From the archives….
Music has never been the food of love for me. When I was hard at work trying to mislay my virginity in the early 1960s, electronic music reproduction was, like human reproduction, a complicated business. The safest way to fill a room with erotic sounds was the tape recorder. These were enormous reel-to-reel things with endless buttons and the ever-present likelihood of the tape spooling itself into a creased mess. As most of the music I was recording came through a mic in front of our battered Ferguson – and Radio Luxembourg had a habit of going from sybillant whisper to ear-shattering distortion within seconds – the results weren’t that successful.
The other method – simply putting on the record player – was also fraught with danger. Our Collaro model frequently dropped the next record down the delivery spine before the previous one had finished, a process more than likely to mar the performance of most romantic ballads. Needles in those days got caught and went into repeat at least once on any one disc. And having gotten to the end of the track – and supposedly onto automatic retreat – the playing arm frequently chose to batter the cardboard inner of one’s 45 rpm disc to death instead. As hands crept up sweaters and became tangled with female protesting hands and feminine elastic, the lady involved in that night’s carpet-wrestling would release her lips from your Electrolux mouth and say “Aren’t you going to change the record then?”
But if it was rarely the food of love, music has been an appetiser for the memory all my life. More than any other art form or primary sense, the sound of music can take me back fifty years in an instant. (This is not to be confused with the Sound of Music, which usually prompted me to take up residence elsewhere – anywhere – on hearing the first three bars of My Favourite Things. (As the Nazis hunted for nuns, I was that young man in the cinema four decades ago shouting from the back row “They’re behind the barrels”.)
Talk to most people over fifty – or read tomes about pop music – and the general impression given is that in the beginning of Pop it went Frank Sinatra, US rock’n’roll, Britrock, and then backwards. While the last bit is entirely accurate, the rest is a gross simplification of the ups and downs and one-hit madness of mass music from 1952-62.
The first song I can recall was a calypso on the subject of cricket. This would’ve been about 1953, as the first West Indians began to arrive in Britain along with unfeasibly white teeth, broad smiles and steel drums as backing instruments. The track was called Cricket Lovely Cricket, and the only lyric I can remember was
With those two old pals of mine
Ramadhin and Valentine
the two names referring to cricketers of some note. Although the form is largely forgotten now, calypso was massive in the Fifties. Shortly after Sunday lunch on the radio’s Light Programme there would be Mr Ross and Mr Ray, a half hour devoted to the jazzy Caribbean output of Edmundo Ross and Ray Ellington. Steel bands were commonplace in Manchester, and it came as no surprise when Manchester United chose a calypso for their club song, the somewhat pedantically titled Manchester United Calypso. (The B-side Yoruba Highlife was a much better song)
Yet another Jamaican band produced the next thing to catch my ear, a ‘novelty’ song called Who stole the Ding-Dong. As the name suggests, it wasn’t in the Dylan/Cohen mould. Novelty songs were also very big before rock ‘n’ roll appeared, so as this one was a novelty calypso it pushed all the buttons. My Uncle Harry sang it almost non-stop for three years – which must have worried his staff, as he was marketing director of Castrol at the time.
Not that it matters particularly, but the song was about somebody stealing a wedding bell. Soon afterwards came I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue toothbrush. Yes, a song about toothbrushes. If you’re gaining the impression that this innocent decade was like one never-ending edition of A song for Europe, you wouldn’t be far out. The toothbrush song was pushing the envelope quite hard in that it wasn’t a calypso, but even so it was not the sort of stuff to evoke teenage riots.
Songs and singers beyond calypso were a mixture of novelty and bland, usually both. Acts like Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson, Denis Lotis and Dickie Valentine released stuff alongside barmy Goons material such as The Ying-Tong Song and I’m Walking backwards to Christmas. The American singers – Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Guy Mitchell and Johnny Ray – seemed to ooze class by comparison. In fact, once I’d reached the age of seven (in 1955) after a couple of years during which to compare notes with the other kids at school, it was clear that most of us thought adult music was a thin melange of infantile lyrics delivered by singers dressed up as if on their way to a formal wedding. Connie Francis, Alma Cogan and Pearl Carr dressed as if it was their wedding; Lotis and Valentine gave the appearance of being sommeliers at the reception. It was a pretty formal and confusing time.
