by Bob Stanley
As if the ASCAP ban hadn’t shaken up the American music industry enough, a 1942 strike by the US musicians’ union led to a ban on all recording. Live performances were still allowed, but no new records could be made. Record companies quickly realised that the strike didn’t apply to singers, just musicians, so they put together vocal groups who sang a cappella backing behind stars such as the Tommy Dorsey band’s Frank Sinatra. Singers remained in the public eye, while musicians were reduced to making a living from public performances. In the swing era – the big-band years from 1935 to 1945 – the singers had usually taken second billing to the band leaders; when the musicians’ union finally negotiated settlements with the record companies, they found that the popularity of the bands had been largely eclipsed by their vocalists.3
The decline of the big band had an even more dramatic effect on American radio, where ‘disc jockeys’ – a term first used as an insult by Variety magazine in 1941 – began to replace live on-air music. This was down to simple economics (a live band cost a lot more to employ than one man with a stack of records) and also the rise of small local stations after the war. The biggest influence in this shift from live music to records was a man called Martin Block. At WNEW in New York, Block had started a programme in 1935 called Make Believe Ballroom, entirely made up of his record collection. On air, he would read out facts about each record from Billboard and Variety – before Block, radio announcers had only read out the titles in stern newsreader voices.4 He also ad-libbed commercials to four million listeners, which began to earn WNEW a lot of revenue. Block’s airplay alone could create a hit record.5 He syndicated his show nationwide in 1948, the year in which the transistor was invented, making the portable transistor radio possible and taking music out of the house and onto the street.
By the late forties the popularity of Block’s show had sparked a whole industry – radio advertising – exemplified by the jingle. America was almost unique in seeing radio, from its inception in the twenties, as a purely commercial enterprise rather than as a government tool. As catchy jingles became more prevalent, the records played between them began to sound similarly perky – Teresa Brewer’s ‘Music Music Music’, the first US number one of the fifties, could have worked just as well if it had been used as a Lucky Strike jingle. In other words, the jingles drove radio; records were largely there to fill the space in between.6
Most countries in Europe saw radio as a means of broadcasting educational material or propaganda, and the BBC’s three channels – the Home Service (which started in 1939), the Light Programme (1945) and the Third Programme (1946) – had a monopoly in Britain; pop music barely existed. Among the few music shows on the Light Programme in 1952 was Those Were the Days: Harry Davidson’s Orchestra played old-time dance music, and the live studio audience were invited to do the Boston two-step, the palais glide and the empress tango; the show had all the excitement of a warm cup of squash next to Martin Block’s Coke float and root beer. The more free-spirited Jack Jackson presented Record Roundup, which ran from 1948 to 1977; he would punctuate records with clips he had pre-recorded onto tape, which made him the first British DJ to mix sound, speech and comedy.7
An alternative was provided by Radio Luxembourg. It was the duchy’s national station, set up in 1929; unlike the BBC it was a commercial enterprise, and so it aimed to maximise its listenership and, in turn, its advertising revenue. From 1934 it started a regular schedule of English-language radio transmissions to Britain and Ireland from eight-fifteen in the mornings until midnight on Sundays, and at various times during the rest of the week. Programmes were recorded in London and flown out to be broadcast from Luxembourg. The station came into its own after the war – from autumn 1948, on Sunday nights when the BBC restricted itself to religious and heavyweight topics, Luxembourg played the Top 20 songs on the ‘hit parade’, based on sheet-music sales, beginning a British tradition that continues to this day.8
At the turn of the fifties there was still food rationing in Britain, and very little money for any kind of reconstruction. Everywhere there were bomb sites, physical reminders of terrible trauma. 1951 saw the Festival of Britain open on London’s semi-derelict South Bank, an exhibition of design, architecture and technology notable for its vivid colour, its modernism and its newness. After the festival closed, Britain was desperate to build on its success and spirit.
