by Simon Warner
The Teddy Boys, or Teds,10 affected an almost caricatured appearance based on upper middle-class Edwardian gentlemen of the 1910s, a working class bid to resurrect the days of Empire, though hardly articulated as a clear, quasi-political manifesto. The imperial golden age, which had stretched from sixteenth century Tudor times to the end of Victoriana and the first decade of the twentieth century, had seen England become a dominating force globally, militarily and economically, with the Union Jack planted, often aggressively, on every continent. Yet, the onset of the First World War in 1914 would set in train a remarkably speedy decline over mere decades. As Britain joined France, Germany and Russia in a brutal episode of apparent self-flagellation, those traditional European powers, most with extended track records as empire builders, engaged in four years of damaging conflict, as they strove to defend and retain their power-bases, continentally and further afield. The results were cataclysmic for most: Germany crushed and humiliated, Russia sent hurtling into a vortex of revolution and bloody civil war, and France and Britain traumatised by the horrors of human loss and the shattering financial blows inflicted by that near-Pyrrhic victory, hauled from the jaws of the savage trenches.
For England and Empire, the 25 years that followed the expensive triumph of the Great War would see the nation’s prestige further undermined and, before the Second World War concluded in 1945, the long days of pre-eminence premised on a worldwide network of colonies – both rich in raw materials and also providers of markets for the abundant products of the industrial motherland – were nearing a close. The Teds, who had made appearances on British city streets by the turn of the 1950s, were, it seemed, dissenting voices against this decline: street level conservatives who railed, even if it was without any genuine coherence, against Britain’s fading status. They regarded the street corner, the pub and the club as the battleground for their violent scuffles and drunken unruliness, but rock ’n’ roll, when it arrived only a few years later, became their rallying call and their passion, too.
George Melly considers this sleight of hand that placed the fashion symbols of a more elevated class on the backs of these raucous rebels in this way: ‘Immediately after the war, suspecting that upper-class young men-about-town might feel the need to express sartorially their dislike of the austerity-minded Socialist government, the smart tailors proposed a style based on the period of their grandfathers: the last golden moment for the British upper classes, the long Edwardian summer. There was certain amount of publicity around this style in the popular press, but the exact moment it was taken up by working class rebels (and of course immediately dropped by upper-class exquisites) is impossible to track down.’ Yet, Melly adds, if this clothing ‘bore no relation to past of these young men […] the whole thing jelled to look undeniably right. The arrival of rock ’n’ roll was all that was needed. The first real pop movement was ready to explode.’11
But, if Britain felt like something of a popular cultural backwater during this decade, there would be, nonetheless, one intriguing musical upsurge, not, in essence, an original one but a surprising one, in which imitation could be legitimately regarded as a form of flattery. When skiffle, a near-obsolete off-shoot of pre-war New Orleans jazz, reared its head on the UK side of the Atlantic, briefly but unquestionably brightly, it gave a small community of British musicians the chance to take a national and international stage. Skiffle, historically, had been an informal, rough-and-ready interval music of some decades before, bridging the gap when the jazz trumpeters, pianists and percussionists took their break. In the UK, trad jazz, or traditional jazz to give it its more formal style, was the way the post-war British revivalists referred to their regenerated form of that older tailgate brand, born of the Delta and dating from the First World War and just after.
Trad jazz, which enjoyed a widening popularity in Britain in the decade and a half after 1945, was encoded with suggestions of black identity and creative authenticity, even if it was usually played by white, often middle-class and well-educated, players. It became a soundtrack to liberal student politics, too, in the final years of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s. Further, it helped to expose skiffle to audiences as a side-show to the main sets of established groups led by Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. Lonnie Donegan, who played banjo in major bands performing trad jazz, would re-introduce the skiffle element to those groups and, during this period, both skiffle and trad jazz would transcend the field of a mere esoteric appeal and achieve chart placings as well.
In fact, so appealing did skiffle become – guitars and banjos, improvised tea-chest basses, snare drums and kazoos replacing the brass and woodwind leads of the trad jazz circuit itself – that Donegan was able to branch out as a soloist in 1954. Taking tunes that formed part of the folk and blues world in the US – songs by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, for example – this breezy singer-performer reincarnated them as Top 40 hits, mainly in the UK but also in the US. His ‘Rock Island Line’ was a chart-entry on both sides of the Atlantic.12 Along the way, the skiffle boom inspired hundreds of young musicians to take up this do-it-yourself format and create groups of their own, the acts who, in many cases, would help produce Britain’s verdant rock boom a handful of years later.
We might also usefully mention the contemporaneous folk revival, sometimes described as the second such renaissance as an earlier one had enjoyed currency in the closing years of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. The impartial historian or musicologist may have identified these 1950s musical trends, in some senses, as almost akin to parallel movements – folk and skiffle were both styles that tapped into older, historical, influences even if they had been drawn from opposing sides of the Atlantic. However, British folk music possessed a pedigree traceable for centuries, but one that had come under threat once the rural traditions of medieval England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales had been usurped by the Industrial Revolution during the long Victorian century. In that sense, it had a different, and much longer, past to the musics considered rustic folk by the Americans – such forms as blues and country or hillbilly. In short, the historical, ideological and political baggage attached to the post-Second World War folk boom in Britain was weighty: the new wave of folk singers was often connected to leftist political ideas. They regarded commercially-inclined pop music – and skiffle would be certainly bracketed under that heading once Donegan had adapted long-standing, US roots songs and taken them into the charts13 – with large suspicion.
