancing and acting for over a decade. A career-spanning CD, Like I Do: The Sixties Recordings, was released in 2016, bringing her 1960s catalogue to a new audience.