My mum was very keen on Guy Mitchell, an American crooner who actually made the transition to rock ‘n’ roll better than most. In 1954 she bought One of the Roving Kind, a single by Mitchell about a girl with dark eyes and long hair. The lyric asserted that She had a dark and roving eye-yae-yae/and her hair hung down in ringlets. Like most Americans he spoke English with a drawl which allowed me to interpret these words as
She had a dark brown Rover Nine
and her hair hung down the window-leads
You have to understand that back then, a car parked outside the house and mock-Elizabethan leading on the windows was the pinnacle of suburban aspiration. Slightly less clear to me at the time was why anyone would dangle upside down from the ledge of an upstairs window.
Thus, familiarity with the words (and the ability to hear them over and over again) was very important. The first record I bought was a 78 rpm single by Danny Kaye, The Ugly Duckling. Uncle Mack played it every week alongside the other songs about ding-dong toothbrushes and upside-down beauties, but as this one had a sane narrative attached it seemed the best choice available. The next record I bought was completely different: because in the meantime, what Harold Macmillan delighted in calling “Events dear boy, events” intervened.
In 1955, a movie called Blackboard Jungle was released starring Glenn Ford as a teacher struggling against juvenile delinquency in a tough New York school. Seen from the perspective of today, it looks like a government information film about A** student behaviour, but half a century ago this was raw stuff. The method school of acting was in the ascendancy: Marlon Brando had made The Wild Ones, and James Dean was about to take Hollywood by storm in Rebel without a Cause. Blackboard Jungle was controversial partly because of its content, but mainly because the theme music was the rock ‘n’ roll classic, Rock Around the Clock. The ‘crazy mixed-up’ teenager had been invented.
The group behind this disc was Bill Haley and the Comets, and the mixed-up part of teenagers became immediately apparent when they started ripping up cinema seats at performances of the film. To this day I’ve no idea why, just as much as I’ve not much of a clue as to why they’d started to grow their hair longer, plaster it with Brylcreem and grow long sideboards. This – with the addition of knee-length suit jackets, brothel-creeper shoes and flick-knives – became the rapidly familiar dress code for Teddy Boys.
The Teddy nickname came from ‘Edwardian’ in style, and the flick-knives were for ripping cinema seats. But like I say, the rest is complete mystery. Another of their weapons, for example, was the bicycle chain. Now you can do a lot of damage with a bicycle chain, but they’re not what you’d call either portable or clean. I can think of a dozen other implements of destruction that would’ve occurred to me first – cricket bats, iron bars, axes and hammers – but no, the Teds went around waving oily bike-chains….and presumably using lots of Swarfega afterwards.
Then there were the socks: lime green, bright orange and sun yellow. ‘Drainpipe’ trousers meant that the socks were visible on top of whopping great crepe-soled shoes, so there was a degree of logic in that. But lime green and bright orange? Street lighting wasn’t that good in 1955, but this doesn’t really cut it as a rationale for walking about as if one had belisha beacons where the ankles should be.
Fashion mysteries to one side, Bill Haley became The New Beginning. Across Freshfield Avenue from our house, Geoffrey Holden already had an LP of the Comets, and a brief clip of them in action on our Wonder of the Age Bush 12″ telly was enough to tell those a few years older than me that Dickie Valentine was about to become The Forgotten Man.
The trouble with Haley was that close up, he looked like a clinically obese paedophile. Rosy, unpleasantly sweaty cheeks and a leering mouth sat below a bizarre kiss-curl on his forehead. Also he wore bow-ties. All of this became apparent during his first British tour in early 1956. But this almost middle-aged man who started it all never stood a chance anyway, because the sex-bomb who dominated most everything until The Beatles was about to make his entrance.
Elvis Presley moved like no white singer had ever moved before. You don’t have to take my word for it: old footage (and the film Jailhouse Rock) are still available to enable anyone interested in the phenomenon to judge for themselves. But if you want a description, I’d say that The King had legs able to do anything rubber could do – and more – plus an ability to twirl his foot against the ground as if he might be a hopeful Hillbilly drilling for oil. He could coordinate two arms pointing into the sky with a ferocious pelvic thrust. And above all, he could adopt a low, suggestive groaning growl that left the audience in little doubt about the dishonourable nature of his intentions.
