P. J. Proby!
A bunch of hits in the mid-60s in the UK, until his infamous split trousers scandal and a single minor hit in the US.
Reading that Wiki article, I see he recorded an album in 1968 called Three Week Hero using all four of the (then) New Yardbirds as some of his studio musicians!
A US/Japan one is Cheap Trick. Their concert at Budokan in Japan led to their success in the US.
The Beatles were big(*) in Germany first. Does that count? 
(*) Not really
Doesn’t the story go that it was in Germany that they learned their job - and then they had to come back to the UK to make it? 
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ETA: and I meant to say, Zipper, that the Muppets is an excellent call. Obvious, but I would never have thought of it - the whole story is hidden in plain view.
I believe he was on the first episode in 2005.
I don’t believe that the Pretenders were big in England before the US. Their first charting song was Brass in Pocket, which charted at #1 in the UK and #14 in the US.
There are a couple of comedians active in the UK who haven’t had much (or any) success at home but are staples of the UK circuit and television panel show crew: Reginald D Hunter (US), Katherine Ryan (Canada) and Henning Wehn (Germany) come to mind.
Not quite the same thing but following their broadcast run Monty Python were destined for has-been-hood* and tape deletion until they suddenly found a new audience in the US. The films and renewed popularity followed.
*Which is to say they’d all moved on to other projects.
Paul Simon found the folk scene in the US was hard going, came to London in 1965 and found a receptive audience.
A lot of US black soul artists found an audience in the UK under the Northern Soul genre, quite a few of these had left the music scene in the 1960’s but were invited back to places such as Manchester and Wigan during the early 1970’s where they revived their careers.
The Walker Brothers were far more successful here than in the US.
Not sure if going to England caused him to make it big, though. He went there after Simon and Garfunkel broke up after the failure of their debut album. While he was away his producer remixed “The Sound of Silence” with additional instrumentation (and without Simon’s knowledge) and it became a hit in the US. Simon returned to the US late if 1965 in time to see the song hit #1 in early 1966.
Let me split a tiny hair because I remember the sequence. Brass in Pocket was released in the UK in November of 1979 and reached #1 in January 1980. The song was then released in February 1980 in the US and peaked at #14 in late May.
Rich Hall is an American comedian I never heard of until I saw him on various British TV shows. He’s notable as the alleged inspiration for Moe on The Simpsons.
^ That’s because you’re just a kid --Rich Hall was a big deal in the early '80s; he created “Sniglets,” and published several books of them. I admit, haven’t thought of him in years, but watched him fervently back in the day. So, a second career thanks to the Brits? Good for him.
Well, a relatively big deal, anyway. He was never famous on the level of a Bill Murray or Eddie Murphy, but he was in the cast of three different U.S. sketch comedy TV series in the 1980s (one season on Saturday Night Live, plus several seasons of Fridays, and Not Necessarily the News), and Sniglets was a popular-enough bit to spawn that book series.
He did pretty much drop off the radar in the US after the 1980s, however.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes:
Delaware has a population of about 1M, the U.K. has 66M.
Singles
U.K. 400K
U.S. 500K
Albums
U.K. 100K
U.S. 500K
So for an album to become a hit, the proportions are roughly equivalent, i.e. the U.S. population is about five times that of the U.K. However, scoring a hit single is much harder than in the U.S.
A few years back on Top Gear the “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” was Seasick Steve and the studio audience seemed familiar with him while I had no clue who he was.
The comparison between the UK and Delaware is silly in a cultural sense anyway. Have you ever heard of a band from Delaware, or maybe a band from England? Who has sent waves of pop cultural influence across the globe for at least the last 60 years? Delaware or Britain?
How about New Zealand? Orlando Bloom hadn’t made a big name for himself, then he went to NZ to make a few movies with Peter Jackson, and they went over pretty well.
Speaking from memory and without any evidence to back myself up, didn’t the Scissor Sisters come to the UK and make it much bigger here than back home?
Also, what is it with David Hasselhof and Germany?
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