by Bob Stanley
The most inventive act to emerge from the R&B scene turned out to be from the isolated North London suburb of Muswell Hill. The Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies may have worn his hair like a romantic poet, but when he slashed his amp speaker with a razor blade he created the single most violent sound in modern pop to date. Received wisdom says it invented heavy metal, which is simplistic, and does ‘You Really Got Me’ a disservice. Of course, there was the riff to end all riffs, a two-note electric shock of sound, but the power of ‘You Really Got Me’ was also in Pete Quaife’s propulsive bass, the Gregorian drone of yeeeeahs and singer Ray Davies’s rising, orgasmic melody. Most importantly, it shifted key twice during each verse to maximise excitement – no song had ever been structured this way before. This was sex and violence in perfect harmony. ‘It’s just like chatting up a girl,’ explained Ray Davies. ‘It starts with an opening – da-nana-da-na! – where you make a good impression. Then when she gets bored you change the key.’ Within four weeks of release, ‘You Really Got Me’ was number one in Britain, dislodging the Honeycombs’ Joe Meek-produced ‘Have I the Right’.
Everything about the Kinks seemed anxious or aggressive. Ray Davies had met Bradford schoolgirl Rasa Didzpetris at a gig in Sheffield in May; with a little help from another Bradford native, singer Kiki Dee, they stayed in touch and Ray wrote the follow-up to ‘You Really Got Me’ about her. Described as ‘neurotic’ by Burt Bacharach on BBC TV’s Juke Box Jury, ‘All Day and All of the Night’ had a lyric that walked a line between possessive and sex-crazed. The group’s leap in confidence can be measured by comparing the coiled-up-tight intro to ‘You Really Got Me’ with the ecstatic release of the cymbal crash on the beginning of ‘All Day and All of the Night’. What’s more, amid sniggers, it sounded like Ray said ‘Whoa, get ’em off!’ just before Dave’s scything guitar break. An incredibly hard record, it reached number two in the UK chart and number seven in the States. The Kinks were the rawest, the toughest and – with their sexual confusion and readiness to self-destruct – the most distinctly English of the British R&B groups. They wore kinky boots and carried riding crops. Dave Davies would go around London restaurants with the Searchers’ Chris Curtis trying to pick up the ugliest waiters. During a show in Cardiff, drummer Mick Avory hit Dave Davies with a cymbal and nearly sliced his head off.10 There was blood everywhere. ‘The police really wanted to get Mick,’ said Ray Davies. ‘I said it was part of the stage act … I really thought it was the end.’ To cap it all, during an American tour in ’65, Ray punched a union official and they failed to play an important show in Sacramento – the promoter reported them to the American Federation of Musicians, and the Kinks were blacklisted from playing in America until the end of the sixties. They spent the rest of the decade in splendid isolation, exiled in Muswell Hill, and Ray Davies focused his songwriting on his immediate surroundings.
So big was the beat boom, and so quickly did the new sound conquer the States in ’64, that no-hit wonders like Liverpool’s Ian and the Zodiacs could have whole albums issued. This was an incredibly strange development which, to this day, no one can very convincingly explain. America was traumatised by Kennedy’s assassination at the end of ’63, lost faith in itself and latched onto something foreign, cute, exciting, different – possibly. Still, the British Invasion was unexpected and hard to process for either side. No one could have predicted it. And no one in Britain could have predicted who would end up as the UK’s best sellers stateside.
Beatles and Stones aside, the biggest acts to break America ended up being from outside Liverpool and outside R&B; they tended towards caricature, the grotesque even. Manchester’s Freddie and the Dreamers (‘I’m Telling You Now’) and Herman’s Hermits (‘Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’, ‘I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am’) had number ones between them by playing on a goofy image which palled within minutes back home, but amused the pre-teen US market enormously. This was England as an outpost of the EPCOT project. Herman, aka Peter Noone, sang music-hall songs with a flat Mancunian accent, and they scored eleven US Top 10 hits; he stopped short of wearing a beefeater’s hat and singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, but he may as well have done. Peter and Gordon (‘A World without Love’, ‘Lady Godiva’) and Chad and Jeremy (‘A Summer Song’, ‘Before and After’) were Oxbridge-type duos who were both far bigger in the US than the UK and weren’t too proud to come up with hokey titles like ‘Sunday for Tea’. Their every syllable was perfectly pronounced and quite, quite precious; both, oddly, made a lot more sense three years after Anglo Fever abated, when the world was engulfed in 1967’s wave of gentility.
