by Bob Stanley
Singles on London served to emphasise the clear distinction between the sound of Britain’s homegrown rock ’n’ roll and its US counterpart. Raw sexuality was largely replaced by the embarrassment of hard-up jazzers and red-faced politeness. The major exception to the rule was Billy Fury; if Elvis was all about sex and immortality, then Billy Fury’s appeal was sex and death. As a child he’d contracted rheumatic fever – he wasn’t expected to live past sixteen. His fans knew this, and Fury played on it; his greatest songs were huge and tragic, orchestrated burlesques of kitchen-sink, monochrome Britain. Halfway to Paradise, nothing ever quite fulfilled.
Having scored with Tommy Steele, Larry Parnes had begun to build a management stable of artists with widescreen names: Marty Wilde, Duffy Power, Vince Eager, Dickie Pride and Billy Fury. Most were from London and hung out at the 2i’s, but Fury – once Ron Wycherley – was a teenage tugboat worker from the Dingle in Liverpool. This hillside area, thick with terraced slums, had already been singled out as gang central in the 1958 Frankie Vaughan vehicle Dangerous Youth. A year later Wycherley, with cheeks freshly scarred by cigarettes in a gang fight, auditioned for Parnes backstage at a Marty Wilde show in Birkenhead; as if it were a scene from a Judy Garland film, he was instantly given support billing on the rest of the tour.
From 1959 until the rise of the Beatles in 1963, Fury would be one of a triumvirate of British boys who were permanent fixtures in the Top 10. Adam Faith (né Terry Nelhams) certainly looked the part when he first appeared with a blond fringe and a beatnik jumper. He resembled a moody French student, though his gargled and spluttered delivery on breakthrough hit ‘What Do You Want’ (UK no. 1 ’59) was less Acton’s Antoine Doinel than an over-caffeinated Buddy Holly. His singles were usually very short, well under two minutes long, and stuck closely to the blueprint of ‘What Do You Want’, which in turn had leant heavily on Holly’s swansong ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’. They were all froth and bubbles, guitar and drums pushed aside in favour of John Barry’s playful pizzicato arrangements, and they were hard to dislike. Alone of the original British rockers, he later took Merseybeat head-on when his career started to flag, hiring the Roulettes as a backing group and coming up with a tremendous second run of hits in ’63 and ’64 (‘The First Time’, no. 5 ’63; ‘We Are in Love’, no. 11 ’64) that included his only American Top 40 entry, a raucous screamer called ‘It’s Alright’.
Cheshunt’s Cliff Richard was the biggest star at the 2i’s after Tommy Steele. His Anglo-Indian complexion and pink jacket gave him an exotic air, and he practised his moody look well. Cliff’s first few singles were written by his guitarist Ian Samwell and they were all impressive, low-slung rockers, especially ‘Move It’ (no. 2 ’58) and ‘Dynamite’ (no. 16 ’59). ‘Latin and calypso got nothin’ on real country music that just drives along,’ he sang, giving the impression that he not only had an ethnographic grasp on where it came from but also knew rock ’n’ roll was here to stay. In spite of this, he soon settled down into a harmless easy-rock sound typified by Lionel Bart’s decidedly non-driving country song ‘Living Doll’, his first number one in 1959. Cliff quickly stopped sneering, ditched the pink jacket, and four decades of hits gently followed.
Billy Fury, however, looked and sounded exactly as a pop star should: he had fine bone structure, a tremulous voice and a real sense of mystery. On stage he wore gold lamé suits, like Merseyside’s very own Elvis – he could have passed for an American. Unusually, he also wrote his own songs, slowies about how much he missed his numerous exes (‘Margo’, ‘Colette’) and rockers about how much he’d love to see them suffer (‘Gonna Type a Letter’, ‘Don’t Knock upon My Door’); this way he had as many male fans as female, something neither Adam nor Cliff could manage. He also wrote every song on his Anglo-rockabilly album The Sound of Fury (1960) – no other UK debut would be entirely self-written until Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn seven years later – which earned him plenty of respect among fellow musicians. John Lennon was once caught asking for his autograph.
Fury’s first few singles sold well enough, hovering just inside the Top 20, but when he devoted more time to ballads everything clicked: his seventh hit, ‘Wond’rous Place’ (no. 25 ’60), was sparse and thick with atmosphere, the vocal all echoed sighs and whispers. It was the most sensual record yet in British pop: ‘I found a place full of charms, a magic world in my baby’s arms, a soft embrace like satin and lace.’ He rarely cut rockers after this waymark.
