by Bob Stanley
There’s a good deal I don’t like, and wouldn’t dream of defending. I don’t like volume for its own sake … This music can be coarse, faddish … It’s mostly trash, but that good five per cent is so exciting and vital and, may I say, significant that it claims the attention of every thinking person.
There’s little doubt the Troggs would have been among Bernstein’s ninety-five per cent. ‘Wild Thing’ (UK no. 2, US no. 1) showed there was still room for primitivism amidst the rococo, and no beat group was more primitive than the Troggs. Their manager Larry Page considered them so lacking in charisma and grace that he renamed the singer and the drummer after the two most stylish people he could think of – Elvis Presley and James Bond. Their debut album was called From Nowhere – The Troggs with good reason: not only had this bunch of unknowns sprung into the British and American charts with indecent haste, but they came from the small market town of Andover. Drums went thump. Thump. Thump-thump. The guitar line was three chords, played forever, no solo, no flash, childishly simple, and Reg Presley’s voice was as frustrated, rough and unadopted as Lee Brilleaux’s ten years later. Here was another example of classlessness – cultural, rather than economic – busting into the mainstream, trashing ordinary cultural categories, boxes and distinctions. Yet even here, in the midst of this pre-school simplicity, is an unexpected ocarina break – did anyone even know what an ocarina was before 1966?
The Troggs should have been a one-shot band, ‘Wild Thing’ their sole claim to fame. But it turned out Reg Presley was a decent songwriter who could capitalise on their limitations. ‘With a Girl Like You’ went one better than ‘Wild Thing’ and reached number one in the UK. Better were a string of suggestive, direct singles that were considerably less tight than Reg’s striped pants: ‘I Can’t Control Myself’ (UK no. 2, US no. 43 ’66), ‘Give It to Me’ (UK no. 12 ’67), ‘Night of the Long Grass’ (UK no. 17 ’67). By ’68 they were finished as a hit act, but their legacy was strange and unique. They became the first poster boys for some of the earliest and best pop writers, inspiring effusive essays from Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs, and so became the first in a list of alternative heroes that would later include Big Star, the Go-Betweens and Nick Drake. Reg Presley also turned out to be a literal poster boy for Michelle Pfeiffer – his was the only picture she had on her teenage bedroom wall. And in the nineties he suddenly became a millionaire when his 1967 attempt at flower power, ‘Love Is All Around’, was revived by Wet Wet Wet and spent fifteen weeks at number one in Britain. Reg, ever the country boy, spent all the proceeds on crop-circle research.
Most of us have been raised in the tradition of Tin Pan Alley, where the songs … were meant to amuse or beguile, but that’s all. They were embellishments on life. What these young people seem to say is that their music isn’t just decorative, it comes right out of their world.
The Troggs showed there was still room for raw noise in 1966, but the original Merseybeat stars – number-one shoo-ins just three years before – were floundering. The exception was the Hollies. The Mancunians had started with speedy Searchers-like covers of Maurice Williams’s ‘Stay’ and the Coasters’ ‘Searchin’’ in ’63, but by the mid-sixties had found they preferred to document the romance of the everyday, whether it was in a school playground (‘Carrie Anne’), a strip club (‘Stop Stop Stop’) or on the morning commute (‘Bus Stop’). In ’66 they covered Evie Sands’s ‘I Can’t Let Go’ – written, like ‘Wild Thing’, by Chip Taylor – which featured an awesome high harmony from Graham Nash that, for years, I assumed was a top-note trumpet. Nash wrote with Tony Hicks (who had the best haircut of the day, and is maybe British pop’s most underrated guitarist) and wood-carved singer Allan Clarke (who always looked ten years older than he was) under the enigmatic group pseudonym L. Ransford. Beyond this the Hollies were a working pop group, pure and simple. They made three great self-penned albums (For Certain Because in ’66, Evolution and Butterfly in ’67), and had absolutely nothing to say about Vietnam, devolution or Hare Krishna. All, that is, except Nash, who quit in ’68, when he decided his lifelong, pint-drinking Manchester mates were too small-time.
I like the eclecticism of it, its freedom to absorb any and all musical styles and elements, like old blues [he plays ‘Hanky Panky’], or a high Bach trumpet [‘Penny Lane’], or a harpsichord [‘Society’s Child’] or even a string quartet [‘Eleanor Rigby’] … Then I like the international and interracial way it ranges all over the world, borrowing from the ragas of Hindu music [‘Love You To’] or borrowing from the sensuality of Arab cafe music [‘Paint It Black’].
