Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  All mod cons

  THE DAWN OF THE SIXTIES seemingly rendered much that had come before unhip as far as the younger population were concerned, including some of the music slang of earlier generations.

  Through it all, however, a certain amount of hip slang just refused to die, even as the music that accompanied it assumed newer forms. Hence one of the most exciting English bands to emerge in the 1960s, The Who, made their debut statement – under the name The High Numbers – with a 1964 single called ‘I’m The Face / Zoot Suit’, which employed up-to-date youth slang in one title, but wartime jazz-speak in the other. As the record company advertising copy put it at the time:

  on their first disc outing,

  four hip young men from london say:

  i’m the face

  and wear:

  zoot suit

  (the first authentic mod record)

  Calling yourself a face was current mod slang for someone who was a key player on that scene, a trendsetter, one to admire. Mention of zoot suits, however, brings us right back to the days of Cab Calloway, but to the band – and to the teenagers watching them at their regular slot at the ultra-hip Scene club in Soho’s Ham Yard – what they would have called a zoot suit was something distinctly less extravagant than the 1940s model. As for the word mod itself, well, by that point it was fast taking on a life of its own. Record Mirror, carefully briefed by the band’s ace face manager Peter Meaden, was hardly shy about aligning them with the youth movement which had originated in London just as the fifties turned into the sixties:

  How mod are this mod-mad mob? VERY mod. Their clothes are the hallmark of the much-criticised typical mod. Cycling jackets, tee-shirts, turned-up Levi jeans, long white jackets, boxing boots, black and white brogues and so on to the mod-est limits.

  Mods were tabloid fodder by then, courtesy of the well-publicised seaside disturbances at resorts like Clacton and Margate in 1963 and 1964. When not enjoying bracing days out at the beach, they were also making news in London: ‘Girls screamed and chairs flew as fights between the “mods” and the “rockers” led to several casualties at the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand last night,’ said a front-page report in the Daily Express in May 1963. However, despite frequent mentions of the m-word in the newspapers, readers might well have been confused as to what exactly a mod was supposed to be, since the meaning of this slang word had shifted comprehensively over the previous ten years.

  Secondary modernists

  A RELATIVE OF MINE RECALLS being at a school dance as a teenager in 1953, and a boy asking her the mysterious question, ‘Are you trad or modi?’ This was almost a decade before the chart success on both sides of the Atlantic of trad clarinettist Acker Bilk – although it is not clear how many record buyers in Idaho were aware that acker was Somerset slang for friend, while the word trad meant so little over there that Richard Lesters UK music film It’s Trad, Dad! (1962) was renamed Ring-a-Ding Rhythm for the American market. The division in the fifties over trad and mod was between traditional and modern jazz – the former exemplified in the UK by bandleaders such as Humphrey Lyttelton and Ken Colyer, and the latter encompassing the various strands which had evolved following the late 1940s bebop trend, played by musicians such as Miles Davis or Gerry Mulligan. In the same week that a key modern jazz figure, Dave Brubeck, made his UK debut in 1958, Kingsley Amis, normally a trad man, complained in his weekly jazz column for the Observer about the tendency of trad bands to play endless versions of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, ‘one more performance of which will either give me the screaming ab-dabs or send me over to the modernists, body and soul’.

  The word modernist cropped up regularly in Amis’s jazz column that year. However, the following March a new development in the meaning of the word was reported in the same paper, when the writer Clancy Sigal interviewed a North London street gang called The Punchers. Sigal was from America, and numbered among his friends the likes of Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel, and it was his then-fashionable Stateside appearance which helped him gain the trust of the gang:

  This ‘manor’ – a North London tenement neighbourhood – is theirs by right of birth and conquest. They sit in all-night cafes, ‘tooled up’ sometimes with knives and ‘choppers’ and crank handles, and wait for ‘pullings’ (challenges), or else go out to meet and, in the last resort, create them. . . . My character reference for the night was Allan, who had grown up with them ‘on the manor’ and owed them his pledged loyalty, even though now he was planning to marry and move away. He said: ‘The way you cut your hair makes it easier for them to accept you. You’re what we call a modernist.’ It’s the new trend with them, cutting their hair short à la St Germaine [sic] de [sic] Pres and listening to the Modern Jazz Quartet and searching hard for ‘intellectual’ words.

