by Bob Stanley
The last people to be enlisted for national service in the UK were signed up in November 1960 and discharged in May 1963; the Beatles began their residency in Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller on October 4th 1960 and scored their first number-one single, ‘From Me to You’, in May 1963. Their national service was played out in Litherland, Bootle, the Cavern and the whorehouses of Hamburg. It certainly beat boot camp in Catterick or Deepcut, and it signalled a final liberation for Britain’s teenagers. The boys could make as much noise as possible, the girls had something with dirt under its fingernails that they could scream at. The Beatles effectively signalled the end of World War Two in Britain.
Without the army to keep boys in line and batter dreams of Fender Stratocasters out of their heads, sales of guitars shot up in 1961. Initially, the Shadows were the role models, and instrumental groups playing clean, streamlined beat proliferated. They had landscaped names, informed by the Shadows’ widescreen hits: Dakotas, Fentones, Eagles, Planets.
In Liverpool things were different, largely because of the Cunard Yanks, the men working on the transatlantic liners in the fifties who had brought unimaginable treasures back to austerity Britain – cameras, jukeboxes, sharp clothes and exotic records – from their trips to New York. They had the money and the hardware and, once back in their home town, set up their own bars and clubs with the spoils.
This is how the kids with guitars in Liverpool were introduced to early soul, R&B and manic rockers that their contemporaries in Lincoln, Luton or Leeds would have struggled to hear – modern pop was still strictly rationed on BBC radio. And, as with the birth of skiffle, everything seemed to emanate from one tiny room, this time a dank cellar on Mathew Street called the Cavern. Originally the Cavern was a jazz club but moved into rock ’n’ roll at the start of 1960 with a landmark set by Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The Beatles first played there in February ’61 and, toughened up by Hamburg, they tore the place apart. Kids would sag off school in their lunch hours to get to the Cavern – their eardrums took such a battering they could barely hear the teacher as they sat through double geography in the afternoon. Girls would slip out of their school uniforms and put on sweaters embroidered with the Beatles’ names. Frieda Kelly, secretary of the Beatles fan club, was a regular: ‘You could never deny you’d been at the Cavern because of the smell on your clothes’ – a mixture of wet ferry ropes, rotten fruit from the neighbouring warehouses and sweat that streamed down the walls. ‘Some people say it was offensive, but it wasn’t. I know it was a mixture of different, horrible things, but it was unique. No other club had that.’
By the summer of 1961 there were over four hundred groups on Merseyside playing sets that featured the same two dozen songs, including Richie Barrett’s ‘Some Other Guy’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, Don and Dewey’s ‘Farmer John’ and half a dozen Chuck Berry covers. There was even a weekly paper, Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat, to keep the teens informed on who was playing at the Cavern, the Blue Angel or the Iron Door that week. Harry was a literate man, and likened the scene to turn-of-the-century New Orleans, the melting pot that had created jazz. Once the Beatles broke through at the start of ’63, London’s talent scouts were thrilled to find a raw, ready-made local scene that had been operating for years, while the rest of the UK was still hooked on the Shads. Everyone on the scene had a Beatle haircut; everyone got a deal. The Beatles’ impact was so strong, the demand for Merseybeat so extremely high, that eight out of twelve number ones from May to December ’63 were by Liverpool groups.1
The beat boom didn’t just provide a spike in record sales – consumers wanted more, to feel closer to their idols, to understand what Boyfriend magazine called the new music’s ‘strange compelling something’. Boyfriend had originally been launched in 1959 and tended to stick to safe, sexless pop – Russ Conway, Johnny Mathis – but found new desires stirring in 1963. It launched a separate monthly paper called Big New Beat, ‘the first authentic photo book about the northern raves’, which was Beatle-heavy and explained how they ate egg and chips and relaxed in ‘a night spot called the Blue Angel, meeting their friends. There they spin the night away with talk of pop and old times … “bored” is a dirty word to them.’ By 1964 the chart-focused Record Mirror was selling seventy thousand copies a week, while the newly launched Fabulous – with colour pin-up posters – and the New Musical Express were on two hundred thousand each. The glossy, slightly more upmarket Rave began publication in late ’63. By then, total sales of music magazines were close to a million a week.