Outside Britain and America, modern pop also ruled. By 1966 local scenes had developed which mimicked Anglo beat but frequently took on their own unique flavours. Almost anywhere you went, a country had its own Beatles and more often than not, because teenagers were usually running the scene, they were pretty good. Sweden had a ridiculous number of groups for a country of just eight million people and the best – the Mascots and Tages – tended towards Kinks and Zombies melancholy; Holland grew its hair longest, liked its beat rawest, and groups like Q65 (their best song title: ‘I Despise You’) and the Outsiders – led by the ghostly Wally Tax – had a delicate menace; from Greece came the sweetly sad Bluebirds; Austria had the snotty Slaves, with their ragged single ‘Shut Up’.
Some of the best, and most regionally specific, non-Anglo-American pop came from France. It had developed its own complex scene, yé-yé, at the turn of the sixties, which developed from the nation’s inordinate love of the twist plus a fondness for girl-group sounds. Cute blondes did best – France Gall, Sylvie Vartan, Gillian Hills – but fiercer females – Cléo, Clothilde, Jacqueline Taïeb – got to cut records too, backed by thudding, fuzzy garage bands; they tended to sell less, but they were terrifically rough compared to their British and American counterparts. France did things its own way, producing pop records that ridiculed pop, most of which were written by the chain-smoking Serge Gainsbourg;6 in France, uniquely, it was also perfectly OK for their pop stars to cut right-wing protest singles, like a bunch of juvenile Barry Sadlers7 – among the biggest were Johnny Hallyday’s ‘Cheveux longs idées courtes’ and Jacques Dutronc’s ‘Restons français soyons gaulois’. Just one of their sixties stars crossed over, selling records in the UK and US. The willowy Françoise Hardy was their biggest (and tallest) export. Though many of her record sales were probably down to the gorgeous Jean-Marie Périer photos that adorned her sleeves,8 Hardy was very good – her songs were sad and simple, her voice like the sound of petals falling from a flower. She scored a Top 20 UK hit with ‘All over the World’, and it became an anthem for British soldiers serving abroad (in peacetime manoeuvres, of course, not Vietnam). Everybody was in love with Françoise. She was the art-school Bardot. Dylan and Jagger serenaded her, but they barely came up to her waist, and she ended up marrying local hero Jacques Dutronc. France in the sixties could afford to be so insular – its pop stars were beautiful, its sound unique.
Still, the world revolved not around Paris, but the ‘rain grey town’ mentioned in the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’: London. Once the Rolling Stones broke through in ’64, R&B groups had taken over the beat scene, initially taking their impetus from the Chicago blues singers Brian Jones loved – Muddy Waters, Elmore James – before moving on to contemporary soul – Motown, Otis Redding, James Brown – by 1965. Unlike their Liverpool antecedents, these groups developed fast out of their primal club sound. It surely helped that almost all of them were from, or near, the capital; their music reflected and absorbed the cultural mood, keeping the momentum going.
Working with Motown’s clangorous backbeat and Chicago blues’ dentist’s-drill guitar lines, London groups picked up an aggressive, angular sound with a penchant for guitar feedback along the way. Fed on purple hearts and sundry other uppers, with a plethora of clubs to keep them awake all night, they created a uniquely British noise which was retrospectively tagged ‘freakbeat’. It was pioneered by the Stones’ s
uccessors as house band at the Crawdaddy Club, the Yardbirds. Blond, beaky singer Keith Relf had possibly the worst pitching of his generation, but this didn’t matter so much when he had the capital’s best guitarists to distract a listener’s attention. Tired of straight blues, the Yardbirds had roped in tablas and a harpsichord to create the moody ‘For Your Love’ and scored a number-two hit in ’65. Their guitarist Eric Clapton quit in disgust, but they hired young session man Jimmy Page in his place and got even better, with a string of dark, loud, dusky Top 3 hits: ‘Evil Hearted You’, ‘Heart Full of Soul’, ‘Still I’m Sad’ and the apocalyptic, proto-psychedelic ‘Shapes of Things’ in ’66. ‘My eyes just hurt my brain,’ sang Keith Relf, over washes of feedback and drones. It felt like quite a step on from ‘Little Red Rooster’. Later the same year they released ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’, by which point Jeff Beck had joined as a second guitarist. It sounded like duelling fighter planes, a three-minute wig-out, but the Yardbirds’ superiority in firepower didn’t help them, and they never managed another hit, eventually calling it a day when Relf quit in ’68. Page carried on with the New Yardbirds, who had morphed into Led Zeppelin by the end of the year.