‘Halfway to Paradise’, his biggest hit (UK no. 4 ’61), was opulently arranged by Ivor Raymonde, with an intro like a triple-speed Beethoven’s Fifth cushioned by booming tympani. It could have been about an ex or, possibly, the heartbreaking barrier between star and fan. The biggest-sounding Fury single of all was ‘I’m Lost Without You’ (no. 14 ’65), which had wailing choirs and a vortex of strings that sounded like World War Three in a minor key – and still it had room for moments of awful fragility. It was Fury’s best record, but by then time and fashion were shoving him aside. Never one for the spotlight – a foible which made him even more alluring to his loyal fanbase – he went into semi-retirement in 1967, living on a farm, tending injured animals. Occasionally he’d sneak out, and he had a fine cameo as Stormy Tempest in David Puttnam’s 1973 take on fifties Britain That’ll Be the Day. Beyond that lay the twilight of cabaret and an early death, aged forty-one, in 1983.
A highlight of his live set in the sixties had been a mawkish thing called ‘Nobody’s Child’: Billy sang, ‘Sometimes I get so lonesome I wish that I could die,’ and three thousand girls screamed back, ‘DON’T DIE BILLY!’ An exhibitionist on stage, Billy Fury was fidgety and nervous off it: ‘People thought I was a real moody sod. This has all got to do with shyness and paranoia. I had a thick Liverpool accent and I was really shy about opening my mouth. I didn’t think I’d be understood and I thought it’d be easier if I didn’t say anything.’ The shy extrovert with the perfect quiff, Billy Fury was the blueprint for the British pop star.
Though he only had one minor hit (‘Jet Black Machine’, UK no. 15 ’60), Vince Taylor should not go unrecognised. For pure image, he blew even Billy Fury off stage. If much of British rock ’n’ roll was close to theatre, it made sense that a bloke from Hounslow who pretended to be from Hollywood, and was managed by Joe Barbera of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon empire, could become one of its minor legends.
Taylor was a proper showman, and far too wild to succeed in fifties Britain. On stage he would stand in darkness, and all you could see was the glint of his swinging bike chain. Then the lights would go up and he was covered head to toe in black leather. His best remembered song is ‘Brand New Cadillac’, later covered by the Clash, but his image and myth count for plenty more. He found fame in France in 1961, stayed there, took too much LSD, and by 1965 had rechristened himself Mateus – white-robed, he walked along the banks of the Seine proclaiming to his few remaining followers that he was the son of God.
Like Billy Fury, he endlessly intrigued the young David Bowie. The legend of long-lost Vince, a forgotten link in the chain, would resurface a little while later in the guise of Ziggy Stardust.
The best record of the entire scene was no obscurity, though. Johnny Kidd and the Pirates are remembered for little else, and they never scored another Top 20 hit, but ‘Shakin’ All Over’ was a masterpiece. It had a teasing guitar line,4 a menacing panther of a bassline, and Johnny with his eye patch and nervous vocal defined the British sexual experience – total fear: ‘When you move in right up close to me, that’s when I get the shakes all over me.’ Deservedly it was a number one in 1960, the highlight of a tainted pop year.
Vince and Billy and Johnny had the looks, the moves and the sounds, but still they looked to America to shape them. Arguably the most significant character in this chapter, largely written out of history, is the avuncular Bert Weedon. In the forties he had been a guitarist for Ted Heath, much in demand as a session man in the fifties, and was playing in Cyril Stapleton’s b
ig band when he first heard ‘Rock around the Clock’. Unlike any of his contemporaries, Weedon was thrilled by the guitar-playing. While he carried on as Britain’s premier session guitarist – backing Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Tony Bennett when they came to town – he was evangelical about guitar-playing and wanted others to join in the fun. He wrote a book called Play in a Day in 1957: it was the acknowledged starting point for Joe Brown – who played guitar on The Sound of Fury in 1960 – as well as an acknowledged primer for Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Peter Green, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Tony Iommi and Brian May, the full flower of British rock to come. Without Weedon’s generous guidance, Britain might have remained a pop backwater. He was the key enabler.