Pop, in the eyes of the committed folk core, best represented by the likes of the active Communist and songwriter Ewan MacColl,14 was a mass manufactured commodity duping ordinary listeners with its trite and simple tropes and hypnotic accessibility; folk was seen as a pure and true music of an older land, upholding, in many instances, pre-industrial values, which had preceded this present era of the city and the factory, one increasingly obsessed with mass consumption and built-in obsolescence. In addition, post-war political tensions had seen the successful, war-time alliance of the capitalist US and the Communist USSR speedily collapse once the battle had been won. The relationship would rapidly degenerate into diplomatic stand-off then bitter Cold War, increasing the prospect of global destruction as the two superpowers contemplated unleashing their nuclear arsenals against the other. These global stresses were echoed in the attitudes of many of those on the British folk scene, who looked to the Soviets as a model of utopian hope, an operating system that rejected the profit-obsessed credo on the other side of the Atlantic.
In short, Americanisation was regarded, in some quarters, as a cultural danger, a symbol of an ethos that prized the dollar over human or communal values. Nor were these fears the sole province of the folk militants; its British critics were stretched across the ideological spectrum. In the UK, says Dick Ellis, ‘[t]his anti-American attack was primarily launched from the left and right wings of political opinion, with the left depicting America as a capitalist menace, and the right arraigning its déclassé democratisati
on …’15 Certainly, the kind of action the US establishment was taking in the post-war decade against those with socialist or Communist, worker or unionist leanings, from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, was regarded by those on the British left as an anathema and an outrage, as artists and actors, film directors and playwrights, not to mention folk musicians such as Pete Seeger,16 faced the approbation and condemnation of the investigations pursued under the authority of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
As for the more militant of the UK folkies, even if backwoods American music like skiffle shared some of the pure strains, rural precedents and cultural autonomy of British folk, they still regarded the style as a product of a social and political world which venerated capital first and even took concerted action against the philosophies of ordinary workers and those organisations that sought to represent them. The story was further complicated by the fact that the second folk revival in Britain had links to the work of Alan Lomax,17 an American who had been collecting song recordings in the fields and on the stoops of the agricultural US from the 1930s. Lomax was an inspiration for MacColl and his fellow travellers, but the American ethnomusicologist became the subject himself of FBI enquiries in the 1940s, when he was suspected of Communist sympathies. He would, as a consequence, re-locate to the UK where he would spend the 1950s.
Yet, in the UK of the mid-1950s, if trad jazz and folk had their place, and often agendas that went some way beyond mere music-making, the popular musical mainstream aimed at the increasingly important teenage markets, was centred less on ideas of authenticity or issues of political expression and much more on notions of leisure, pleasure and entertainment. In that respect, it was the raw thrill and insistent energy of the new US pop that engaged its listeners most: that potent blend of black and white styles, spawning novel genres such as rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, doo wop and more. Engrained, if unofficial, segregation that had dominated society in America for so long – and certainly in the fields of entertainment and music, film and radio – was slowly beginning to crumble. Race was still a deeply contentious issue in the conservative US mainstream but in the dynamic realm of the American teen, the older, entrenched colour coding was losing its grip; rock ’n’ roll, viewed by some as an obvious and dangerous emblem of racial mixing, was feared by much of the white establishment for this very reason. On the other side of the Atlantic, in a country only just welcoming its first significant waves of non-white immigrants at the end of the 1940s,18 such racial tensions were barely recorded. For British teenagers, meanwhile, the endemic and institutionalised racism of many parts of the US was very far from their day-to-day radar;19 they could only hear the frenetic power of this hybrid American sound and flocked to immerse themselves in it.
As for practical, home-grown approaches to recording and performance, the prime thrust of British pop or rock ’n’ roll in the latter half of the 1950s – and Donegan’s flame had pretty well dimmed as that decade ebbed – was to imitate the best of the US acts. Tommy Steele blended Cockney cockiness with a chirpy, upbeat act, Cliff Richard started as a British answer to Presley – his superb debut, ‘Move It’, in 1958 had the ring of a genuine classic – and the stable of artist manager Larry Parnes introduced another string of re-christened singers – Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Billy Fury and Tommy Quickly among them – who largely delivered anodyne versions of the American repertoire.
As the 1960s dawned, in northern English cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, hundreds of bands played youth clubs, dance halls and church halls but were little more than covers acts, recreating hit American compositions for local audiences. Certainly young, ambitious groups like the Quarrymen, then the Silver Beetles, eventually the Beatles, were scarcely more than a skiffle group, then a conveyor belt rock ’n’ roll act, whose ability to copy the American style won them home city gigs and then, eventually, residences in Hamburg. There the mercantile community of a rumbustious port, echoing the sparky vivacity of Merseyside itself, also hungered for a passing imitation of the US sound to while away their late nights and early mornings in the bars of the infamous red light strip on the Reeperbahn.