Out in Ilford were the Small Faces, smart-dressing, pill-popping short-arses who cut a series of abrasive soul-influenced 45s, the best of which was ‘All or Nothing’, a UK number one in ’66. Singer Steve Marriott was a fidgety ball of energy and, once he discovered hallucinogenics and mellowed a little, the Small Faces singlehandedly created cosmic music hall (‘Itchycoo Park’, ‘Lazy Sunday’). After splitting the group in ’68, Marriott wasted his soulful wail in blues-rockers Humble Pie in the seventies, while the others hooked up with Rod Stewart, dropped the prefix and became the Faces.
Over to the west, in Shepherd’s Bush, were the Who, who you couldn’t have made up: if the Hollies were the straightest, then the Who were the wildest. After Pete Townshend heard the blunt brutality of ‘You Really Got Me’ in ’64, he knew exactly how he wanted his nascent beat group to sound and wrote ‘I Can’t Explain’ as part tribute, part parody – it reached number eight in ’65.
Everything about the Who was skew-whiff: they were comprised of an oikish, fighty singer, an art-student guitarist with a complex about his nose, a jazz bassist and a surf-crazy drummer who thrashed around his kit with no regard whatsoever for dancers’ feelings. Their untogetherness is what I like most about them. They were also managed by the odd pairing of Chris Stamp (brother of actor Terence) and Kit Lambert (son of classical composer Constant). Somehow, these two also produced most of the Who’s records from their imperial phase:9 they ended up drum-heavy, with vocals sometimes disappearing from the mix, John Entwistle’s bass used for counter-melody colour, and Townshend’s guitar constantly on the edge of feeding back. This was all for the good, and made their instantly recognisable singles leap out of transistor radios. ‘I like the blatantness of pop, the speed, the urgency,’ Lambert told the Observer, by way of explanation. Pete Townshend wrote all of their singles, and his subject matter was unlike anybody else’s: seaside simpletons (‘Happy Jack’), masturbation (‘Pictures of Lily’), divorce (‘A Legal Matter’), cross-dressing (‘I’m a Boy’) and total disrespect for your elders (‘My Generation’). For three years they were never out of the UK Top 10, although they could never quite reach number one, falling one place short on two occasions: ‘We’re always beaten to the top by the dead or the half dead,’ said Entwistle in ’66. ‘Good old Jim Reeves did it on us last time [‘I’m a Boy’], and before that [‘My Generation’] it was the singing pimple, Ken Dodd.’10
Kit Lambert sowed the seeds of progressive rock when, presumably inspired by his dad, he suggested to Townshend in ’66 that he should try writing a ‘rock opera’. ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ was a ten-minute ‘suite’ on their second album, but their third album was the keeper: The Who Sell Out made real Townshend’s claim that they were ‘pop art’; there were songs about acne creams and deodorants, and every thing was linked by pirate-radio-station jingles. On the cover, Daltrey was pictured in a bath of cold baked beans. It was a busy concept, and could have ended up horribly wacky, a London scenester smug-in, but Townshend had saved some of his prettiest melodies for tracks like ‘Our Love Was’ and ‘Sunrise’, and his most explosive guitar effects for ‘Armenia City in the Sky’. The Who Sell Out was an overwhelming, wraparound experience, the most consistent and thrilling album of the year. Unfortunately, this very ’66 record was released at the end of ’67. London had moved on: ‘People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more like we did to a Cliff Richard “newie”,’ moaned the prematurely aged Townshend.
Then I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music – the arresting impact of a consort of amplified guitars [‘Good Day Sunshine’] … Now that’s not just cheery, that’s very unorthodox … We never used to find that in pop music – it’s new … sort of tart, pungent … Now the point I want to make is such oddities are not just tricks or show-off devices – in terms of pop music’s basic English, so to speak, they are real inventions.