I’d love to suggest that I remember the release of It’s alright Mama and Heartbreak Hotel, but to be honest I don’t. The first impact Elvis Presley made on me was a single called All Shook Up. Not only did the song have a rhythm that made it almost impossible to sit still, the lyrics were full of the glamorously intriguing mystery surrounding all things American. Here again, misunderstanding was at large.
In 1957, nobody in England knew what a pick-up or a levee or a Chevvy or a hotrod might be. They certainly had no idea at all what a fuzzy tree was, but Elvis was itching like a man in one. I mean, if they were itchy, why climb into them? But the biggest mystery of all was the full lyric upon which the title was based:
I’m in love – uh – I’m all shook up
Usually in those radio-dominated days, it was likely one would hear a lyric before reading it. And to me, Elvis was singing
A man I love – urggh – Amalshacup
As I had not as yet discovered either sex or homosexuals, it didn’t strike me as odd that Presley would love a man. What puzzled me was him loving somebody who was completely urrgh and called Amalshacup. Was he Monsieur Amalshacup, an as yet unknown Frenchman? Or the swarthy Arab Amal Sheikup?
Perhaps for this reason, I steered clear of Elvis discussions: at that age one is terrified of being revealed as ignorant and thus making a life-threatening gaffe. So it wasn’t until Hound Dog, Don’t Be Cruel and Jailhouse Rock had topped every chart in the world that I surreptitiously read the sleeve notes of my brother’s Christmas Present Elvis Golden Records, and was relieved to hear that Mr Presley was rather badly shaken, as opposed to a sucker for ugly foreigners.
By that time however, a new artist had made an even more spectacular impression on me, and it was his debut UK EP (Extended Play) record that represented my second purchase in Cheetham Hill Records. This astonishing man was called Little Richard.
Long Tall Sally was the first record that not only made me want to move, it was the only one up until that point I knew I had to play 24/7 for eternity, or life would be completely without meaning. There was a brief moment of confusion in the shop as I told the bloke behind the counter I wanted to buy oo-oo-oo-oobaby-we havin me some fun tonight ye-ee-eh, but luckily another customer nodded and said ‘Little Richard’. The real bonus was getting the EP home and discovering that the other tracks were Rip it Up (so that’s what the cinema seat thing was about) Ready Teddy, Tutti Frutti (more foreign stuff) and Lucille. For several months thereafter, I didn’t listen to anything else.
But if Elvis lyrics were hard to fathom, Little Richard’s sounded as if he might be speaking backwards.
Gorra tall wren Mary/ boun up a join
he claimed he had a million but he had alorra fun/ oh baby
This was going to be a code-cracking exercise on the scale of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Dead Sea Scrolls. And there was more:
Wellah saw onker join with bald-head Sally
he saw a merry comin’an he jumback in der alley/ oh baby
Well quite. But this was safer territory, because nobody as yet had the sheet music for these early Richard hits – and thus no white human being on the planet knew what the blue buggery this little black man was on about. Better still, my parents thought the artist behind this mangled esperanto must be mad.
“‘E sounds like Stanley Unwin after a few pints” said my Dad.
My grandparents were several leagues further behind, in a land called DearGodwhatnext. Grandma in particular (already sixty-seven and therefore obviously beyond help) was at sea about almost every aspect of contemporary culture. She once called Elvis “That bloke Albert Presley who plays wicket-keeper for United” and on another occasion referred to him as Elvis Prestwich, a gag I’ve been using ever since.
Interest in a black singer recording for a relatively obscure label called London American might have made me a lone eccentric were it not for school chum Dave Russell, who shared the passion. Roughly at the same time, Jerry Lee Lewis exploded onto the scene with Great Balls of Fire and High School Confidential, and for the next year or so this pretty much made up the set save for one man – a Texan geek with glasses called Buddy Holly.
That’ll Be the Day (Holly’s first hit) will always remind me of Christmas 1957, because it was in the late Autumn of that year that its British release had everyone from ten to twenty wondering who the guy was. Schooled by this time in the knowledge that everyone in The American South was black except Elvis, this was the assumption we all made. So too did the entirely black and utterly astonished audience at New York’s Apollo Theatre where Holly appeared on August 16th of that year. But by December in Britain we knew otherwise, and soon after New Year Buddy & the Crickets came over to record a special for the BBC.