In the north-east, bespectacled Brian Rankin and his best friend Bruce Welch practised every day, as per Bert’s instructions. They came down to London for a talent contest in 1958, stayed overnight at King’s Cross station, and the following day made their way to the 2i’s. They never went home. Brian changed his name to Hank Marvin, and promptly became the teenage guitar hero Bert Weedon – already approaching forty – could never be.
Writer Paul Morley has said that the Shadows have always been a disappointment to him as their name implies a darkness which doesn’t really tally with Hank Marvin’s grin. I think the name is perfect; they have remained in the background, a rarely mentioned influence on British pop that is nevertheless always there, just out of sight. The Shadows were not only the most successful group of the era, they were also the very first to have a distinctly Anglo sound. Initially they were made up of the star players at the 2i’s, and were corralled to back Cliff Richard on his first British tour. Then, after a couple of flop vocal singles, they stepped out with the moody instrumental ‘Apache’,5 a number one in 1960. Cliff played an alluring hand drum on the intro, Tony Meehan alternated a steady rock beat with a catlike grace on the cymbals, while Hank Marvin played the melody slow and low. It was deeply atmospheric. Crucially, this was no copy but the sound of an imagined America, refracted through British eyes – the impact of Westerns and crime movies on underfed post-war kids mixing with the exoticism of rock ’n’ roll’s armoury; Hank played a Fender Stratocaster,6 Jet Harris had the first electric bass guitar in Britain. Jet was bottle-blond, heavy-lidded and intense, and drummer Tony Meehan was a schoolkid, but it was Hank who schoolboys wanted to copy, miming to a string of perfectly titled Top 5 singles (‘Apache’, ‘FBI’, ‘Man of Mystery’, ‘The Frightened City’, ‘Kon-Tiki’) with a tennis racket in front of the bedroom mirror.
It’s impossible to overstate the Shadows’ importance. Each new single was an event, and they scored five further number ones in the wake of ‘Apache’. Brian May taped ‘Foot Tapper’ (their last number one, in March ’63) off the radio and learnt to play it before the record was in the shops. Pete Townshend later called them ‘a living myth … frozen in my mind as one of the greatest passions of my life’. The Beatles’ first composition, recorded in Hamburg, was an instrumental called ‘Cry for a Shadow’. Every kid in Britain wanted to be in the Shadows.
Their best single was ‘Wonderful Land’, which spent eight weeks at number one in early ’62. It was probably written as a hymn to America, its glamour, its colour and its endless skies.7 But what I hear in ‘Wonderful Land’ is a British dream of the future, the primary-coloured optimism of post-war Britain, people moving to the new towns ringing London, the space and light in the bright open spaces of Crawley and Stevenage (or the modernist sweep down to the water in reconstructed Plymouth, the Gerry Anderson-like underpass and flyover in Croydon). There is also a definite melancholy to the song, in the melody and the string arrangement’s huge sense of promise, and its awareness that the promise is too huge to ever be truly fulfilled. Just months ahead of the Beatles’ annexation of British pop, condemning everyone in this chapter to instant museum status,8 ‘Wonderful Land’ sounds vast, blue-skied, and still so sad.
1 Silvester’s contribution was ‘Society Rock’, a doomed attempt to blend blue rinse and Brylcreem. Other band leaders did show some understanding of the music, notably Ted Heath, who recorded Ella Mae Morse songs with Lita Roza.
2 Vaughan is an intriguing character, hard to pin down as anything more specific than pure showbiz – his nickname, after all, was Mr Versatility. He may have been built for the Palladium but he always gave a hysterical edge to his covers of American hits – notably Jim Lowe’s ‘Green Door’ (UK no. 2 ’56) and Gene McDaniels’s ‘Tower of Strength’ (UK no. 1 ’61) – that made him hard to ignore. Later in the sixties he covered Jimmy Radcliffe’s big-city soul ballad ‘There Goes the Forgotten Man’ and the Beatles’ ‘Wait’, and didn’t disgrace himself on either.
3 Newley’s hit run included covers of American rock ’n’ roll (Lloyd Price’s ‘Personality’, no. 6 ’59), Italian ballads (‘If She Should Come to You’, no. 4 ’60), jazzy wise-ass versions of folk songs (‘Strawberry Fair’, no. 3 ’60; ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, no. 12 ’61), and the gloopiest teen pop (Frankie Avalon’s ‘Why’, no. 1 ’60). He tried his hand at pretty much everything, married Joan Collins, moved to Hollywood and eventually became a respected writer, responsible for Nina Simone’s ‘Feelin’ Good’, the lyrics to the Goldfinger theme and the soundtrack to Willie Wonka. And Newley owed it all to a couple of clunky rock parodies.
