by Bob Stanley
1 Technically, Chuck Berry’s 1972 novelty hit ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ was his highest-charting record, a UK and US number one, but it seems almost cruel to mention it.
2 Among the future hits to feature or adapt the Bo Diddley rhythm were Elvis Presley’s ‘His Latest Flame’, Them’s ‘Mystic Eyes’, the Who’s ‘Magic Bus’, the Stooges’ ‘1969’, David Bowie’s ‘Panic in Detroit’, George Michael’s ‘Faith’ and the Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’. That’s not including covers of Bo’s songs, which made up a good percentage of repertoires on the British R&B circuit in 1963 and ’64: ‘Mona’, ‘Pretty Thing’, ‘Road Runner’, ‘I’m a Man’, ‘Who Do You Love’ and ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover’.
3 Though surprisingly obscure, cuts like ‘Love Is a Bird’ and ‘Born to Be a Rolling Stone’ brought out something in Vincent’s voice, which by 1966 was not dissimilar to that of the Byrds’ Gene Clark, and suggested there could have been a country/folk-rock future for him. ‘Bird Doggin’’ on the other hand was as fierce as his pioneering 45s, raw garage-rock simplicity. These sessions were collected on an album called Gene Vincent that only appeared in Britain in ’66, and have been scattered across compilations since.
4 It’s hard to imagine bespectacled Hank Marvin, for one, having the nerve to take the stage without Holly’s precedent.
5 Like a touchstone for the whole era, ‘Book of Love’ has been referenced in various songs since, including Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’. I might be wrong, but the bassman’s voice could also be the model for the Muppets’ Fozzie Bear.
6
FIFTEEN MILES FROM MIDDLESBROUGH: SKIFFLE
If the geographical origins of American rock ’n’ roll are rich and varied, with New York, Cleveland, New Orleans and Memphis all in with a shout as birthplace, British rock ’n’ roll can be narrowed down, quite definitively, to the London suburb of Cranford. More specifically, to a pub called the White Hart on Bath Road, and to a corrugated-iron hut around the side.
Skiffle – ‘folk songs sung to a jazz beat’, according to the Reverend Brian Bird’s 1958 book on the subject – feels so distant from a twenty-first-century understanding of pop that it can be hard to see where it fits in, or why it was significant. The closest American comparison would be rockabilly – both scenes picked up on Leadbelly’s ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’ for inspiration – but, in a nutshell, it caused a commotion in the mid-fifties because it was fast and loud, it was a racket and, as Rev. Bird pointed out, most significantly it was ‘homemade, “do-it-yourself” music, within the reach of all of limited means and no more than average ability’. In 1955 almost everything broadcast by the BBC smelt of delicacy and refinement, prettiness and propriety; up against homegrown Carusos like David Whitfield, skiffle was an exciting noise. And it was exciting purely because it was a noise.
So it was the original DIY music, cut-and-paste, no qualifications necessary; amid the combination of washboard percussion, broom-handle bass, kazoos and nasal shrieks you can hear the first footsteps on a path that led to Joe Meek, to punk and to jungle. This urgency and sense of constructing something out of nothing – and doing it right now! – was fundamental to the progression of British pop. Some of Lonnie Donegan’s hits may sound like scrunched-up tinfoil, but the airplay that ‘Rock Island Line’ received on the BBC in 1955 inspired John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page to pick up guitars for the first time; it’s one of the unlikelier facts of history that a song about illegally transporting pig iron is British pop’s fountainhead.
So how did a Leadbelly song get onto BBC radio and cause a revolution? Skiffle emanated from the trad-jazz revival – Dixieland stuff, with no homegrown embellishment – which had been picking up speed in Britain since the mid-forties, helmed by the popular and likeable BBC Light Programme regular Humphrey Lyttelton.1 Over in Cranford was Ken Colyer, an irascible New Orleans jazz obsessive. By 1949 he’d found some like-minded souls and formed a group; they hired the hut next to the White Hart, a stone’s throw from Heathrow. Naming themselves after one of the Thames’s more obscure tributaries, the Crane River Jazz Band were confident enough to charge people to enter their hut and watch as they played a primitive set with two guitars, a double bass, a washboard for rhythm and a modified kazoo with a horn stuck into the end.2 The repertoire was very similar to the sounds that would soon inspire rockabilly in the States, a country-blues mix of Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee numbers, though – significantly – there were no original songs. It was ultra-basic and the crowds loved it; by mid-1950 they had a residency in a West End cellar bar. Somewhere along the line the Cranes came up with the name ‘skiffle’ – a New Orleans term for house parties organised to pay the rent – to describe what they were doing.