Many years later as an adman, I was to be involved in the marketing of Buddy Holly’s Twenty Golden Greats, and the experience was as emotional as writing this is now. For an all-too-short time until his death in a plane crash early in 1959, Holly probably outshone everyone. His output was prolific, but also different in an important way, because I think he seemed at the time to be the first white rock ‘n’ roll singer not simply inspired by (and doing cover versions of) black music. His sound was a little Tex-Mex, a little Country, and a huge amount of both vocal, lead guitar and percussion power. As such, I think Buddy Holly & the Crickets were the nearest thing The Beatles had to a model for the combo they were about to form.
Oddly enough, for a week or two before they settled on ‘Crickets’ as the name, Buddy and his backing band seriously considered ‘Beetles’ as a name. They even – unbelievably – recorded a cha-cha version of That’ll be the Day.
In a way, this presaged a move which was about to begin – away from the edgy, dangerous niggra music and towards a more mainstream acceptability. Singers like Pat Boone began covering Rip it Up with anodyne versions in which there was no talk of ballin’ and foolin’ around. As one of the characters in the movie American Graffiti opines, “Rock n roll ain’t been the same since Buddy Holly died”.
This was both an amusing and poignant line. Shortly after Holly’s demise, Presley’s induction into the US army was announced. Little Richard renounced rock music and announced he was entering a monastery. Even Jerry Lee Lewis began his slow drift back towards southern country-blues.
By 1960, the general consensus was that rock n roll was dead. In the States, cleaned-up crooners like Bobby Vee, Del Shannon, Tommy Roe and Fabian were turning out acceptable music for the family audience – Little Town Flirt, Sheila, The Night has a Thousand Eyes, Runaway, Rubber Ball and so on; former rockers were either going into Cabaret or dead.
But here in the UK, other social factors were in play. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) attracted the attention of better-educated middle class youth, and the Jazz/beatnik/existentialist axis had gone from Paris via New York to Britain’s student population.
Most of these people still had traditional short-back-and-sides haircuts: they looked down on pop music and the yobs they perceived to follow it. They marched against nuclear weapons and wore duffle coats. The top end sported arty rive gauche beatnik beards and listened to modern jazz. And some time during 1959, the less elitist modern jazz followers broke out towards traditional New Orleans music to begin the next pop craze – ‘trad jazz’.
Trad swept the nation just as skiffle – a folk/jazz fusion led by Lonnie Donegan which allowed young amateur bands to form with cheap instruments – had done two years previously. Except this time, the craze spawned real sales, and bands that became almost timeless over the years: Kenny Ball, Chris Barber – and above all, Acker Bilk, whose Stranger on the Shore was Number One for a record thirty weeks.
But the mainstream went – as in the US – back to squeaky clean. In the three years after 1956, several British artists had been groomed by the record companies as crypto-American rockers: Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Terry Dene and Adam Faith. The only one to achieve lasting pop success was a young man called Harry Webb, who changed his name to Cliff Richard.
Cliff’s backing group The Shadows were (unlike many of their competition) extremely good musicians. And from 1958 onwards, the ITV pop show Oh Boy! acted as an excellent stage for bad-boy Cliff to sneer, gyrate, and generally look like an English Elvis.
At this time, Cliff’s lip-curl made Presley’s look like a restrained smile of approval from President Eisenhower. Watching this performance one early evening, my mother typically remarked “Someone should tell ‘im if ‘e’s not careful it’ll stick like that”.
Sticking with his revolutionary approach, Richard made two movies – Espresso Bongo and Serious Charge – before accepting that a general clean-up was under way. Afterwards (like Elvis with his endless films about girls and beaches and racing cars) Cliff went on to make The Young Ones and Summer Holiday before becoming every grandma’s favourite pop star – and something of a national treasure.
The phase which ran from roughly 1959 to 1962 on both sides of the Atlantic is rarely celebrated today. But I remember the period fondly, because it marks the point at which I noticed that the other gender was growing bumps and wearing sleek stockings with tempting crinkles around the knee area. Sunday afternoon was devoted almost entirely to cruising round Manchester’s Heaton Park with a transistor radio, trying to pick up girls. The idea (largely flawed, I might add) was that just the sound of Del Shannon singing Swiss Maid would be enough to get young ladies tagging along and lying down on the grass. The fact is that they had trannies too, and were in love with the Bobbies Vee or Vinton. Also I had no clear idea what to do with them once lying horizontal and at my mercy: the movie of the time Splendor in the Grass might have given me a few clues, but Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood up to naughtiness was enough to make the censor give this now largely forgotten film an ‘A’ certificate. Then as now, watching sexy stuff is the last thing you want to do when accompanied by parents.
