When Haley brought his updated version of swing to the British charts in 1955, our own bandleaders and singing personalities dutifully followed this latest American novelty, just as they had mimicked all its predecessors. None of them was aiming at teenagers; all of them provided a dance beat, with a hint of swing but no swagger, no rasp, no threat of violence or sexual promise. To prove the point: take your pick from Jack Parnell’s band smothering ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’; Don Lusher, with Ted Heath’s band, struggling through ‘Rock and Roll’ like a duck wading through treacle; and, most surreal of all, the Big Ben Accordion Band squeezing and fingering like demons on a medley headed by ‘Rock Around the Clock’. (They may make you want to slash your sofa, but not in excitement.)
The village nature of the UK recording industry, which was centred around the publishing offices of London’s Denmark Street, the impresarios of Soho and a handful of major record companies based in the capital, ensured a uniform and anodyne product. When Britain created its own rock ’n’ roll star, he had to trick his way past the doormen to gain admission, and was quickly swallowed up in show business. This was Thomas Hicks, a teenage merchant seaman from London’s East End, who claims in his autobiography to have heard Buddy Holly sing ‘Peggy Sue’ in Texas more than a year before the song was written. But the man who became Tommy Steele can be allowed some tall stories, for the process whereby he became a star was both archetypal and gloriously ridiculous.
In Soho, he first met two professional songwriters (one of whom, Lionel Bart, would soon transform the British musical stage as the composer of Oliver!) and then a Fleet Street photographer, John Kennedy, who offered to act as his manager. Together, they concocted Hicks’s stage name, and a suitable pastiche of Bill Haley, ‘Rock with the Caveman’. Kennedy procured him headlines (‘“He’s Great, Great, Great!34” Says the Duke of Kent’), hired prostitutes to pose as aristocratic daughters besotted with this cockney discovery, and announced him as Britain’s home-grown Elvis Presley. ‘Does Tommy Steele expect35 to gain more popularity by appearing with untidy hair?’, asked the New Musical Express reprovingly in November 1956. That month, he appeared on the country’s only popular-music TV show, Off the Record, and launched a national tour at the Sunderland Empire – supported by such acts as Reg ‘Unknown to Millions’ Thompson and Thunderclap Jones, the Wild Welshman of the Keyboard. Amidst such company, he was bound to impress, and several thousand well-primed teenage girls dutifully screamed and rushed the stage if Steele so much as moved a muscle.
By comparison with the officially sanctioned entertainment of the day, Tommy Steele was as savage as his critics declared all rock ’n’roll to be. In a letter to the BBC’s Radio Times magazine that December, an exasperated viewer wrote: ‘How any sane person36, young or not so young, can find pleasure in cavorting and jerking about in a raucous cacophony of jungle noises, in a manner which proves conclusively that the usual decent inhibitions have been swamped by sensual and emotional strain, passes my comprehension.’fn5
But the majority of Steele’s fans were not, as with other adolescents’ idols, in their teens, but aged between 5 and 12. Children had already spotted the scallywag exuberance that would translate Steele into a star of film comedies and West End musicals. Touring South Africa in 1958, he was greeted as a threat to social order, but the audience response was so restrained that the police who’d been primed to quell riots were reduced to watching the show. By 1959, Steele was concentrating on comic songs, and securing a lengthy career, rather than the brief moment of notoriety allowed to most of his rivals.
They each needed their own John Kennedy, and most of them found a businessman named Larry Parnes, who created a star out of Billy Fury. The latter was a shy ornithologist, with a weak heart but a talent equally adaptable to switchblade rock ’n’ roll and emotion-racked balladry, who was described in the national press as ‘a sex symbol of deformed38 contortions and suggestive songs the minute he walks on stage’. Parnes’s interest in his male clients preceded him: rock ’n’ roll hopefuls were said to have shared a secret ditty which climaxed, ‘Larry fucks our arses39/and we become stars’. Except that they didn’t, not all, unless their vision of stardom amounted to a one-disc recording contract and a forced rechristening. Their manager insisted that they should jettison such unimpressive monikers as Reg Smith and John Askew to become Marty Wilde and Johnny Gentle. (Parnes’s arch rival, Reg Calvert, claimed to have boys named Ricky Fever and Eddie Sex on his books by the end of the decade.) Almost regardless of their talent, they were duly signed by a major record company, and became the recipient of screams from teenage fans. ‘We all do it40’, a 16-year-old named Beryl explained. ‘It’s something inside of you. We’re so pleased at seeing our favourite that we have to let ourselves go. It’s an expression of liking him. We’re his fans. And he knows we’re there.’