Melody Maker, the jazz weekly, hated Colyer’s band. He was a purist, a grouchy extremist who thought Louis Armstrong had sold out when he brought a saxophone into his band. His conservatism accidentally beat a new path. What he did with skiffle was to revive a music that was so old it seemed radically new; in this way, he is a forefather to Morrissey – who took early-sixties, pre-Beatles pop culture to shape the Smiths’ image and lyrics – and the indie revolutioncxotic distance to Ken Colyer seemed very real to people still living in two-up two-downs, in ramshackle Victorian structures with galley kitchens and outdoor toilets. The washboard, the mop, the bucket – these were everyday items in working-class fifties Britain. Transforming them into musical instruments with a few nails and a few screws caught the imagination of kids like a home-made Meccano set.
Tony ‘Lonnie’ Donegan was an accomplished jazz guitarist with an interest in blues. Nothing if not resourceful, he had discovered a source of blues and folk music in the library of the American Embassy. Donegan was a regular visitor and diligently listened to everything they had – he even pinched a couple of rare 78s, including ‘a record that Muddy Waters had made when he was a farm worker in Mississippi. I borrowed it and never took it back. I told them that I’d lost it and paid a fine, quite happily of course.’ Donegan was an opportunist as well as an enthusiast.
When the Crane River Jazz Band split in ’52, Ken Colyer joined the navy and went AWOL in New Orleans.3 On his return to England, after a stint in a Louisiana jail, the rebel Colyer was met at Waterloo station as a conquering hero by the fast-rising Chris Barber Band, who now included the pilfering Lonnie Donegan on banjo; Colyer joined them immediately. Their skiffle interludes got the crowds more excited than anything in Barber’s main set, but pretty soon sparks flew between uptight Ken and wily Lonnie. Colyer was the enthusiast, the idealist and natural leader, but Donegan had the hunger for fame and fortune. Colyer issued an ultimatum, lost it and quit the band.
The Chris Barber Band had already cut ‘Rock Island Line’ as an album track with Donegan in 1954. It started as a spoken-word thing, a folk story about getting one up on the customs man who thinks the narrator has livestock on his train; the premise couldn’t be less promising, but the record gets gradually faster, and ‘Rock Island Line’ ends up mildly demented. Unexpectedly, it picked up one BBC radio play, which led to a torrent of requests, repeat plays and a single release on Decca in late ’55, when it reached number eight; for teenage Britain, it was the most influential British record of the decade. Photos of Liverpool skiffle band the Quarrymen at the Woolton church fete are testament (Donegan’s ‘Gamblin’ Man’ was number one on the day Lennon and McCartney met in 1957). ‘Rock Island Line’ was the point at which British pop – ‘I fooled you! I fooled you! I got pig iron! I got pig iron!’ – audibly gained momentum.
When British teens realised that they could make it onto the radio by mastering a broomstick and a kazoo, the revolution commenced. Every town suddenly had a skiffle band – the Vikings from Birmingham, the Dominoes in Leigh, Lancashire, and the Lea Valley Skiffle Group from Hackney Wick, an area which probably dealt with industrial by-products far more gruesome than pig iron. Grandchildren of the Industrial Revolution, th
ey all had the right to sing through their noses.
For a good twelve months skiffle ruled, with ‘Rock Island Line’ (US no. 8 ’56) and Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey’s ‘Freight Train’ (UK no. 5, US no. 40 ’57) even hitting the American charts. Generally, the rougher and louder it was, the better. Johnny Duncan’s brace of 1957 hits ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ (UK no. 2) and ‘Footprints in the Snow’ (UK no. 27) stand out, and Jimmy Miller and the Barbecues’ rabid ‘Sizzling Hot’ is a raucous match for any lost rockabilly classic. Lonnie Donegan, his dander up, produced a pair of the most primitive British number ones ever in ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Gamblin’ Man’ (both 1957). The latter is a two-chord thrash, entirely unmoored from melody, with a one-note guitar solo, that works its way to self-obliteration, coming close to white noise by the three-minute mark. Here are other pointers to British pop’s future: you can hear the drone and repetition of Status Quo and, with a markedly similar DIY drive, the Fall.