Biggest of all the non-Mersey British invaders, briefly outselling even the Beatles, were the Dave Clark Five. They didn’t do any Max Miller gags. They were nothing much to look at, either. Clark was a steely-eyed North London businessman, a Spurs fan who clearly thought of music as a career. He played very basic drums and didn’t sing, but assembled a smartly dressed band around him. He also recorded the group himself, keeping ownership of everything, and this marked him out as slick and uniquely far-sighted. The Dave Clark Five’s back story might be better suited to the Financial Times than the story of modern pop.
The catch was that their records weren’t slick at all. They were blindingly primitive, powered by Clark’s anti-jazz drums, relentless two-note saxophone and Mike Smith’s raw bellowed vocals. Unlike the early-sixties Spurs team that Clark watched from the terraces, this was route-one stuff. After a few false starts, ‘Glad All Over’ took them to number one, knocking the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ off the top (‘Has the Five Jive Crushed the Beatles’ Beat?’ asked the papers) at the start of ’64. It was loud, hard, fast, and all about a relentless thump. The sequel, ‘Bits and Pieces’ (UK no. 2), was a one-chord bawler that was never going to be written up in The Times.11 Then, having inched their way onto The Ed Sullivan Show immediately after the Beatles’ three-week run ended in March ’64, they quit Britain for lucrative America and – charisma bypass notwithstanding – became even bigger. In Britain they released two albums between 1964 and 1968; in the US they released twelve.
They may have been the most calculating, unlovable beat group ever, but they were also one of the strangest. For a start, in 1965 they made a phenomenally cynical movie (director John Boorman’s first) called Catch Us If You Can in which they literally sold meat, encountered middle-aged swingers, smackheads and army brutality, and ended up in a derelict seaside hotel, their dreams all over: here was a prematurely Broken Britain in all its monochrome glory.
The DC5 never re-formed, never reissued their albums and effectively wrote themselves out of pop’s narrative.12 Clark bought up the rights to Ready Steady Go!, briefly issued a few videos in the mid-eighties, cutting unrelated DC5 clips into the footage even though they were rarely on the show, and has sat on the tapes ever since. He has been reclusive; one of his rare reported appearances was as one of half a dozen guests at Freddie Mercury’s funeral, and there are rumours of botched plastic surgery. More tragically, singer Mike Smith had a fall at his house in Spain, lay undiscovered for several days and ended up paralysed. He died in 2008. Beyond this information, there’s nothing. The squarest beat group of the lot turned out to be the era’s greatest enigma.
1 Five of the first six number ones from early ’63 had been by Cliff Richard, the Shadows or ex-Shadows Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. After ‘Summer Holiday’ topped the chart in May, for the rest of the decade they could only manage two more number ones between them.
2 Chris Curtis’s ‘If I Could Find Someone’ and the Pender/McNally-written ‘Don’t Hide It Away’ are among their best songs and deserve more exposure.
3 George Harrison ‘quoted’ ‘Sorrow’ on the tail of ‘It’s All Too Much’. The Beatles must have been nostalgic for their home town in ’67 – they also released ‘Penny Lane’ and sang the chorus of ‘She Loves You’ on the fade of ‘All You Need Is Love’. But, as the Shangri-Las could have told them, they could never go ho
me any more.
4 I almost forgot Ken Dodd, who had the year’s biggest seller with a ballad called ‘Tears’. Even now, if you go into a junk shop anywhere in Britain, you will find a copy of ‘Tears’. It sold a million copies in 1965, and it seems like every single one was given away – either that or everyone kept hold of it until their dying day.
5 It was born from an art-school sensibility but I should point out that not all participants in the R&B boom were students – the Yardbirds’ Paul Samwell-Smith was an electrical engineer by day, and Bill Wyman was a bookmaker.
