Maureen Evans
Maureen Evans (born 23 March 1940, Cardiff, Wales) is a Welsh pop singer who achieved fame in the 1950s and 1960s. Career. Evans career began as a singer with Waldini's Gypsy Band in the mid-1950s, mainly doing summer seasons at UK holiday resorts such as Llandudno. She released her first singles in 1958 on the Embassy Records label. She entered the UK Singles Chart in 1960 at No. 26 with the song "The Big Hurt", but her biggest hit was 1962's "Like I Do", which peaked at No. 3 in the UK in late January 1963  and achieved silver certification for selling in excess of 250,000 copies in the United Kingdom. "Like I Do" was the UK's 43rd best-selling single of 1963 selling in excess of 300,000 copies. In 1963, Evans competed in the British trials for the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Pick the Petals", but came in third; Ronnie Carroll represented the UK that year in the competition. She continued releasing singles through the 1960s, as well as one EP (1963's "Melancholy Me", on Oriole Records) and an album, "Like I Do", also on Oriole (1963). One reviewer noted about  one of her latter singles, "Never Let Him Go", that it was "an excellent interpretation of a David Gates song". She had a total of four UK Top 40 hits and sold well over one million records in the UK. She owned the Maureen Evans Theatre School in West Grove, Cardiff, which taught children aged 6 to 18 years old, how to sing, dance and act, from 1998 to 2010. In 2013, Stage Door Records released "Maureen Evans – The Singles Collection", as a digital download on Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify. "Like I Do: The Sixties Recordings" was released on 25  November 2016 by RPM Records. This is the first time that Evans' work has been treated to a proper CD release. The album contains 31 tracks which includes her best known hits and rare B sides, from her time with both Oriole Records and the UK branch of Columbia Records (now a unit of Sony Music Entertainment), which purchased Oriole in 1964. Evans wrote the sleeve notes that accompany the CD.