In November ’52 EMI launched the first 45s, and pop’s truest format – the firewood for future youth clubs, mobile discos and furtive fumbles at teenage parties – was born.9 The forty-five-revolutions-per-minute single was pressed on vinyl rather than the fragile, brittle shellac which had been used for 78s, the main recorded-music format for more than thirty years. Vinyl, boasted the sleeves of the earliest EMI singles, was ‘unbreakable’ – it was lighter than shellac, too, and its microgrooves gave a much clearer, louder sound than 78s. Vinyl was also more portable, and hence more sociable. Twelve-inch vinyl albums, around since the late forties, were initially for adults:10 the cheaper, handier, less precious seven-inch would become the property of the teenager. EMI tentatively issued classical-only 45s at first, but they quickly realised the three- or four-minute playing time was much better suited to pop. EMI was the parent company to four pop labels – HMV, Columbia, Parlophone and MGM – and in January ’53 they issued, respectively, Eddie Fisher’s ‘I’m Yours’, Ray Martin’s ‘Blue Tango’, Humphrey Lyttelton’s ‘Out of the Galleon’ and Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney’s ‘A Couple of Swells’ as their opening shots; by the end of 1953 EMI had issued close to three hundred 45 rpm titles, and the raw materials for a revolution were in place.
Locking down seven-inch singles as a youth format, the portable Dansette record player was registered as a trademark in October 1952. Prior to this, record players were literally pieces of furniture, oak or mahogany, heavy and expensive; the radiogram, with its combined gramophone and wireless, was the size of a fridge. Until the fifties, electrical goods were classed as either ‘white’ (washing machines, fridges) or ‘brown’ (televisions, radios, gramophones). The Dansette was manufactured at a factory on Old Street in London’s East End; reflecting the primary colours of the Festival of Britain, it came in vivid red, blue, green, cream or pink leatherette. As the fifties progressed, the owner of the Dansette company, Samuel Margolin, was sharp enough to listen to teenagers, and he designed exactly what they wanted. He added an auto-changer, which meant singles could be stacked in a pile; Elvis would automatically be followed by Pat Boone or Duane Eddy, lined up and ready to be dropped automatically onto the turntable. The Dansette was party perfect.
America provided another building block of the modern pop world. The first magazine for teenagers, Seventeen,11 had been launched in 1944; though it was primarily aimed at girls and featured little on music, it was a start. In Britain, the only magazine to feature pop in 1952 was Picturegoer, which – as the name suggests – was primarily about movies. The record reviews were sniffy about anything beyond Sinatra. Actress Janette Scott’s ‘Teen Page’ revealed she was ‘a bit of a disc fiend’, though she had no time for ‘criers and the arm-flappers and the rest … I know I’ll raise a bit of a storm here but I’m not really wild about Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray.’
Unlike Janette Scott, though, much of Britain was pop hungry, and in need of refreshment.
1 One infamous post-war reaction to peacetime was the 1947 biker riot in Hollister, California, where ex-soldiers hopped up on speed were looking for the kinds of excitement and camaraderie they had found in the war. Amphetamines had been standard issue in the US army – this would later have grave consequences for modern pop’s first superstar, Elvis Presley.
2 Bobby Troup later wrote ‘Route 66’, associated with both Nat King Cole and the Rolling Stones, and produced Julie London’s exquisite ‘Cry Me a River’ (US no. 9 ’56, UK no. 22 ’57). London was so impressed with his work that she married Troup in 1961.
3 Les Baxter was a fascinating exception. He had been tenor-sax p
layer with Artie Shaw and vocal arranger for Mel Tormé’s Mel-Tones, before he put together a small band in 1947 with novel instrumentation – ‘a cello, a French horn, a theremin, a rhythm section and a twelve-voice choir’ – for Harry Revel’s ten-inch album Music out of the Moon. ‘It was a little weird,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t know what popular records were. I wanted to be innovative.’ He then split his career into adventurous self-composed albums like Ritual of the Savage (1951) and pleasant but straightforward arrangements for singles which resulted in US number-one hits – Nat King Cole’s ‘Too Young’ (1951), his own ‘Unchained Melody’ (1955) and ‘Poor People of Paris’ (1956), none of which he wrote. The one record which jumped the fence was Martin Denny’s ‘Quiet Village’ (US no. 4 ’59), a Baxter-written Tiki-influenced instrumental which became the touchstone for the ‘exotica’ revival in the nineties.