4 The guitarist was Joe Moretti, a session man who deserves a mention here – he also played on Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’ and contributed the high hook line on Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’. Mick Ronson would later pay homage to Moretti by mimicking his guitar lines on David Bowie’s 1973 tribute to his sixties youth, ‘Pin Ups’.
5 ‘Apache’ was first recorded by Bert Weedon. Its composer, Jerry Lordan – who went on to provide the Shadows with ‘Wonderful Land’ and ‘Atlantis’ – was unimpressed by Weedon’s slow, slightly jazzy arrangement, and passed it on to Hank Marvin during a tour, suggesting that if the Shadows recorded it quickly they could beat Weedon’s version into the shops. Though chart positions don’t do his legacy justice – he only scored one Top 10 hit with ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle’ in 1959 – Bert would belatedly have his day in the sun when 22 Golden Guitar Greats gave him a surprise number-one album in 1976.
6 Hank Marvin: ‘Cliff bought me a red Stratocaster in 1959, and it played such a huge part in the development of my style. We loved James Burton’s sound on the Ricky Nelson records, and we knew he played a Fender. Also, Buddy Holly had this outrageous-looking guitar on the cover of The Chirping Crickets. There was an import ban on American guitars then, so we got the brochure and found out Buddy Holly’s guitar was a Stratocaster. And because it was the most expensive one, we assumed that’s what James Burton played. It was just stunning, even to look at.’
7 The reality of America in 1962 was certainly glamorous, but possibly not in the way the wide-eyed Shads would have imagined: during its stay at number one, the American president, John F. Kennedy, spent the night with the closest thing to American royalty, Marilyn Monroe.
8 Cliff Richard was the sole survivor of the Beatles revolution. After aping the Mersey beat with a brace of ace singles – ‘Don’t Talk to Him’ (no. 2 late ’63) and ‘I’m the Lonely One’ (no. 8 early ’64 – note the precipitous drop in chart position) – Cliff dug deep into ballad territory, where the Beatles couldn’t touch him. It wasn’t until 1972 that he finally released a flop, ‘A Brand New Song’ failing to reach the Top 50. But he’d be back.
8
WHISPERING BELLS: DOO WOP
While Britain struggled to find its own rock ’n’ roll voice in the fifties, America already had several, and they all called out from different cities: in Memphis and Nashville there was rockabilly; New Orleans had its own swampy, lolloping R&B; and New York had the street-corner symphonies that would wind up being tagged, onomatopoeically, as doo wop.
Doo wop lived within and outside of rock ’n’ roll. Singing on street corners wasn’t new to pop; it was part o
f an urban folk tradition. Even Perry Como had learnt how to sing harmony in a barber shop. But the style that became known as doo wop1 was the first to incorporate singers as musicians – if you loved rock ’n’ roll but couldn’t afford a stand-up bass, you found yourself a baritone to do the trick; chances are you couldn’t afford a saxophone either, so you would pick out a resonant tenor. Decades later, the human beatbox would continue the tradition for kids without the wherewithal to buy a Roland TR-909.
In some ways doo wop is the purest pop form: reliant on the flexibility of the human voice, it is infinitely adaptable. Its essence is simplicity. Doo wop is passionate and joyous, naive too, and has a sensuality missing from other rock ’n’ roll subgenres (almost all aggressively sexual) which would have a lasting influence on pop.
Doo wop can veer from the ethereal, like Nolan Strong and the Diablos’ ‘The Wind’ with its endless melancholy and deathless romance, a blissed-out purgatory, to the barely human sound of the Chips’ ‘Rubber Biscuit’ (or ‘r-r-r-r-rubber biscuit’ as the chief Chip would have it), something like an aural Harpo Marx skit. At its best you can hear automobiles, subway trains and church bells in the harmonies. The voices reverberated around alleys and subways, hallways and staircases, even school gyms, anywhere its perpetrators could find an echo to lift the sound from the ground, closer to the stars. The acme of doo wop, the Five Satins’ ‘In the Still of the Nite’, was recorded in a church basement. It contains the beautiful noise, the essence of a city, that Neil Diamond later referenced; to my ears it condenses the entire fabric of New York inside three minutes, and has a saturated saxophone break that sounds like it echoes from one end of the Holland tunnel to the other.