6 Trad was the musical choice of British beatniks, CND members and baggy-jumpered weekend dropouts, while their American equivalents were digging the milky folk of the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Brothers Four. Dylan blew away these prim acts, and R&B’s takeover of trad-jazz followers meant Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk never troubled the chart after 1963 (OK, Acker had a fluke Top 5 hit with ‘Aria’ in ’76). Peter, Paul and Mary did manage a post-British Invasion hit with ‘I Dig Rock and Roll Music’, a US number nine in 1967; their heavy irony was so late in the day it was hard to tell if they were actually serious. Happily, the trad-jazz boom led to a transatlantic Top 5 hit – ‘Petite Fleur’ in 1959 – for R&B’s chief disseminator Chris Barber.
7 Korner was featured on the cover of the 1963 UK Kays catalogue, and inspired Eric Clapton to choose a Kay when he bought his first electric guitar.
8 Korner did manage chart success as a singer with a new brass-powered group called CCS – or Collective Consciousness Society – in the early seventies. Produced by Mickie Most and helmed by Donovan’s arranger John Cameron, they scored two Top 10 hits in ’71 (‘Walkin’’, ‘Tap Turns On the Water’) and cut the definitive Top of the Pops theme with their version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
9 There were a few Icelandic beat groups, naturally enough, and the best were called Thor’s Hammer (in the UK) or Hljómar (in Iceland), meaning ‘Chords’.
10 Interviewed in 2000, Dave Davies explained the contretemps: ‘I looked at Mick and said, “Why don’t you get your cock out and play the snare drum with it? It’ll probably sound better.”’
11 The Beatles’ ‘Not a Second Time’ had been praised by The Times’ William Mann for its use of an ‘Aeolian cadence’. In 1980 John Lennon told Playboy that he had ‘no idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds.’
12 The KLF attempted to do this, publicly announcing their strategy, three decades later, but somehow the DC5’s disappearance seems more complete.
14
WHO’S DRIVING YOUR PLANE? THE ROLLING STONES
The unprecedented amount of positive energy created by the Beatles had to be earthed if it wasn’t to burn out. In order for this to happen, it needed something to put its positivity in perspective, and that something was the Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones were seriously antisocial. They didn’t smile. They didn’t wear matching outfits. They were always rude about other groups, wore conspiratorial sarcastic grins, made snide asides at everybody else’s expense. They refused to wave from the revolving stage of the London Palladium. They refused to put their name on their debut album cover, figuring the five threatening faces would be well known enough to sell it – if you didn’t recognise them, you didn’t count. They slouched, they sneered, they mumbled; they refused to explain anything.
Essentially, they refused to play the game. Even the Beatles and Elvis had played the pre-rock showbiz game up to a point, occasionally singing to a dog or smiling at the royal box. The Rolling Stones were all about anger, dissatisfaction, frustration and power, and they were loved or hated, really hated.
All of this darkness was harnessed and orchestrated by their manager and mentor, Andrew Oldham. Oldham was a tall, thin, sandy-haired nineteen-year-old who had given up on a singing career after stumbling through a version of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ at school. He got a job helping out on publicity for a singer called Mark Wynter (‘Venus in Blue Jeans’, UK no. 4 ’62) and then, rather more interestingly, for the Beatles. He knew that the cosmic energy the Beatles had unleashed, that had been almost unanimously accepted by the Establishment, could also cause fires. He intended to find the lightning conductors and, one night in ’63, he happened across the Rolling Stones at the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey.1
What he saw was a vision of the future, a totality of noise and image. Three worker Stones2 were at the back – Wyman, Watts, Stewart – with the three star Stones – Jagger, Richards, Jones – at the front. They played amped-up Bo Diddley covers to a post-beatnik crowd, but the Stones were a cut above other Southern-based R&B acts like the Birds and the Pretty Things, due partly to Jones’s and Richards’s sharp dual guitar work but more so to their front man, the loose-lipped Mick Jagger, who had an animalistic androgyny.
