A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Next in this composite history two seminal places would appear. One would be the coffee bar. Whether the El Toro in Muswell Hill or Liverpool’s famous Kardomah, or a thousand in between, coffee bars had become vital hang-out places for young people. Often opened by Italian immigrants, they offered a rare space where music could be listened to, away from family-crowded homes or unwelcoming adult pubs. They hosted the first juke-boxes and sometimes live music. The second place to feature was more important still, the art college. In the fifties art schools played a much more important role than simply producing the next generation of designers or sculptors. Many of them were Victorian or Edwardian institutions connected to local technical colleges and originally meant to provide the craftsmen who would help sustain a town’s clothing, ceramic, printing or other businesses. Before the arrival of mass university education, therefore, which would not really change things until the seventies, art schools were where bright and imaginative teenagers who failed to conform to the academic disciplines tended to end up.

  John Lennon at Liverpool Art College, Ray Davies at Hornsey, Peter Townsend at Ealing, Ian Dury at Walthamstow, Keith Richards at Sidcup, Cat Stevens, the core of Pink Floyd and Roxy Music were just a few of thousands. The coffee bars were essential meeting places but the art schools were the true factories of popular culture. Art students had long been a recognized and much-mocked subsection of national life, in turtle-necked jumpers and CND badges. Such colleges had become vital rallying places and support systems for talented outsiders, relatively few of whom would end up as conventional artists. The great pop art pioneer Peter Blake, a Dartford electrician’s son, had begun to create paintings and sculptures out of the wrestlers, popular magazines, pin-ups and music stars around him. Supplementing his income by teaching in three London art colleges, Blake had a huge influence on younger people and was in advance of American pop artists like Andy Warhol. In 1961 he encouraged the young Ian Dury to start depicting what interested him – ‘tits and bums, gangsters, Teddy boys, Jayne Mansfield and Marlon Brando’ – but Dury was one of many, reaching out hungrily for a brighter, younger culture. Across the country, student designers found themselves working next door to would-be painters, graphic artists and film-makers, so ideas quickly hopped across. The characteristic Bridget Riley op-art lines of sixties dresses and shop windows had been stolen by students from the artists they mingled with; the RAF-style roundels and bold black arrows which appeared on the clothes of bands such as the Who, and became part of the Mods’ insignia, had been swiped from graphic designers and pop painters. The way the sixties and seventies looked came out of the fusion that happened in Britain’s municipal applied design institutions, places not quite paralleled in America or continental Europe.

  This hunger for novelty and readiness to mingle disciplines became a big force in British music, too. For the art schools had early on been bastions of folk and jazz. Why would they not be? Here were gathered thousands of bright middle-class and working-class teenagers looking for fun and hoping not to be sucked into factory design shops or office jobs. By the later fifties, the art students would be listening to skiffle, R&B and the first generation of safely packaged, toothsome and relatively unthreatening British Elvis copies. First there would be grinning Tommy Steele, then Harry Webb the Hertfordshire pub singer, reincarnated as the eyeliner-wearing Cliff Richard, then the former tug-boat hand Billy Fury. A few years on, and future members of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who were imbibing radical ideas and new looks, as clearly the product of art school as any watercolour or well-thrown pot. Ian Dury and his friends got into trouble for using their paint brushes as drum-sticks, sending off a rumble through the rest of the building. That works as a metaphor too. The ultimate art school bands would come later still. Roxy Music, led by Brian Eno of Winchester art college and Bryan Ferry, the coalminer’s son who had been taught at Newcastle Art College by the original British pop artist Richard Hamilton, pioneered a decadent, clever-clever, intellectually sharp music loved by British audiences in the early seventies. Pink Floyd, the greatest of the concept album bands, is unimaginable without the art school background.