4 Block had borrowed both the name and concept of Make Believe Ballroom from a DJ called Al Jervis on KFWB in Hollywood, where Block had been an assistant.
5 An appearance on TV had far less impact. In the late forties TV shows were in their infancy; they were basically flat reproductions of radio shows, and did little to help sell records – compare staid clips of Kay Starr singing ‘Wheel of Fortune’ on TV in 1952 to the gorgeous, Technicolor musical scenes from Singin’ in the Rain the same year. What’s more, having your own TV variety show effectively meant you became a host, and were no longer a pop star. Dinah Shore discovered this in 1950; Cliff Richard, Cilla Black and Glen Campbell would later. The impact of TV would change dramatically in the late fifties and it would take a Briton, Jack Good, to draw its full pop potential.
6 Another reason for the change in the way pop music sounded was the decline of Broadway. It had been a solid provider of hit songs since the twenties, but took a steep drop in popularity in the early fifties. This must have seemed unlikely in 1950, when the new season brought Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (‘Getting to Know You’, ‘Shall We Dance’), Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (‘If I Were a Bell’, ‘A Bushel and a Peck’) and Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam (‘You’re Just in Love’), giving us a fresh clutch of standards. In 1951, though, all the new Broadway shows lost money. What happened? Possibly the cold war helped to foster a bunker mentality, with people happier staying at home with their new televisions, wireless radios and gramophones. What’s more, those radios would no longer have had live broadcasts by big bands playing the current Broadway hits, as they had done for the last twenty-odd years, and so a vital strand of publicity for shows was lost. The next big hit – 1954’s The Pajama Game – was quickly made into a film before the trail went cold.
7 When BBC Radio 1 started in 1967, Jackson was still around, and was referred to by Kenny Everett as ‘the daddy of all disc jockeys’.
8 The very first Top 20 countdown signature tune, pre-dating Pick of the Pops’ ‘At the Sign of the Swinging Cymbal’ (Brian Fahey) and Top of the Pops’ ‘Whole Lotta Love’ (CCS), was ‘Doodletown Fifers’ by the Sauter-Finegan Band on Radio Luxembourg.
9 Britain was one step removed from America, the birthplace of vinyl – the 33 rpm, twelve-inch long-playing record and the 45 rpm, seven-inch single. This meant Britain didn’t have to worry about the fraught and complex process that had gone into creating these formats: Columbia had first produced the LP in 1948 and RCA the seven-inch single in ’49 – both also made the machines on which the discs were played and, for some time, they refused to compromise and were at each other’s throats trying to win the ‘battle of the speeds’. Columbia called the 45 ‘unorthodox’; RCA’s David Sarnoff countered, ‘I challenge … anybody in the world to demonstrate that a seven-inch 33⅓ record can produce the same kind of quality that a seven-inch 45 rpm record can and does produce’. New York Times critic Howard Taubman, writing in 1950, conceded that Sarnoff was right, but that the LP was better for ‘sheer listening comfort and continuity of performances’. The LP, initially, was perfect for classical music, and the 45 for pop.
10 33 rpm records were designed for longer music – expressly, classical symphonies – and hence had one kind of cultural value embedded. ‘Albums’, up to this point, had meant leaved or boxed collections of several 78s, like a stamp or photo album. So a 33 rpm long-player (or LP) was actually a replacement for the album, a whole that had previously been necessarily but awkwardly divided up on several shellac 78s, each side of which had a maximum playing time of roughly five minutes. The terminology remained, with ‘LP’ and ‘album’ interchangeable.
