Ford was the first Black British artist to sell one million copies of a single. In January 1960, Ford signed a two-year employment management contract with Leslie Grade. He had several more hits in the UK, and also scored a number one EP in 1960. The readers of the British music magazine "New Musical Express" voted Emile Ford & the Checkmates as the "Best New Act" in 1960. Ford's debut album was made up of covers. He made several albums, but his last studio recordings were in 1963. His half-brothers George and Dave Sweetnam-Ford were later members of the Ferris Wheel. "Counting Teardrops", an anthology including all of Ford's recordings with Pye Records, was released in 2001. Ford, like Jimi Hendrix, had synaesthesia, a condition where the person who can associate certain colours, or even see certain colours in relation to the sound they are hearing. An article about Emile Ford appears in the November 2004 issue of the "UK Synaesthesia Association Newsletter". He once said that he was gifted with the ability to see and hear sound differently from others and that gift allowed him to make first-class recordings. The female singers that backed him were originally called The Fordettes. They consisted of Margot Quantrell, Eleanor Russell, Vicki Haseman and Betty Prescott. They spent a year on the road with Ford in 1960, playing one-nighters. Back in London they left Ford to sing backup for Joe Brown who Vicki Haseman was engaged to. They were then known as The Breakaways. As a sound engineer, Ford was responsible for creating a backing track system for stage shows, first used in 1960, which provided a basis for what became known as karaoke. In 1969, he set up a recording studio in Barbados with the help of his father, before moving to Sweden. While there, he further developed a new open-air playback system for stage shows, patented as the Liveoteque Sound Frequency Feedback Injection System. Emile Ford died in London on 11 April 2016.