After more than six decades of almost unbroken touring, The Hollies have come off the road for good. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band announced on Instagram that lead guitarist Tony Hicks, 80, is stepping away for health reasons, and that drummer Bobby Elliott, 84, has chosen to retire alongside him rather than carry on without the man he has played beside since 1963.
The statement was short and gave no further detail about Hicks’s condition. “Due to health reasons, Tony has decided to step away from touring,” the band wrote. “Out of respect for Tony and everything they have shared throughout their remarkable journey together, Bobby has also decided to retire from touring. After more than six decades, The Hollies’ touring career will come to a close with immense gratitude to the fans who have supported them around the world.”
That is the whole of it. No farewell tour, no final show at the London Palladium, no long goodbye — just a few lines on a social media account, ending a run that began when The Beatles were still playing the Cavern.
The two who never left
What makes this an ending rather than another lineup change is that Hicks and Elliott were the last structural supports still standing. The Hollies formed in Manchester in 1962 around singers Allan Clarke and Graham Nash. Both of those men were gone by the end of the century — Nash famously walked away in 1969 to co-found Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Clarke retired from the band in 1999.
Hicks and Elliott stayed. Both arrived in 1963, and both came by way of a Nelson three-piece called The Dolphins, the group that also produced later Hollies bassist Bernie Calvert. Hicks, according to the band’s own history, had to be talked into it: manager Alan Cheatham spent weeks persuading him before The Dolphins folded and he became a Hollie.
Between them they played on essentially every record the band made — Hicks’s needling, unmistakable guitar lines and Elliott’s unusually busy, jazz-inflected drumming are as much a Hollies signature as the three-part harmonies. The band toured virtually every year from 1963 onward, an endurance record matched by almost nobody, and one the group itself used to cite. A 2020 press release described Elliott and Hicks as “the integral, original members” and noted that the band had not stopped touring since 1962.
Elliott, in a 2021 interview with Gold Radio, described the group less as a business than a household. “The band are like a family. The crew are like a family,” he said. “It’s always a happy atmosphere backstage, hopefully. And at showtime, that radiates out from our friends there.” Read now, his decision to stop when Hicks stopped looks less like sentiment and more like the only outcome that was ever likely.
What the statement does and does not say
It is worth being precise about the wording, because the coverage has not always been. The band said its “touring career” is coming to a close. It did not announce that The Hollies have broken up, and it made no statement about recordings, the back catalog, or the other four musicians in the current touring lineup — singer Peter Howarth and guitarist Steve Lauri, both of whom joined in 2004, bassist Ray Styles, with the band since 1986, and keyboard player Ian Parker, there since 1991. Whether the name continues in any form is simply not addressed.
There is also a small numerical muddle worth untangling. Variety reported the pair as retiring after 63 years in the band; several other outlets have run 64 years; Parade called it a “60-year road run.” All three are defensible. The Hollies formed in 1962, which makes the band 64 years old. Hicks and Elliott joined in 1963, which makes their own tenure 63 years. The discrepancy is arithmetic, not disagreement.
A catalog that traveled
For American listeners in particular, the scale of what is ending can be easy to underestimate, because The Hollies never became a stadium act in the US the way their British Invasion contemporaries did. The hits, though, went everywhere. “Bus Stop” reached No. 5 in 1966 and was followed into the US top 10 by “Stop Stop Stop,” “Carrie Anne,” “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” and “The Air That I Breathe” — six top 10 singles spread across nine years and two very different versions of the band.
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 by Steve Van Zandt, with Clarke, Nash, Terry Sylvester, Eric Haydock and Calvert honored alongside Hicks and Elliott. Haydock died in 2019.
The reaction under the Instagram post has been overwhelmingly warm rather than aggrieved. “This is gutting,” one fan wrote, in a comment quoted by Parade. “Lots of love to Tony and Bobby who have worked their socks off over the past 60+ years, to put it lightly.”
Sixty-three years is longer than most bands last, most labels last, and most formats last. The Hollies outlived the beat boom, the singer-songwriter era, punk, CDs and streaming, and were still selling out theaters while doing it. That two men decided to finish it on the same day, together, is a fittingly unshowy way for it to end.