The acme of British rock ’n’ roll in the late 1950s was a television show entitled Oh Boy! which, for the first time, allowed the public to experience this phenomenon in all its animalistic glory. ‘Artificiality is death41 to good television’, declared its producer, Jack Good, who as a drama graduate understood the power of image and movement. He insisted that all the acts should perform live: ‘If conditions are right, and the performer feels good, you may create something that perhaps isn’t on the disc – the magic thrill of an inspired impulse.’ Marty Wilde was booked as the show’s star, until Good saw an 18-year-old signing to EMI: a factory hand who had been born in India, and then reborn to show business as Cliff Richard. As showbiz writer Peter Leslie explained, ‘the new star looked more42 like the hero of a picaresque 19th-century romance than a purveyor of pelvic gyrations on a 20th-century stage’. Good stripped away Cliff’s Elvis-like sideburns and guitar, and encouraged him to writhe and smoulder (provoking one of the great British headlines of all time: ‘Must we fling this filth at our pop kids?’). ‘Rock ’n’ roll has to be sung43 with the face and the body’, Cliff explained. ‘I like to fix my eyes on them, to get them going.’
He posed for publicity photographs with a cross around his neck and a rabbit mascot, claimed that he loved Elvis Presley so much that he dreamed about him, and when quizzed about the juvenile content of rock ’n’ roll music, he protested that ‘older people like it too44’. How old? ‘Sixteen.’ (He also said that he hated the name ‘rock ’n’ roll’: ‘Call it rhythm and blues.’) Like a handful of his peers (notably Fury and Wilde), he could boast a genuinely convincing rock ’n’ roll voice, a naïve understanding of the music, and a charisma which was heightened by the tension between his slightly babyish features and his contortions on stage. But in Britain there was no strategy for an entertainer which did not lead inexorably to pantomime, Sunday Night at the London Palladium and film musicals. Even the nation’s belated acceptance of the jukebox, which in a 1957 court case was said to have ‘a rather fatal fascination45 for the young 18-to-19-year-old’, did not signal that a viable commercial career could be erected around their preferences alone. By November 1959, the Daily Mirror was asking: ‘Is Cliff Richard46, the Golden Boy of British Beat, turning “square”? This young master of the rhythmic twitch, the hooded eyelid and the snarling smile has released an LP (Cliff Sings) on which only half the numbers are rock. The others are nostalgic “oldies” like “Embraceable You”.’ Yet this still-teenage rock ’n’ roller was not the industry pawn that observers assumed him to be. Given the options of retiring gracefully into obscurity, or steering himself towards a lifetime as a song-and-dance-man, Cliff Richard invented a third course: becoming the only original 1950s rock ’n’ roller in Britain or America who was able to remain a viable pop star until the end of the century, by mastering the stylistic changes that were within his grasp and skilfully evading those (such as heavy metal and punk) that did not suit him. More so even than Elvis Presley, he was the first man to demonstrate that teenage pop stardom could escape its momentary hyperbolic bubble and become an enduring career. His fame stretched to almost every nation on
the planet, and for many years he was more popular than Presley in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Only the United States, where his hits were sporadic and almost random, failed to be seduced by his gentle brand of rebellion.