  So, let us continue the composite pop star life story. You have been corrupted by Radio Luxembourg, learned to play in a skiffle band, hung around at coffee bars and had your imagination jemmied open in a provincial art school. What happens next? In a word, management. In the early sixties an unlikely sounding name and a pretty-boy face meant you had probably been discovered by ‘flash Larry’, or Larry Parnes, first of the Svengalis. The Svengalis feature early and often. Suddenly there is money to be made from tousled-headed boys.

  Before pop the dominant popular musical styles produced low profits. Most public music was live – the piano and banjo players on music-hall stages, the star singers and then eventually the big bands of the dancehalls and the smoky subculture of jazz. Sheet-music made big money for talented composers like Ivor Novello and stage stars like Harry Lauder. Gramophone record sales had kicked off with recordings of early twentieth-century opera stars but the invention of the modern microphone in the twenties had then changed popular singing, allowing intimacy and variety of a new kind. So the recording industry had brought Gilbert and Sullivan, Louis Armstrong, the Ink Spots, Flanders and Swann, Vera Lynn, the crooners and many West End musicals, to millions of homes long before pop. By the end of the fifties there were four major British recording companies: EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips. Most of their profits came from classical music or comic recordings. Only since the spread of seven-inch 45s had records really been something teenagers could aspire to buying. Though first produced in the US as early as 1948, for working-class British youngsters they were still formidably expensive by the late fifties.

  The other essential technological changes arrived at around the same time. First, loud electric guitars, invented by radio repair man Leo Fender in 1948, swiftly followed by his great rival Les Paul. Then transistor radios, originally invented in the mid-fifties to help Americans keep in touch after the coming nuclear war with Russia, and becoming popular for other purposes at the end of the decade. Without the mike, the electric guitar and the seven-inch record, rock and pop would not have happened. Without the radio, the vital cross-current influences would have been unheard. Everything conspired towards the moment. The post-war economic boom was putting money in the pockets of teenagers and young workers. The baby boom had increased their numbers. Better nutrition meant they tended to mature sexually earlier. And the mechanisms for the mass marketing of pop were already in place. Radio Luxembourg had broadcast its first Top of the Pops show in 1952. Within a few years television would follow – Rediffusion’s Ready, Steady, Go, a crucial show in the story of British pop – then the BBC’s Top of the Pops.

  The earlier generation of American rock and blues pioneers had turned music into short, addictive bites lasting only a few minutes to be purchased anew every week or so. The radio, TV and magazine publicity machine was up and going. The equipment was in every second home, radios and record players turned out by England’s then-booming electronics industry. And ‘the workers’, all those teenagers with stars in their eyes, desperately strumming away at cheap guitars and handwriting lyrics and chords from the radio, were just waiting to be picked up in every major city in the land. Thus, in this fictional sixties success story, the Svengali duly arrives at the back of the coffee bar basement or the private club with a contract, bought from W.H. Smith in one hand and a flash Parker pen in the other; and a decade of argument about who is ripping off whom, is about to begin. Like Parnes and the most famous of all, Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, the agents and middle-men were often edgy outsiders too – both those men were gay when homosexuality was illegal, and Jewish, when anti-Semitism was rife.

  And so the typical pop band history will roll predictably on – the early dodgy names for the band; the cover songs; the year or two of bouncing around the narrow roads of pre-motorway Britain in hired coaches between gigs at But
lin’s camps and provincial theatres; the first chart hit and the first invitation to Rediffusion’s headquarters to be filmed for television; the first Bentley and the first joint; the growing tension between the guitar heroes and the drummer, who never really fitted in, the purchase of a grand house in the Home Counties, the tragic early death of a band member, by overdose, car crash or drowning; and then eventually the split followed by the comeback.