If I’m honest, the braindead floor-show pop of that era was bound to come to an end, if only so that that crazy mixed-up kids could morph into something other than their parents save for the Republican/Tory voting imperative. The pre-war babies were now being usurped by the Baby Boomers, and most of these young people wanted to be genuinely revolting.
Looking back now, I really doubt whether it mattered what the focus of that revolt might be. But one thing is for sure: the elitist CND crowd might find Trad Jazz and Ban the Bomb a suitable outlet for their restless intelligence, but those coming next wanted to have some fun.
I find it hard to don rose-coloured spectacles about the 1950s: while memories of the Busby Babes, French Cricket in the street and the amazing summer of 1959 endure, on the whole Manchester at that time was a damp and dark-grey aftermath of the Colonial Age when cotton barons built confident Edwardian houses. Its dark-yellow smogs threatened to kill everyone over the age of fifty, and its dank pavements below dripping sycamore trees seemed about to swallow up anyone who dreamed of something more exotic.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the segue from pap to Merseybeat came in the unlikely form of a protest singer who was anything but po-faced. From the moment he began to make an impression in the Greenwich Village world of saxophone satirist Woody Allen, Bob Dylan made me think and laugh in equal measure.
The first thing one notices in the surviving documentary clips of young Robert Zimmerman is that he was very probably stoned most of the time. Indeed, his giggly fuzzy-at-the-edges interview style was a trailer for what became The Swinging Sixties. He was, like, far-f*ckin’ out man – but several years before the rest of us were.
What Dylan banished was the earnest, hand-wringing CND duffle-coat approach to protest. While his classic track Blowin’ in the Wind was from that same mould, he was ever the man who knew both how to fit into the zeitgeist, and how to predict where it was going next. In this sense, his early adoption of irony made Bob Dylan quite different to anyone else.
Once again, I’d like to suggest I was precocious in my early admiration for Dylan, but it was another school chum Shaun Whittaker who first played me the man’s second album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. At the time, I’d no idea what the first side might have been, but this collection of quizzical and laugh-out-loud folk had me hooked from Day One.
This was the first time I had been exposed to the Talkin’ Blues comic genre. Tracks like Motor-Psycho Nightmare and Talkin’ World War III Blues are probably a mystery to the current generation, but for those of us living in the light of all things American – and under the shadow of nuclear annihilation – Dylan really did offer another side to the argument.
In time, Bob Dylan moved on to electrified performances – annoying the remaining duffle coats, but developing a new fan-base as the sudden arrival of the Beatles democratised music forever. When in October 1962 Parlophone released Love Me do, it had precisely the same effect for me as Long Tall Sally had six years previously: the future didn’t necessarily consist of an infinite cacophony of cabaret and Aldermaston marches.
Is there a lesson in all this? I think so. In 2008 we have reached the stage of being almost unable to imagine a genuinely original music form. Two years ago I listened to Steve Wright in the Afternoon while the host and a guest discussed the future of Pop. Wright opined, “Well one thing’s for sure – it isn’t going to be folk”. Although I like his show very much, this was a daft remark by Steve Wright. The future won’t be a rerun of protest folk – it may not be folk as we know it at all – but it will be a reaction.
I’ve no idea what the exact reaction will be. It could be any one of genuinely discovered rather than pedantic talent-show talent, accoustic rather than electric bands, the rejection of guitars as a mainstay of Pop, big bands rather than small, or a modernisation of choral music. But for me, the 1950s was a period during which popular music demonstrated its ability to develop unpredictably. If, for example, you had told somebody in 1954 that exhibitionist crooning in the style of Johnnie Ray would be followed within a decade by singers who had fused Country, rock ‘n’ roll and Folk, they would’ve said you were mad. (If you doubt that this had happened, listen to Norwegian Wood by the Beatles)
On a broader canvas, the outrage caused by Ray made the licentious sex and open anti-war drug taking of the 1960s seem about the least likely outcome: there was, after all, a bald bloke in the White House and a Victorian in Downing Street. But the thing about tomorrow is that it’s never anything like the tomorrow we expect today.
This piece first appeared at NotBornYesterday on 24th November 2008
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