The only conceivable rival to Cliff Richard’s eclecticism was Johnny Hallyday, just 17 years old when he first reached the French charts with ‘Souvenirs, souvenirs’ in 1960. France had proved to be defiantly immune to rock ’n’ roll during the late 1950s, opting instead for the personality vocals of 23-year-old Dalida.fn6 When US rock hits were translated into French – as when the Coasters’ ‘Three Cool Cats’ became ‘Nouvelle Vague’ for Richard Anthony, and Sacha Distel took on Lloyd Price’s ‘Personality’ – their rebellious swagger was replaced by nightclub charm. Hallyday was the first Frenchman to sound as if he was singing rock ’n’ roll by choice. His success heralded the handover of French pop from young adults to teenagers, and from original chansons to a shameless reliance on American archetypes. Eddy Mitchell led Les Chaussettes Noires (the Black Socks), whose debut hit ‘Tu parles trop’ seemed to prefigure the arrival of the Beatles; Dick Rivers was just 15 when he fronted Les Chats Sauvages (the Wild Cats). Neither of them could match Hallyday’s raw energy on ‘Si tu me téléphones’, ‘Dis-moi oui’ and ‘Elle est terrible’ from 1962. (He claimed that he sustained his frenetic pace on stage by only drinking milk.) It’s commonplace for British commentators to mock French rock ’n’ roll, but these sides were easily the equal of anything produced on the opposite side of La Manche.fn7
The idea of English people48 singing Negro blues strikes me as so ridiculous that I cannot take records such as this one at all seriously. [It’s] almost blasphemous. All concerned should hang their heads in shame.
Jazz Monthly reviews Lonnie Donegan, December 1955
Rock ’n’ roll is out of date49 – old-fashioned as aspidistras. Skiffle music is the coming craze. I’ll take a bet on that … They’re turning London’s expresso bars into modern versions of the old-time music-hall.
Noel Whitcomb, Daily Mirror, September 1956
The most incendiary rock ’n’ roll record to come out of Britain in the 1950s – the closest equivalent to the wildest music emanating from Sam Phillips’s Sun Studios in Memphis – was an Appalachian folk song from the nineteenth century, performed by a jazz guitarist and former soldier born in Scotland and then raised in the East End of London. Nothing else taped in London came closer to capturing the essential spirit of rockabilly, the newly coined term for country-based rock ’n’ roll, than ‘Cumberland Gap’ by Lonnie Donegan. Yet its creator claimed to hate rock ’n’ roll, and distanced himself throughout his life from the teenage rebellion that it represented. It’s one of the ironies of musical history that a man who considered himself part of an elite not only became an all-round entertainer, a one-man inheritor of the music-hall tradition; but also did more to popularise the guitar and encourage teenagers to play rock ’n’ roll than anyone else of his era.
Donegan tied his flag to the mast of jazz; then, when he was cast overboard, he claimed the standard of another genre, and refashioned it in his own image. The style he commandeered was skiffle, a name taken from a 1920s American blues party record entitled ‘Hometown Skiffle’ (not released in Britain until late 1949). A skiffle, according to a surprisingly early reference in the Daily Mirror, ‘is the Chicago Rent Party50, which thrived during the hard times of American prohibition … an all-night session of Blues and Boogie-Woogie, pianists, guitarists and blues singers’. That certainly captures the spirit of ‘Hometown Skiffle’, but when Britain’s skiffle bands emerged amidst the undergrowth of the traditional jazz revival launched by George Webb’s Dixielanders, there was no piano – merely guitar, banjo and percussion. And the music was not strictly urban blues but a much broader assembly of African-American folklore, much of which had passed through the white hands of singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger before it came to British attention.