ITV’s London broadcaster Rediffusion started a show to reflect the beat boom’s popularity. Ready Steady Go! went out early on Friday evenings with the memorable tagline ‘The weekend starts here!’ The Surfaris’ ‘Wipe Out’ was its theme tune, and the presenters were the ruggedly square Keith Fordyce and the gawky, befringed Cathy McGowan, who had answered an ad for ‘a typical teenager’. It was live, slightly ramshackle, hugely popular, and led the BBC to launch a rival show called Top of the Pops on New Year’s Day 1964. The first number one on the first Top of the Pops was the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. They were dictating national television.
Brian Epstein once explained to Gerry Marsden that the Beatles were like the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus, while Gerry’s own Pacemakers were more like a lightbulb – and Epstein managed both acts. If the Beatles’ variety, modernity and songwriting put them in a different league from the rest of the Merseybeat scene, there was still a lot of quality action once the main event split for London in late ’63.
Resident beat group at the Iron Door were the Searchers, fronted by an ex-boxer with a squashed nose called Tony Jackson. In the beginning they played incredibly fast, and – Beatles aside – their first two albums were the best evocations of the Liverpool beat cellars. For their third single, ‘Needles and Pins’ (UK no. 1, US no. 13 ’64), guitarist Mike Pender took over the vocals and played the song’s chiming hook in octaves, mimicking the sound of a twelve-string guitar; later in theyear he even managed to buy an actual Rickenbacker for their best single, ‘When You Walk in the Room’ (UK no. 3, US no. 35 ’64). Pender singing lead caused friction, and Tony Jackson, feeling unwanted, quit the group – the first-ever instance of a modern pop group splitting over musical differences at their peak. Fidgety drummer Chris Curtis took the reins, and the Searchers turned out more beautiful, ringing, harmonic singles: ‘Goodbye My Love’ (UK no. 4 ’65), ‘He’s Got No Love’ (UK no. 12 ’65). Their lyrics involved blushing, stammering, a general lack of masculinity, and their sound became progressively softer, folkier, more feminine. By the time they covered the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ on their Take Me for What I’m Worth album in ’65, wispily, delicately, they were in danger of evaporating completely. They had no confidence in their own songwriting – group compositions were almost always B-sides or album tracks2 – which scuppered their career when pop turned to self-authored rock. Their jangle clearly inspired the Byrds, and in turn Big Star and Tom Petty, but by the end of the sixties Chris Curtis was working in an office.
Looking more Scouse than any of their contemporaries, and so justifying their ultra-generic name, the Merseybeats’ sound was as bruised as the Searchers’, but they made the reverse trip. Initially they were Latin-tinged, and aped the softer end of the Brill Building sound on their second single ‘I Think of You’ (no. 5 ’64). When the Who’s manager Kit Lambert took control a year later, they cranked up the sound and got tougher than just about anyone. ‘I Love You, Yes I Do’ (no. 22 ’65) was second-generation Merseybeat, brutal, soulful and melancholy, and – after abbreviating their name to the Merseys – they peaked with the brassy sadomasochistic swing of ‘Sorrow’, a UK no. 4 in 1966.3 Another name change, to the similarly blunt Liverpool Express, saw them score a number-eleven hit in 1976 with ‘You Are My Love’, a luminous, McCartneyesque song with an analgesic production – it sounds like the singer is drifting in and out of consciousness.
The biggest sellers, though, were Brian Epstein�
��s second-stringers Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer. Both knocked out several number ones in ’63 and early ’64, smiled constantly and were very famous for eighteen months. Neither was equipped to survive a fad perversely determined by geography; both sounded mildewed by the end of ’64. The Swinging Blue Jeans (‘Hippy Hippy Shake’, UK no. 2 ’64, ‘You’re No Good’, UK no. 3 ’64) were superb but had no personality at all, and never made the Top 30 again; the Cryin’ Shames cut Joe Meek’s last masterpiece, ‘Please Stay’, but its sales were so locally concentrated that while it was a Liverpool number one, it only made twenty-six nationally. Groups that got away included the Big Three, who were notorious ruffians but did leave the world the fierce ‘Cavern Stomp’, and the Escorts, who were more subtle and soul-flecked, and were Beatle George’s personal favourites. Maybe the archetypal Merseybeat hit was the Mojos’ ‘Everything’s Alright’ (no. 9 ’64), two minutes of screaming and wig-shaking that barely extended beyond a juddering riff and raucous repetition of the title.