Why was skiffle’s sudden decline in 1958 as rapid as its rise three years earlier? Largely it was down to the limited number of songs that punters demanded to hear – there were no British skiffle compositions, there was no way forward. Almost no British teenagers would have thought to write their own songs as – aside from Tommy Steele, who operated in a quite different area – there were no role models. Harder to understand, in retrospect, is why no one dared to cover contemporaneous rock ’n’ roll songs. So everybody’s skiffle set included the same Leadbelly tunes and a breakneck ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O’; skiffle’s lack of ambition and fear of tampering with its folk tradition gave it a built-in sell-by date. Copies of the Reverend Brian Bird’s Skiffle: The Story of Folk-song with a Jazz Beat gathered dust. The music was swept away like outdoor toilets and back-to-back houses.
As it turned out, Lonnie Donegan had real staying power, and racked up twenty-nine Top 40 hits, only fading from the view with the advent of Beatlemania in late ’62; he worked hard, but he was always a man with a hand on his wallet, and while Chris Barber dug deeper, bringing blues and jazz musicians over to Britain for the first time and helping to birth the first truly international movement in British pop, Donegan abandoned skiffle in 1958 for music hall (‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour’, UK no. 3, US no. 5 ’61), folk (‘Tom Dooley’, UK no. 3 ’58; ‘Battle of New Orleans’, UK no. 2 ’59) and comedy. He scored his biggest-ever hit, ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, in 1960, a year of bloody awful records, of which shameless Lonnie’s number one was possibly the worst.
1 Lyttelton deserves at least a footnote in this book for his constant gentle presence, even though he was a jazzer through and through. On VE Day 1945 he was inadvertently recorded by the BBC playing his trumpet while sitting in a wheelbarrow – the recording is still in their archive. His ‘Out of the Galleon’ was one of the first four seven-inch singles released in Britain; his ‘Bad Penny Blues’ was Joe Meek’s first hit single in 1956; he part-owned the 100 Club on Oxford Street, home to the firestarting Punk Rock Festival in September ’76; and he played on and arranged ‘Life in a Glasshouse’ for Radiohead’s Amnesiac album in 2001
2 The original New Orleans term for skiffle bands was ‘spasm bands’, who – unable to afford brass instruments or banjos – played whatever instruments came to hand. One of the earliest documented spasm bands played in Doc Malney’s Minstrel Show, and its members’ bizarre names anticipate the DIY punk acts of the late seventies: Stale Bread (zither), Cajun (harmonica), Slew-Foot Pete (guitar, made from a cigar box), Whisky (string bass, made from a half-barrel) and Warm Gravy (banjo, constructed from a cheese box).
3 He spent his time mixing with his heroes, such as Lawrence Marrero, Joe Watkins and Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau. Letters home were written up in the newly respectful Melody Maker. The local police were less impressed and advised him to play with white musicians. Colyer did no such thing. This was enough to get his visa rescinded and have him thrown in jail.
7
ROCK WITH THE CAVEMEN: BRITISH ROCK ’N’ ROLL
If skiffle was shed-grown and organic, British rock ’n’ roll started off as the most genetically modified music of the fifties. When ‘Rock around the Clock’ reached number one, the publishing companies on Denmark Street and pro musicians, mainly jazzers, tripped over themselves to get some shillings from the new fad. In America, new independent record labels took chances and hoovered up untrained, unsigned acts from street corners; in Britain, the Victor Silvester band bought three dozen pairs of blue suede shoes from Freeman Hardy Willis and tried vainly to adapt Bill Haley for the ballrooms of Bognor and Barnstaple.1 Commitment was non-existent. Don Lusher’s ‘Rock and Roll’, released on Decca in 1955, was theoretically the first UK rock single, but when you took it home and stuck it on the Dansette you only heard big-band swing with a lightly oiled drum track; it had nothing at all to do with Chuck Berry. The big Tin Pan Alley story of ’55 wasn’t Bill Haley, it was Ruby Murray.
The old guard cut covers of American songs as they always had, thus nipped-and-tucked Denmark Street versions of Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’ (the Southlanders), the Drifters’ ‘Honey Love’ (Dennis Lotis) and Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ (the Four Jones Boys, who thoughtfully added an extra verse about ice cream) came and went while Britain was largely oblivious to the originals. Almost all were dire. Exceptions came from the reliable Alma Cogan (‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’ and Fats Domino’s ‘I’m in Love Again’) and Frankie Vaughan (Boyd Bennett’s ‘My Boy Flat Top’).2 And then there was Jimmy Young.