  These were some of the young modernists whose name was later shortened to mods, who would then go on to clash with bike-riding, leather-jacketed rockers, especially when there were press photographers and newsreel cameras in attendance. By then, however, many of the original late 1950s modernists had abandoned the scene. In 1963, the year of the first beachfront scuffles, there were plenty of references to mods in the press, but the waters were already becoming muddied. Shirley Lowe wrote an article entitled ‘Mod Or Trad?’ for the Daily Mirror in March, but she was speaking strictly about different types of jazz fan, not the scooter-riding youth cult. However, when the paper’s veteran show business correspondent, Donald Zec, referred to new pop sensations The Beatles in September as ‘four cheeky-looking kids with Stone-Age hairstyles’, many youngsters wrote in to complain. Rose, from Chelmsford, argued that ‘Zec made them out to be thick-headed Rockers, but all their fans know them to be Mods’, while ‘Two Very Angry Fans’ from Aldershot called them ‘handsome Mod boys who deserve every penny they get’. Few people these days, when asked to name a mod group, would mention The Beatles, but the band were indeed photographed at a British seaside resort that summer, as the Mirror reported in August, although their antique full-body swimwear was more 1924 than 1964:

  The sun is shining. On the beach, four young men in striped bathing suits and straw boaters go into a song and dance routine. . . . the four young men larking about on the sands at Weston-super-Mare are (left to right) Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ring Starr [sic] and George Harrison – the Beatles, appearing at the local Odeon.

  A selection of genuine mods were interviewed in 1963 by Woman’s Own journalist Jane Deverson, who eventually, together with the writer Charles Hamblett, combined the results into the very fine book-length youth study Generation X (1964). One told them, a mod will pay up to thirty guineas for a suit and up to £5 for a shirt. Most popular is John Michael, the Mod Shop in Carnaby Street, Soho. The Dunn’s shops are fab for hats. We pay up to £5 for shoes and £2.10s, for a hat.’

  Many of the interviewees were aged fifteen or sixteen, so the fact that they could pay roughly three times what high-street retailer John Collier was asking for a suit that year – while a good pair of men’s Hush Puppy shoes could be had elsewhere for £3.50 – gives an idea of the spending power helping to fuel the new teenage fashions. Deverson and Hamblett’s book directly inspired the name of the 1970s punk band fronted by Billy Idol, but the phrase Generation X now means something else entirely in many people’s minds, thanks to the 1991 debut novel by Canadian writer Douglas Coupland. He seems to have been unaware that it was already the title of a well-respected book, although the band themselves had name-checked it in various late 1970s interviews with the music press. In a 1989 piece of the same name from Vista magazine, Coupland wrote, ‘British punk rock star Billy Idol calls them Generation X. Specifically, they are college educated people born between 1958 and 1968 to middle and upper-middle class families.’ Given the overwhelmingly working-class backgrounds of the people interviewed in the 1964 book, this represented a major distortion of the meaning of the phrase, quite apart from the fact that the generation under discussion was an entirely different one, and the
London punk band themselves were hardly singing about the lives of ‘upper-middle class families’.

  This is the famous Ringo here, gear fab

  IN 1963, THE YEAR OF THE BEATLES’ huge breakthrough, a rock band formed in Stockholm who called themselves the Hep Stars – a name which belonged more to the days of Calloway than the Cavern. They achieved great success in Sweden, and a certain Benny Andersson joined their line-up the following year, a decade before he and ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with his catchy but historically flawed summary of Bonaparte’s behaviour at the close of a long and bloody career.