Thus, if live popular music had a place in the British psyche, it was principally by way of copycat performers. Sometimes, bona fide US artists would hit these shores – Bill Haley caused mayhem when the kiss-curled singer and His Comets played UK dates in 1956 and Jerry Lee Lewis was winning British fans galore until, in 1958, his relationship with a 13-year-old cousin saw him expelled from Britain, starting a moral backlash against the new rock ’n’ roll that would last for the next couple of years. Certainly, the furore over this music and its implied gospel of immorality saw the Cavern in Liverpool, a jazz club at the time, ban rock for some considerable time after these tawdry revelations were exposed in the tabloid press.
There was also an interesting divide in Britain at the turn of the new decade, with a style like rock ’n’ roll – which had a gallery of white stars at its heart – locking horns with genres like blues, rhythm and blues and jazz, forms perceived as closer to the real black American experience. In London the veneration of black musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker was led by blues players and aficionados like Alexis Korner, John Mayall and Cyril Davies. Not only did those UK musicians perform, record and tour their versions of this American sound, they also encouraged black bluesmen to play live in Britain, helping to organise gigs and playing host. For black musicians, marginalised and ghetto-ised to a large degree in their homeland, the respectful, often delirious, welcomes, from principally white audiences, were both surprising and gratifying.
If the capital became a hotbed for this piece of cultural exchange, Manchester was one city which also welcomed these exotic visitors. Liverpool, a more independent conurbation perhaps that had a long history as a racial melting pot, had its own distinctive musical agenda, it seemed. If, in the early 1960s, Liverpool clung to the attractions of rock ’n’ roll – there were said to be 300 active bands in the city20 at the start of the decade – London’s hip crowd gravitated towards those earlier, more gritty, black styles. The outcome was an emerging British blues boom as groups, led by the more mature Mayall and Korner particularly, became the seeding ground for a whole generation of young new interpreters of American R&B. Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood were just a tip of that iceberg. The bands these musical graduates would form included the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Manfred Mann, Cream and Fleetwood Mac. When the Beatles arrived in London in 1963, their brand of popular music – perceived as rock with a diluted black sound, closer to the nascent brand of Motown soul in Detroit – was considered to be more commercially oriented and thus less credible by the capital hipsters.
It would be a while before the Beatles managed to cast off the deep and long shadow cast by high profile US music-makers, white or black, abandon their core American rock repertoire, and find their own feet as national and international stars, though the traces would remain even then. Tunes like ‘Twist and Shout’,21 an early Isley Brothers hit, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’,22 co-penned by Motown founder Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson’s ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’,23 and Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’24 would all still feature on the group’s early LPs. It is true to say also that, after this, the three composing members of the group, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, would quickly embrace the new cultural forces – in fashion and art, in film, technology and religion – that would proliferate from the mid-1960s. They would draw promiscuously on these energies to shape their own artistic identity. As the US, and audiences internationally, took the group to their hearts, their song-writing would gain in confidence and their studio work would take on an increasingly mature and inventive veneer, as poetry, the political and the rising drug culture impinged on their prolific creative instincts.
Underpinning the changing and expanding musical landscape of the UK was a powerful throb
of evolving subcultural life. If university and art college students tended towards the cerebral styles of sophisticated modern jazz or the more dance-oriented tempos of trad, and the Teds and the rockers stuck rigidly to the sounds of rock ’n’ roll, a new breed, the mods, provided an influx of fresh energy to the scene in the early 1960s. Jonathon Green comments: ‘Like Teds, the mods emerged from the London outer suburbs […] but unlike […] the Teds they were more middle-class, often Jewish, the sons of middle-management, small businessmen or some equivalent […] they began life as philosophers as well as dandies.’25 Originally dubbed modernists – a result of their favouring innovative jazz giants like Miles Davis and John Coltrane – by the start of the new decade, this grouping had moved in favour of the rampant soul styles, the rootsy Stax label generally favoured over the hit factory of Motown, but they also found, amid the blossoming blues boom, a string of British groups to admire. The Who, the Kinks and the Small Faces became their UK idols. The mods adopted Italian fashions – jackets, suits ties – and the US army overcoat – the parka. Initially, they affected a liking for continental philosophy, European cinema and Beat writing, too. Green quotes mod Steve Sparks: ‘Mod before it was commercialised was essentially an extension of the beatniks […] it was to do with modern jazz and to do with […] [a]mphetamine, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker.’26 This subcultural community venerated black authenticity and danced at all-night but unlicensed clubs, replacing alcohol with speed. The mods rejected the grit and grime of the rocker and his motorbike, adopting clean-lined Italian scooters, Vespas and Lambrettas, as their mode of transport. By 1964 and into 1965 this diverging tribalism saw outbreaks of violence in South East English coastal resorts – Clacton, Brighton and elsewhere – as the mods and the rockers fought pitched Bank Holiday battles on seaside beaches. The ideological differences were based on appearance, class and musical choice, but the motivations for conflict were largely fuelled by adolescent testosterone at a time when the manacles of a disciplinarian society were loosening.