Even though Oldham was younger than they were, and largely ignorant of the embryonic British R&B scene, he fell in love at first sight and seized his chance. The Stones had been on the circuit, gaining a reputation but only financial crumbs, for a year. Oldham dazzled them, and told them he could get a record deal tomorrow. He’d learnt his spiel from the back row of the cinema, from watching Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo and Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success. He was calculated and succinct. For every kid who wants to take the Beatles home, he told them, there’s another who doesn’t want to share, who wants their own private group. He told them that they were it, that they were the chosen ones, and they fell into line immediately.
Up to this point, the Rolling Stones had been blues purist Brian Jones’s group. Jones had a fine blond mop and a babyish face that looked as if it could break out in tears under the slightest strain. ‘He was very clean,’ remembered girlfriend Linda Lawrence. ‘The other boys liked to make a lot of mess.’ Maybe the Stones would have got somewhere helmed by Brian, without Andrew Oldham, but it’s more likely they’d have been playing a fiftieth-anniversary show at the 100 Club to a few dozen nostalgic pensioners.
Once Oldham appeared and sussed out the potential, singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards became the focus. On stage, Jagger was an incredible sight, wide-eyed, a human spinning top, with his un avoidably rude lips. Richards was a big-eared kid with a goofy grin, but within this underfed, gawky frame Oldham detected a sense of real menace. ‘Whatever I decided people could be,’ claimed Oldham, ‘they became.’ And he wanted the Stones to be the anti-Beatles.
He wasted little time, spoonfeeding a gullible press with headlines like ‘Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?’ Wearing their everyday clothes on stage was a showbiz no-no: Oldham took the casual nonchalance he’d seen in Richmond and multiplied it by ten, turned them into the ultimate bad boys. He also ditched the square-jawed Ian Stewart from photos; the silent sixth Stone would remain hidden from view, loyal to the band, until his death in 1985. With Oldham’s blessing the Stones courted trouble and, eventually, they got it. In 1965 they were up in court after Bill Wyman had urinated against the wall of a Forest Gate garage: the petrol-pump attendant described him as ‘a shaggy-haired monster wearing dark glasses’. Wyman’s defence was a bladder complaint, but the group were all fined fifteen guineas; considering Elvis had been conscripted to get him off TV, the Stones initially got off lightly.
In the midst of all this ballyhoo they became exceptional, both as a group and as songwriters. As they channelled their snottiness away from blues snobbery and into the most relentless, abrasive sound Britain had yet produced they became, as Oldham knew they would, the most un avoidable force in pop outside of the Beatles.
Musically, their baby steps had been uncertain, though their progress up the charts was steady: ‘Come On’ made the Top 30 in late ’63, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was Top 20, ‘Not Fade Away’ went Top 5, and ‘It’s All Over Now’ took them to number one in late summer ’64. Their original songs at this point – all Jagger/Richards compositions – weren’t worthy of consideration for A-sides, little more than half-formed, barely dis
guised rewrites of old blues and R&B numbers. Oldham tried their more promising early numbers out on other singers, and Gene Pitney took ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’ into the UK Top 10. Some of their covers worked magic – Keith’s cavernous, growling coda gives their take on ‘It’s All Over Now’ the edge over the Valentinos’ original – while others added nothing to pop’s sense of progress. ‘Little Red Rooster’ remained no more than Southern blues played by a Thames-estuary tribute band, and its release as a single in late ’64 was little more than roots one-upmanship (it was dislodged from number one in Britain by the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’, with its feedback buzz intro – no question at this stage who the modernists were).
In this way, they were the first group to mark themselves out as pop snobs, outsiders and proud of it, cutting themselves off from the squares and the straights with no intention of – as the Beatles initially had – working from within to smash the system. They also acted deliberately dumb. ‘We’re not Bob Dylan, y’know,’ Jagger told the NME, by way of deciphering ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ in 1966. ‘It’s not supposed to mean anything. It’s just about a neurotic bird, that’s all. I thought of the title first – it just sounded good.’ Oldham kept promising a Stones movie; the title alone – Only Lovers Left Alive – was all the public had to go on. ‘We’re not gonna make Beatles movies,’ snarled Jagger to a Melody Maker reporter. ‘We’re not comedians. I can’t see, f’rinstance, Ringo with a gun in his hand, going to kill somebody. But I don’t think you’d think it was very peculiar if you saw Brian do it.’