  Hep was unhip in England and the US by then, but language was moving fast in those days. Consider, for example, the slang-heavy cover of issue number six of an American comic called Go-Go, published in April 1967, under the slogan ‘We’re So In, We’re Out!’. ‘Like WOW!’ it shrieked. ‘We got a brand new contest! “Name The Mod Swinging Group!”’ Elsewhere on the same page, they invited their readership of twelve-year-old girls to ‘Join the IN Crowd’ and also to ‘Turn On with Petula Clark’. Just a year or two earlier, some of these words would have been adult slang, and ultra-hip, now they were fodder for schoolchildren and the mass market. The use of the word mod here was some distance removed from the youth cult which originated in London half a decade earlier. Similarly, while it was only the previous year that acid-culture guru Timothy Leary had urged people to turn on, tune in, drop out, already Go-Go’s editors were using turn on in a watered-down, non-drug- or sex-related sense. The word mod was already a lost cause, operating as a shorthand for anything up to date and modern, which – since old was bad and new was good in the brave new world of the sixties pop-culture consumer – might also have been indiscriminately labelled groovy or far out. Then, in 1968, US television audiences were treated to a new crime show about a group of undercover American police named The Mod Squad, brought to the screen by producer Aaron Spelling (later responsible for Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat). Unsurprisingly, bouts of fisticuffs between cast members and assorted rockers on Clacton seafront were few and far between.

  America may have taken the word mod to its heart, but how different things might have been if they had seized instead upon the linguistic possibilities presented by Lonnie Donegan’s State-side successes. He blazed a trail from the UK into the US charts eight years before The Beatles, and then in 1960 Atlantic Records – impressed with how Lonnie’s new music-hall-flavoured single ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’ had come from nowhere to the top of the British charts in just one week – took out a full-page advert in Billboard magazine, complete with a photo of the man himself peeking over the top of a cartoon dustbin. Virtually no one in America had a clue what a dustman was supposed to be, so the song was subtitled ‘Ballad Of A Refuse Disposal Officer’. Since the lyrics themselves were shot through with cockney slang, the advert came weighed down with handy linguistic advice for the US consumer, thoughtfully provided to Atlantic by Donegan’s manager, Cyril Berlin:

  ENGLISH–AMERICAN GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Flippin’ Skint – ‘mighty broke’

  Gorblimey Trousers – ‘workman’s trousers’

  Council Flat – ‘local government apartment’

  Daisy Roots – ‘cockney rhyming slang for boots’

  Sadly, this expensive campaign failed to have the youth of America strolling down the road in a pair of gorblimey trousers, looking a proper nana, and muttering wistfully about the Old Kent Road, despite the fact that numerous folk singers in pubs the length of Britain were even then dressing up in their finest imitation Woody Guthrie attire and singing about dustbowls, shotgun shacks and a Mississippi river most of them had never seen. However, three years later, the worldwide success of The Beatles made the port city of Liverpool an object of transatlantic longing for some, and certainly helped popularise those slang words of approval gear and fab.

  By the time of their second feature film, Help! (1965), such language was commonplace enough that a scene was included in which a Scotland Yard superintendent, played by Patrick Cargill, attempts to prove his mimicry skills to George Harrison by picking up the phone and saying, ‘Hello there, this is the famous Ringo here, gear fab. What is it that I can do for you, as it were, gear fab.’ Fab meaning fabricated was well established after the war, because of the name given to the temporary ready-made housing built at that time, pre-fab, ‘There was also a detergent powder in the late 1950s called Fab. However, fab, as a shortening of fabulous, was certainly in use at the start of the sixties, before The Beatles had released a record or come to public prominence. The Observer columnist Pendennis, writing on the first day of 1961, pegged fab as playground slang:

  Our research unit which has been looking into children’s vogue-words reports that, after several years’ service, ‘super’ is right out of fashion – about as dated as ‘top-hole’ and ‘ripping,’ in fact. ‘Super-sonic’ is the modish superlative and, among the kindergarten set, plain ‘sonic’ is preferred. ‘Fab’ or ‘fabulous’ may still be used, however, without risk of being thought passé.