  Though the stories of British rock and pop bands follow a predictable trajectory, the stories of the earlier bands are more interesting simply because the story had not occurred before. It was freshly extraordinary, that fairy-tale rocket whoosh from backstreet poverty to international fame and huge wealth; so too was the darker tale of abuse and betrayal which almost always followed. Though pop was a business it was also a story about class and morality: almost every band history will describe the tension between the marketing of the music and the attempt by the band to stay in some way authentic or true to themselves. Many of course never tried to be authentic in the first place but the important ones did and it wasn’t always easy. The Kinks, four north London boys who affected a camp look and played rough, hard pop, were put into the most extraordinary confections of pink hunting jackets, ruffs and thigh-high suede boots to attract attention. Long before the New York Dolls or Velvet Underground, their gender-bending pose was also something the straighter American market found very hard to accept. The most famous band of all were bullied and cajoled by Epstein into ditching the rough jeans and leather Luftwaffe jackets image they had learned in Hamburg. To get their first recording contract, the Beatles were told to stop smoking on-stage, stop swearing, turning up late, and making spontaneous decisions about which songs they would play at their gigs. Oh yes, and they had to learn to bow smartly, all together, at the audience after every song. They agreed. It would only be later that their success gave them the freedom to tell their managers and advisers where to go.

  The degree of control needed to make a band exciting but not too exciting would become one of the most amusing dilemmas in modern management. The harnessing of youth spirit for maximum commercial return proved as tricky and unstable as the early days of harnessing nuclear fission – though it was finally achieved by the eighties, when the death of punk allowed entirely commercial and packaged pop unquestioned dominance. In the early days it was not always quite as obvious that money would always trump vitality. There were still battles to be had. The Who was a west London band which had, like so many others, emerged from skiffle and been kick-started by the success of the Beatles. They were encouraged by their manager, Peter Meadon, to dress stylishly and address themselves to the new audience of Mods. But their violence and guitar-smashing, while delighting their live audience, kept them away from mainstream venues for ages. Throughout a stellar career during which they gave the Beatles a run for their money in the concept-album stakes, the Who were never properly tamed. Nor were the Kinks, whose song-writing genius Ray Davies became involved in a punch-up with an American television union official who had called the band a ‘bunch of commie wimps’, and managed to get them banned from the States for four crucial years. One band’s roughness and ire would provoke the next to go further.

  Apart from keeping physical control of the new market, the big battle line was over the subject of the songs, which quickly moved beyond the easy boy-meets-girl and black American rip-offs of the early years. Rock was about escape, mainly from the urban and suburban Britain of its young consumers. For most, the teenage years would end in a conventional working life and marriage, which was more popular than ever in the sixties, with marriage rates peaking in 1972. But drugs, mysticism, gangs and sexual experimentation were some of the alternatives celebrated by pop culture, to the discomfiture of the record companies, the BBC, politicians and the newspapers. Some bands adopted a provocatively camp look, wore make-up and baited the short-haired traditional male. Songs such as ‘Lola’ and the Who’s ‘I’m a Boy’ discussed transvestites; there was a lolling libertinism in the Rolling Stones’ music which shocked watching parents.

  Above all, the rate of experimentation and change in sixties pop itself was simply astonishing. A new sound, line-up of instruments, length of song and image seemed to come along every few months, and in 1966-8 every few weeks. It was a classic capitalist market-driven competition, with profits and status dependent on beating the rest, measured by sales, week after week. Among the great experimenters were Paul McCartney, who was feeding back discoveries about tape loops, modern composers and Bach into the music of the Beatles. As they became the ultimate über-group they however found the screaming at their concerts so loud that even they couldn’t hear the music and retreated more and more to work in the studio, which in turn produced longer, more complicated and reflective sounds. On it would go. The Stones’ blues-rock would challenge Merseybeat pop, the Mods would hit back, early versions of guitar-rock heavy metal suddenly appeared. The amphetamine-fuelled fast and short singles would give way to LSD-inspired albums with looping, hypnotic rhythms and surrealist covers. Acoustic protest songs were plugged in and went electric.