In mid-’66 the now London-based Beatles released a single with McCartney’s ‘Paperback Writer’ on the A-side and Lennon’s ‘Rain’ on the flip. ‘Paperback Writer’ was a crazed tribute to the Beach Boys, with multi-tracked high harmonies that predicted the disco-era Bee Gees, which would prove impossible to perform live. It was a groundbreaking single, for at this point the studio took over from the stage as the primary way people consumed pop. ‘Rain’ was possibly the densest Beatles recording. At all times, it sounds disorientating. Ringo’s drumming is always slightly behind and off the beat, which he never plays the same way twice. The vocals are drawn out, tired in every possible way, and the way Lennon sings ‘sun-shine’ was the complete blueprint for Oasis. McCartney’s bass is so fluid it flows off the turntable; Harrison’s guitar circles and swirls like oppressive cloud cover. And, right on the tail, the tape gets flipped and Lennon’s vocal comes out backwards. British psychedelia is invented right here.
What about Gershwin? What about Duke Ellington? ‘Sophisticated Lady’, with those rich, chromatic parallel seventh chords? Yes, but that’s the whole point. This pop generation has rejected that old chromatic sound as too sophisticated, the sound of an older, slicker generation … This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language. It relies more on the simple triads, the basic harmony of folk music.
The girl-group sound, with its storytelling and naive tales of heartbreak, had become America’s suburban folk music. It had survived Merseybeat by adapting to the nascent Motown sound (the Chiffons’ ‘Sweet Talkin’ Guy’, the Shirelles’ ‘Last Minute Miracle’), but by 1966 had entered its terminal phase. For once, a dying pop trend reached its apogee just as it turned from ripe to rotten. The Red Bird label – formed by Leiber and Stoller in 1964, and funded by doo-wop lover and Frankie Lymon producer George Goldner – was one of the dozen best the music industry has ever produced.
For such a short-lived label, started at precisely the wrong moment (weeks after ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was on The Ed Sullivan Show), Red Bird was incredibly successful. It scored a US number one with its very first release – the Dixie Cups’ stripped back, sweet, but impossible to resist wedding song ‘Chapel of Love’ – and barely paused for breath: the Jelly Beans’ aching ‘I Wanna Love Him So Bad’ (US no. 10 ’64), the Ad Libs’ jazzy finger-snapper ‘The Boy from New York City’ (US no. 8 ’65) and Bessie Banks’s original, intensely sad version of ‘Go Now’ (a UK number one for the Moody Blues in January ’65). Best of all were records by the Shangri-Las, myrmidons of melodrama, two sets of sisters – the blonde Weiss sisters, the brunette Ganser twins – from Cambria Heights in Queens. It could be because I first heard the song when I was six or seven,11 a highly impressionable age, but I’ve never perceived ‘Leader of the Pack’ (US no. 1, UK no. 12 ’65) as a camp gag. There are no affectations in Mary Weiss’s delivery on this b
low-by-blow account of the grisly death of her boyfriend. Her singing voice, high and quite piercing, is one of the most emotive on record, while her spoken-word episodes on ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’ (US no. 6 ’66) and ‘Past, Present and Future’ (US no. 59 ’66) are positively haunted; on the former her mother dies, on the latter (‘don’t try to touch me’) she suggests something worse. Pete Townshend has cited it as his favourite pop single of all.
Just as the classic American girl-group sound began to dip, a new breed of British girl singer had emerged in the mid-sixties: Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, Petula Clark, all – in their varied ways – totems of late-twentieth-century British social history. There had been British female singers before, of course, but it often seemed like only the fine details separated Alma Cogan (ball gowns) from Edna Savage (married a wrong ’un), and Marion Ryan (she had twins – more of them later) from Helen Shapiro (just fourteen, but with a crazily deep voice). These girls had rarely been major stars, and had almost zero autonomy. By 1966 the way British girl singers were presented had changed. They all had their own jobs: Cilla Black was the girl next door, a Scouser with a slightly crooked fringe, flat chest and buck teeth; Dusty Springfield was sophisticated and heavily bouffant – she’d forged her own identity by studying the Brill Building catalogue, and she yearned to record in the States; Petula was continental, a survivor of pre-rock and child stardom who had an apartment in Paris and could probably show you a thing or two beyond French kissing; Marianne was demure, well spoken and sexy, with a quavering folkie voice, definitely out of your league; Sandie was working-class and achievable – as a fashion role model for girls and as a potential date for boys; Lulu was a Glaswegian bundle of fun who could holler like a cross between Brenda Lee and the girl in the Trio advert. Between them, they had it all sewn up.