What Merseybeat groups did was to get kids into dancehalls, get them raving, and encourage more teenagers to pick up guitars both in Britain and America. Most significantly, they helped make it acceptable for previously purist art students to stray away from jazz and blues, to form guitar, bass and drums combos. And, in doing so, they made themselves instantly redundant.
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Now, what does the pop scene look like this month? Hair is a little longer. And everything becomes a little more rhythmic and a little more bluesy.
Big Beat: The Mod Paper for Pop Fans, January 1964
The British R&B boom seemed to follow Merseybeat into the British charts within weeks – the Rolling Stones’ first single, ‘Come On’, had debuted on the UK chart on July 25th 1963, the same week in which the Searchers’ debut ‘Sweets for My Sweet’ climbed to number three, and a full month before ‘She Loves You’ was released. By the end of 1964, when the Rolling Stones’ cover of Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ reached number one, R&B had entirely eclipsed Merseybeat. The only Liverpool act to score a number one in 1965 was the Beatles.4
The two scenes had been growing in tandem. While Liverpool had the docks, a unique source of inspiration, London had the Soho boho scene, the 100 Club, sundry jazz and blues hangouts and a significant record shop for obscure American imports called Dobell’s. The musical inspiration for both scenes came from black post-war American music; both deified Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
The crucial difference between Merseybeat and British R&B was that the latter started out as an art-school hobby – these groups weren’t setting out to become professionals.5 Brian Epstein’s stable – Gerry Marsden, Billy J. Kramer, Cilla Black – had a work ethic, just like Cliff Richard and the Shadows or Dickie Valentine. You may not have wanted to do panto in Stockton-on-Tees for a month, but it was work and you wouldn’t turn it down. Going to art school was the British way of dropping out from mainstream society, and it fed and nurtured successive waves of pop – the very first had been trad jazz, then came the short-lived skiffle boom, and from these sprang R&B.
As trad jazz went overground and into the charts at the end of the fifties,6 Chris Barber had started peppering his band’s set with rhythm and blues to keep things fresh: by 1957 they were playing Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Working’, Ma Rainey’s ‘See See Rider’, John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. Barber brought Muddy Waters over to Britain, and he shocked the beatnik purists at St Pancras Town Hall by playing electric guitar. Some booed; the rest thought about copying him. Just as had been the case with skiffle, it was a pair of former Barber sidemen – harmonica player Cyril Davis and guitarist Alexis Korner – who left their leader and stoked the fire he’d started. They formed a loose, Muddy Waters-inspired aggregation called Blues Incorporated in 1961, opened their own G Club in Ealing a year later and found a ready crowd.
Alexis Korner – like the US bluesmen he worshipped – played a cheap and cheerful Kay electric guitar.7 The affable Korner and the purist Davis were a little too old and a little too paunchy to take financial advantage of the excitable crowd on their doorstep, but they were generous souls and encouraged the audience to join in. The inspiration of this combo is incalculable: among the enthusiasts willing to get up on stage with Blues Incorporated and summon up the spirit of Mississippi from the backroom of a pub in Middlesex were Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Steve Marriott, Long John Baldry and Paul Jones; those watching but, for the time being, a little too timid to join in included future Kinks, Yardbirds and Pretty Things. All of these people would have significant careers and Top 10 hits within a couple of years. The firestarters went largely unrewarded. Heavy drinker Davis died suddenly in January 1964, aged thirty-one, while Korner had to be content with knowing that he had almost single-handedly birthed the British blues boom.8
British R&B groups picked up on an assemblage of influences – the rocking Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley sat alongside more gutbucket blues by Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf in the repertoires of Birmingham’s Moody Blues, Newcastle’s Animals, Sheffield’s Dave Berry and the Cruisers, and – fiercest of all – Belfast’s Them. Their leader was singer Van Morrison, who had a ruddy, sponge-pudding face and a mop of red hair. He set up an R&B club at the Maritime Hotel in April ’64; by early July they were in Decca’s West Hampstead studio recording ‘Gloria’. With its cat-slink organ and Morrison’s stuttering, panting expectation, he convinces you – unlikely as it may seem – that Gloria Grahame is about to walk through the door and mop his fevered brow. It’s a dirty, dirty record, and a nervous Decca relegated it to the flip side of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ (UK no. 10 ’64), which was scarcely less thrilling. Them were all about phrasing and dynamics, breakdowns and rave-ups. They took Paul Simon’s ‘Richard Cory’ and swapped his sneering tone about the poor little rich guy who blows his brains out for one of stunned, barely articulate disbelief. Given a high-quality but classically constructed song like Bert Berns’s ‘Here Comes the Night’ (UK no. 2, US no. 24 ’65) they sounded constricted, as if they were playing in suits that were a size too small. Their best single, ‘Mystic Eyes’ (US no. 33 ’65), was the polar opposite. It came in from nowhere, everything turned up, turned on, distortion everywhere – presumably it was a jam that had been edited down for radio, but straight away you were in the eye of the storm. Its hook, if that’s what you’d call it, was a two-chord breakdown on which Morrison ad-libbed about children playing among the tombstones of an ‘old graveyard’. The title was repeated like an incantation until the beat picked up once again, fiercer still, with an abrasive one-note organ line adding to the noise, before it quickly faded. All over inside two minutes forty. ‘Mystic Eyes’ remains one of the unlikeliest rackets ever to have reached the US Top 40.