Anthony Donegan was so besotted with the 1920s blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson that he stole his hero’s name as his own. But the prime musical inspiration for skiffle was a man who had died in 1949: Huddie Ledbetter, known better as ‘Lead Belly’. He was serving a sentence for murder in a Louisiana prison when he was discovered in 1934 by folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who were on a quest to track down the original folk music of black America before it was lost to posterity.fn8 Ledbetter was pointed out to them as the best singer in Angola Prison, and the Lomaxes assumed that he might broaden their knowledge by a song or two. Instead, he reeled off dozens of tunes in a bewildering variety of styles – some immediately classifiable as blues, others as ragtime, others claimed by Lead Belly as his own creations. John Lomax petitioned the governor to have the prisoner released as a benefit to the wider cultural community. He then arranged for a March of Time newsreel to be filmed, offering a mythologised version of Ledbetter’s return to polite society and his meek obedience to his new master. Saviour and prodigy eventually fell out – Lomax describing the musician in 1944 as ‘a triple murderer51, a drunkard, a congenital liar and a super double super hypocrite’ – and while the folklorists went on to make an equally significant ‘discovery’, in the form of blues singer Muddy Waters, Ledbetter amassed a formidable recording catalogue, encompassing everything from children’s songs to field hollers from the slave era.
Perhaps Lead Belly was the perfect icon for a genre that claimed the authenticity of traditional folk music, but relied upon more than an element of showbiz hoopla (and Lonnie Donegan’s ravenous egotism). It is certainly striking that skiffle musicians found an exotic thrill in Americana which was not matched by any curiosity about Britain’s folk roots. For the early 1950s was the era when collectors and singers across the British Isles began to revolt against the colonialism of American culture, and pursue more local traditions. Some acted with political motives, keen to preserve the submerged culture of the working class in an age when historians were finally beginning to realise that they could dig beneath the familiar tales of kings and prime ministers; others were simply appalled by the banality of commercial music. They unearthed the surviving singers of traditional songs, and revived the process of documenting Britain’s folk heritage in print, on record – and on radio.
In the early 1950s, the BBC broadcast a series by Francis Collinson and Francis Dillon entitled The Postman Brings Me Songs, devoted to ballads which had been submitted to their weekly Country Magazine show about rural affairs. But the key figure in the BBC’s almost unwitting revival of British folk was A. L. ‘Bert’ Lloyd: singer, folklorist and Communist. He prepared a series of radio documentaries in the late 1930s, which ostensibly chronicled the traditional songs associated with specific professions; although, for example, his programme The Voice of the Seaman, based on his experience on a whaling ship, carefully glossed over the fact that most of his shipmates had preferred to sing Tin Pan Alley hits rather than age-old ballads. After the war, he enlisted folksinger Ewan MacColl (real name James Miller; an experienced radio actor) in his crusade to shape the nation’s perception of its musical history. MacColl poured his enthusiasm into a pioneering series of ‘radio ballads’: programmes which examined themes of working-class life, from love to work, the city to the sea, travellers to fighting men. Broadcast between 1957 and 1964, they offered a version of traditional music far removed from the genteel ballads gathered at the start of the century, and even further distant from the revamped Americana that had been dominating the skiffle clubs. Yet they, and the work of other folklorists, left their mark. From the late 1950s onwards, a network of folk (as distinct from skiffle) clubs was established across Britain – the root of a genteel tradition that stretches to this day.
There is little evidence that Lonnie Donegan ever paid much attention to the unearthing of Britain’s folk heritage, scholarly or political. Nor did he seem to stand out from his colleagues in Chris Barber’s Jazz Band in 1954. He only took centre stage as an intermission novelty, where
in Barber, Donegan and their pals would change instruments, romp through some American folklore, and then return to the serious business of reviving 1920s jazz. When Barber’s band recorded their first LP in July 1954, a week after Elvis Presley’s initial session at Sun Records, two of the eight songs were credited to the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group. These weren’t the first commercial skiffle recordings in the UK – Ken Colyer’s group, to which Barber and Donegan had once belonged, beat them by a month – but they were the first to be released. ‘Isn’t it time to call a halt52 to the sloppy use of the term “skiffle” before it changes its meaning altogether?’, complained jazzman Humphrey Lyttleton when the LP was released in 1955. ‘Country folk songs and urban rent party music are not the same thing!’ The Gramophone magazine added snidely: ‘Lonnie Donegan still sounds53 rather too much like a hog-caller from up-country.’
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