  Yet fab had staying power, and millions of children would have then heard the word used frequently in the dialogue of the new TV series Thunderbirds (1964–6), in which glamorous Lady Penelope was chauffeured around in a pink Rolls with the number plate FAB 1, By this stage, the media had already begun referring to The Beatles as the fab four, encouraged by the band’s press agent, Tony Barrow, who coined the phrase.

  Nun of the above

  THE SAYING THAT’S THE GEAR! as a term of approval appeared in a 1925 book entitled Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases by Edward Fraser and John Gibbons, and had been shortened to gear by the 1950s. With the arrival of the music style known as Merseybeat or the Liverpool Sound, the public became accustomed to hearing the word used in interviews with groups from that port city. In 1964, when Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers was asked by the Daily Mirror to comment on the news that his group was to star in a feature film, he was reported as saying, ‘It’s fab, gear and lovely!’, although Cilla Black, talking to the Daily Express a couple of months later, employed the term fab gear simply to mean trendy clothes. The word had come a long way since Jonathan Swift’s day, when it functioned instead as a venerable term for what the OED properly refers to as the organs of generation, as used here in A Tale of a Tub (1704):

  And whenever Curiosity attracted Strangers to Laugh, or to Listen; he would of a sudden, with one Hand out with his Gear, and piss full in their Eyes, and with the other, all to bespatter them with Mud.

  Oddly enough, the publication of Mark Lewisohn’s epic work of Beatles scholarship All These Years, Volume One, Tune In (2013) finally seems to have debunked the much-related story of John Lennon in the band’s Hamburg days whipping out his own fab gear and urinating on a group of passing nuns.

  They don’t run trains there

  AS THE HIPPIE ERA ROLLED into view, a good example of a slang phrase which was worked into the ground by everyone from freaks to old fogey broadsheet journalists was far out. Indeed, if a television comedy series today wanted to depict a typical acid casualty of the Summer of Love, then outfitting someone in a reeking Afghan coat, tangled fright wig and beads, and having them flash a peace sign while muttering, far out, man, would probably tick most of the boxes, so enthusiastically had some original hippies adopted the new counterculture code. As Anthony Haden-Guest remarked in a 1967 issue of Oz magazine, ‘The British Empire spends 200 years unloading beads on the natives. In 9 months we get them all back again.’ Elsewhere in the same issue, an equally deadpan attitude to prevailing trends was displayed by a firm selling newly fashionable light-show equipment for concerts, using the advertising slogan, ‘TURN ON / TUNE IN / DROP US A FIVER FOR A HOT LINE TO INFINITY’.

  As an expression, far out was well established before the sixties began, and is yet another example of a phrase which originated among jazz musicians before going mainstream some time later. Tracing the term through the pages of Billboard
magazine, it surfaced, for instance, in a review of jazz saxophonist Earl Bostic’s ‘My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice’ (1954), a modern jazz take on a French tune from the 1870s (’Bostic rides mighty far out on this classical melody from Saint-Saens’ opera “Samson and Delilah”.’) Unsurprisingly, their reviewers also reached for those words again in 1959 when considering Jack Kerouac’s jazz-backed spoken-word LP Poetry for the Beat Generation (‘Most hearers will call the Kerouac manuscripts far out’). By 1962, far out had become an accepted category in the jazz world, as referenced in an article in Billboard which gave record-shop owners advice on how to arrange their stores:

  Gone are the days when a dealer could throw all his swinging merchandise in one browser box labelled ‘jazz’. . . Leading lights in the avant garde or ultramodern category are Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. These artists along with others in the far out groove seem to sell best to college clientele.

  Coleman and Coltrane were serious artists, but Billboard’s reviewers also praised the ‘far-out’ dialogue and ‘amusing jive talk’ on veteran TV announcer Don Morrow’s jazz-backed spoken-word LP Grimm’s Hip Fairy Tales (1961), in which the likes of Hansel and Gretel received a beatnik makeover:

  These two little round cats with the square handles [straight names] shared a pad at the edge of Treesville with their Big Daddy, who was a flunky, and a Big Step-mama, who was slightly off-key. Man, she didn’t dig the patter of little feet, no-wise. . .