It may feel like there’s a complete disconnect between the elbows-on-keyboards murderous noise of ‘Mystic Eyes’ and the Caledonian folk-soul of Morrison’s solo career, but there was a single thread joining them – it’s a late Them single called ‘Friday’s Child’, a forgotten piece of 1966 magic. As Morrison’s lyric dipped a toe into the slipstream, into what Dave Marsh has called his ‘literary air of mystery’, it was evocative of some past and future Caledonian legend: ‘From the north to the south, you walked all the way.’ Of course, it could have just been autobiographical – this was a group sure enough of their own legend to write a single called ‘The Story of Them’: ‘You built all of your castles in the sun, and I watched you knock them down, each and every one.’ The lead guitar could easily be a mandolin – the record practically invents REM. Delicate and tough in equal measure, ‘Friday’s Child’ was Morrison’s farewell to the loudest, most fractious group since Johnny Burnette’s Rock and Roll Trio.
If Them were at one extreme of the R&B spectrum, then the Zombies were at the other, five unceasingly polite Hertfordshire boys whose take on Bo Diddley’s ‘Road Runner’ is best
described as weedy. They were the least nasty, the least gritty and the least raucous R&B act in the country. If they struggled with the raw Delta materials, this soon became an irrelevance as they married Colin Blunstone’s menthol voice, and his pure St Albans Grammar enunciation, to Rod Argent’s jazzy electric piano and came up with something all of their own. The arrangement on ‘She’s Not There’ (UK no. 12, US no. 2 ’64), at a time when R&B screamers ruled, was coolly restrained; guitarist Paul Atkinson was virtually inaudible. Shortly afterwards the Zombies recorded a version of ‘Summertime’ and made it sound more like ‘Greensleeves’ than Gershwin. Clearly, Old England was in their marrow. They scored another pair of sizeable US hits (‘Tell Her No’, no. 6 ’64, ‘Time of the Season’, no. 3 ’69) but were ignored in their homeland. Their 1968 farewell album Odessey and Oracle, recorded after they’d agreed to split, was one of the floweriest, most summery and most fully realised of that or any year.
The Zombies’ love of minor chords was echoed and amplified by Glasgow’s Poets, who used passionately thrummed acoustics and ghostly high harmonies to forge their own brand of Pre-Raphaelite R&B. They released six singles and the only one that charted was 1964’s ‘Now We’re Thru’, which crossed paths with ‘She’s Not There’, climbing the Top 50 as the latter dropped down in October ’64. The floor-shaking bassline of the follow-up, ‘That’s the Way It’s Gotta Be’, was borrowed for the Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Keep On Runnin’’, a number one in early ’66. By this point the Poets had already suffered about eight line-up changes, and manager Andrew Oldham eventually lost patience with them, which was really too bad. Tight and pumping, their aptly named farewell single, ‘Wooden Spoon’, in ’67 saw them blend dive-bombing guitars and a Motown-styled backing track. They lacked the breaks and basic industry support to secure hit singles – in the mid-sixties, being from Glasgow meant they were so remote from the London-based record companies they may as well have been from Iceland.9