An odd reversal of the Pat Boone phenomenon, Young sounded godawful on ballads (‘Unchained Melody’, UK no. 1 ’55) and starchy on country and western (‘The Man from Laramie’, ‘Wayward Wind’). ‘Chain Gang’, though, a number-nine hit from early 1956, was just plain weird. The backing – caterwauling brass, whipcrack snare, moaning convicts – sounds like it was recorded in a quarry, and Young’s vocal is drenched in reverb. On first listen I assumed it was an Anglo take on the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ vocal production. Then I realised, with a jolt, that ‘Chain Gang’ predates Elvis’s British debut by months. If this wasn’t odd enough, at the song’s climax it trips out into proto-dub, Young’s voice echoing in a void of tape delay and lonesome stand-up bass, oblique, dissolving.
Still, one great, largely forgotten single didn’t make a scene. Anthony Newley summed up the strangeness of the early British rock ’n’ roll performers. He had played the Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist in 1948, then appeared in the mid-fifties radio comedy series Floggit’s before doing his national service. Drawing on this experience, Newley was chosen to star in 1959’s Idle on Parade, in which he played a rocker in the army; it was slightly snarky, a kind of Carry On Elvis, but two songs in the film became hits – the title track (number thirteen) and the ballad ‘I’ve Waited So Long’ (number three) – and so Newley became a bona fide pop star. That the songs were parodies didn’t seem to bother anyone.3
While London’s music-publishing world couldn’t see rock ’n’ roll as a genuine breakthrough, there was a clutch of younger hucksters who certainly could. The whole rock scene was condensed into a few coffee bars in Soho, notably the 2i’s on Old Compton Street, yards away from the hive of musical-instrument shops on Charing Cross Road and publishers on Denmark Street. Larry Parnes was the most significant new face in town, a shrewd manager in his late twenties who collected autographs at the London Palladium. His first charge was Tommy Steele, né Hicks, a blond moptop with an endless grin who came from the docks of Bermondsey. Steele had been a merchant seaman, travelling the world with his acoustic guitar and picking up a bunch of rock ’n’ roll numbers en route which virtually no one in Britain knew – and certainly nobody else was playing live. On his return he found himself a gig at the 2i’s, where he pricked up the ears of publicity man John Kennedy and the excitable Parnes: ‘The first time I saw Tommy, the moment he hit the stage in his jeans, it was electrifying, the same as with Johnnie Ray.’<
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Steele’s first single, the frantic frolic ‘Rock with the Caveman’ (UK no. 13 ’56), was written by musical writer Lionel Bart and hard-living actor Mike Pratt, who would provide him with a string of hits plus the material for a brace of film soundtracks, The Tommy Steele Story and The Duke Wore Jeans. This was an impressively fast rise to the top, but with only Jimmy Young and the skifflers to contend with, and no American rockers playing in Britain until 1957, it had been a pretty simple move from playing to fifty people at the 2i’s to main attraction at the Roxy. Most of Steele’s ensuing singles – ‘Elevator Rock’, ‘Shiralee’, ‘Butterfingers’ – were charming and naive, endearingly amateurish, with odd smudges of echo and strangely slurred vocals, as if the new American sound had been passed to Bermondsey by Chinese whispers. He was groundbreaking, Britain’s first rocker, but Tommy Steele is still better remembered for the dozens of pantos and musicals he starred in after renouncing rock ’n’ roll in 1959. ‘When Tommy Steele steps on to a theatre stage,’ said Picture Post in 1957, ‘it is like killing day at some fantastic piggery. The act itself is simple enough. It’s ninety per cent youthful exuberance. There is not a trace of sex, real or implied.’
More significant in the long term than Denmark Street’s attempts to cash in on a passing trend, or Tommy Steele’s cute movies, was the London label. This was an offshoot of Decca which licensed American recordings from independent American labels for UK release, and was the closest British fans could get to the American rock ’n’ roll experience. In 1956 London issued the first British singles by Fats Domino, Little Richard and Carl Perkins; a year later Ricky Nelson and Jerry Lee Lewis joined the roster, and in 1958 they released a staggering 242 singles, from the ubiquitous (Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’) to the more esoteric (‘Daddy Lolo’ by Ganim’s Asia Minors). The silver-on-black label was a reliable source, a trusted friend when there was precious little information in the press or on the radio about the new sound, and it was quickly fetishised by British rock ’n’ roll fans.