  Hairstyles went from slicked to floppy to long to shaved, moustaches flowered and withered, huge mountain-man beards sprouted from the unlikeliest chins. Always the Beatles were pioneers, the first big stars to fall for Indian mysticism, sitars or the next drug craze and ultimately the first to find the pressures intolerable and to break up. The trajectory seemed impossible to beat. A band’s success was based on its members’ skills but also on their authentic claim to be kids from the streets whose anger, enthusiasm, boredom and wit reflected the actual Britain all round them, the lives of the people who would save up and buy their songs. Pop was music from below or it was nothing. Yet the successful musicians would be cut off from the world they came from by the money and the security needed to keep fans at bay until they were fated to sound introspective and irrelevant. Ultimately life in the bubble would prove airless and the music, or the band, would choke to death.

  56

  Flash, Snip, Smile: the Making of Celebrity

  The contemporary cult of celebrity was born in the sixties too. All developed societies lavish attention on a small number of favoured people, rich, beautiful or talented. In eighteenth-century Europe it might be duchesses and court composers, in classical Rome orators and gladiators, in nineteenth-century Japan, warriors and courtesans. Details of their clothing, personal lives, foibles, family successes and disasters are gossiped about and vicariously enjoyed. They form a fantasy extended family, prettier and wickeder and more brightly coloured than the rest of us. What has changed in recent decades is the scale of celebrity devotion, this cargo cult of modern Britain. It has elbowed aside rival forms in television entertainment, invaded and occupied popular newspapers and produced racks of magazines breathlessly following the face-lifts, marital break-ups, boob jobs and births of celebs. All of this originated in the mid-sixties. The cloying, ingratiating tone of contemporary magazines such as Hello! and OK! when interviewing or describing some frozen-faced doll can be found in the write-ups of the young set in British newspapers, supplements and the arch glossies of the sixties. The origins of ‘Big Brother’ television exhibitionism are buried in game shows and agony aunt columns half a century old. The raising of footballers and musicians from being tradesmen-servants of the public to misbehaving gods began then too.

  Celebrities are often mocked for being talentless. Some are, some are not. A tribute paid to the young and beautiful by the rest of us, the circle of celebrity is paradoxically both very small and very open. From the outside the celebrity world seems to be a closed, charmed place, a marquee guarded by men with shaved heads and sunglasses inside which rock stars and footballers, actresses and princesses, all magically turn out to know one another. Yet what the sixties discovered was that celebrity must be open too in the sense of letting in new people from the streets, or it congeals into a resented elite. Modern celebrity has no time for a Samurai class or for
haughty duchesses – it must be a fantasy island we could all paddle our way to, at least in theory. Cultural democracy rules, even while parliamentary democracy struggles.

  What was called Swinging London, or the Scene, was simply a small number of restaurants, shops and clubs where a small number of people were repeatedly photographed and written about. In Chelsea, Biba, Granny Takes a Trip, Bazaar and Hung on You were honeypots for the fashionable. In the evening it might be Annabel’s or Showboat or Talk of the Town. When in 1969 the Private Eye journalist Christopher Booker published his drily hostile look back at the decade, The Neophiliacs, he found that by the summer of 1965 there were a mere twenty or so people who seemed to be at the heart of Swinging London. They included the Beatles and Mick Jagger (the other Stones had not yet quite cut through), the model Jean Shrimpton, the designer Mary Quant, the painter David Hockney, the actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, the photographers Lord Snowdon, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, the cartoonist and editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine Mark Boxer and the interior decorator David Hicks.

  All these ‘New Aristocrats’, Booker pointed out, were in some way concerned with the creation of images. This list, though it would lose and gain constantly at the edges, had some validity. Bailey himself would pump the publicity machine with his ‘Box of Pin Ups’ designed by Boxer. Booker takes up the story:

  The list, which was virtually a Debrett guide to the New Aristocracy and their circle included: 2 actors, 8 pop singers, 1 pop artist, 1 interior decorator, 4 photographer/designers, 1 ballet dancer, 3 models, 1 film producer, 1 dress designer, 1 discotheque manager, 1 creative advertising man, 1 ‘pop singer’s friend’ and the Kray brothers from the East End who could only be described as ‘connected with the underworld’.