11 Seventeen’s first editorial set out the terms for a youthquake: ‘You’re going to have to run this show – so the sooner you start thinking about it, the better. In a world that is changing as quickly and profoundly as ours is, we hope to provide a clearing house for your ideas.’ Those ideas took a good few years to filter through, but it was a launchpad. The magazine still exists today.
PART ONE
1
FEET UP: THE FIRST BRITISH HIT PARADE
For Britain, the modern pop era began in 1952. Not only was it the year the first seven-inch singles were released, and the nation’s most significant and longest-running music paper – the New Musical Express – was first published, but on November 14th the NME printed the first singles chart.1 All three creations would become cornerstones of the pop world until their simultaneous decline in the nineties, as the digital era got into its stride. The singles chart in particular – or the ‘hit parade’ as it was called in the fifties, borrowing American terminology – had a special appeal to the British sensibility.
It meant competition, excitement in league-table form, pop music as a sport. It would pit Frankie Laine against Johnnie Ray, Blur against Oasis, Brits against Yanks, Decca against EMI; it would become fuel for a nation obsessed with train numbers and cricket statistics. The charts dictated what you heard on the radio, what you saw on TV, how high your heroes’ stock had risen. For over four decades they would be a national fixture in Britain, like the FA Cup, like Christmas.
The barely documented years between 1945 and 1954 are pop’s Dark Ages, invisible and obscure. If it’s remembered at all, it’s as a period of stagnation, a stop-gap between the swing era and the rock era, full of identikit balladeers, stars of their day who have all but vanished from collective memory. Tony Brent? Billie Anthony? Would anyone remember Eddie Fisher if he hadn’t married so well and so often? Or Ruby Murray if her name hadn’t become rhyming slang for the national dish? It’s a period I find oddly attractive because of its persistent obscurity. Though the songs are largely forgotten, the first UK chart contained a mix of genres (country, ballads, instrumentals, film themes, exotic novelties, poster-boy pop) which would recur throughout the following decades. For Justin Timberlake, there was Johnnie Ray; for ‘My Heart Will Go On’, the theme from High Noon; for ‘The Ketchup Song’, see ‘Cowpuncher’s Cantata’.
All of these singles were released on shellac 78s – only Mario Lanza’s ‘Because You’re Mine’ was available in the shops on a seven-inch in November 1952, as EMI had just issued it as one of their very first 45 rpm singles. It is also notable how US-dominated the chart was, with only Vera Lynn, Max Bygraves and band leader Ray Martin from Britain.
Britain’s inferiority complex was tangible, even when it tried to promote itself. The sleevenotes to Tony Brent’s Off Stage album claimed he was ‘above the local, in the international class; he is one of the few British vocalists who come within hailing distance of Sinatra or Cole’. Eddie Calvert, who scored a solitary US Top 10 hit in 1954, had similarly humble words printed on the back cover of The Man with the Golden Trumpet: ‘At one time, not very long ago, the idea of a British musician making a record that would sell hundreds of thousands in the United States, the home of modern popular music, was in the nature of a fantasy.’
In 1952 Britain had little self-confidence, then, and no reason to believe it could compete with the likes of pert, blonde, virginal Doris Day, square-jawed cowboy Frankie Laine, Ital
ian operatic import Mario Lanza or Bing Crosby, king of the crooners, and now twenty-odd years at the top. America was a country of conspicuous wealth and immaculately turned out stars of stage and screen; pockmarked Britain was still awaiting redevelopment seven years after the end of the war. Hollywood in 1952 meant Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Gary Cooper as the ultimate good guy in High Noon; Gene Barry stirred up fears of unimaginable disaster in The Atomic City; Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain was the year’s hit musical. Britain, meanwhile, had Michael Redgrave starring in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest – a great story and a fine movie, but really … The only hint of local danger came from bad girl Diana Dors, who starred as a thieving teenage seductress in The Last Page. There was no suggestion whatsoever of an imminent, and remarkable, convergence of British and American pop culture.