| Elvis Presley, Heartbreak Hotel! You just thought "What is that?" It was incredibly exciting, incredibly rebellious, and you just thought “That’s it. THAT IS IT! I dedicate the rest of my life to whatever that is!” |
| Rock'n'roll was a consequence of the limited racial desegregation in the U.S. which had followed the war. Until the early fifties, black entertainers were accepted in 'showbiz' if they mocked their race (Amos 'n' Andy, Bert Williams), or if their talent was, by white cultural standards, outstanding (Paul Robeson, the Inkspots). On the black side of the great divide, however, there was a tradition of music which had evolved out of jazz, gospel and blues to meet the needs of an exclusively black audience. By the late forties it was recognisably something else; in fact it was several somethings else: boogie-woogie, jump blues, second-line, doo-wop and a dozen other styles, some pure, some hybrid, all black. There had been musical cross-fertilisation across the black-white barrier, but it had been the musicians' secret. It hadn't had the effect of mixing up the audiences. |
| When white teenagers in the U.S. became consciously separate from their parents on the one hand and their kid brothers and sisters on the other (an awareness that occurred earlier there than in the U.K.) some of them began to tune their radios to black stations and listen to this stuff, in spite (or probably because) of the fact that their parents regarded it as 'jungle music'. |
| The new market did not go unnoticed. A Cleveland disc-jockey called Alan Freed was probably the first broadcaster to play black records for a white audience and he claimed to have coined the term 'rock'n'roll' to describe what he would otherwise have had to call 'race music'. The audience grew, and before long, white musicians latched onto the sound and began to reproduce it in a deodorised form. |
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| With the exception of the few who took a specialist interest in obscure American records or tuned their radios to AFN (the American Forces Network), British teenagers were unaware of rock'n'roll during its formative years. The beast therefore leapt the Atlantic full-grown and ravening, and its impact was all the greater for the delay. |
| There had been straws in the wind. In September 1955, South London cinemas had reported Teddy boy disturbances at showings of The Blackboard Jungle, which featured a brief appearance by Bill Haley singing Rock Around The Clock. But it was almost a year later that the film-of-the-song-from-the-film opened in Britain and rock'n'roll became a matter of national controversy. |
| I'd read in the paper that there was this film and kids were tearing up the cinemas, so I went to the cinema and, sure enough, as soon as it started off, with one accord the audience leapt to its feet and started bopping about in a way I'd never seen before in my life. I was looking at the screen and then the audience as if I'd been at Wimbledon. I was totally bowled over by the simple display of animal force and energy, and I loved it. |
| I went three times to see that film. 'Then we'd be dancing coming home, in the middle of the road with all our friends, remembering the footsteps and everything. |
| On 10 September 1956, the Manchester Guardian described the scene at the Odeon thus: |
| The film was stopped for eighteen minutes, in the hope that the uproar among the audience of 900 would subside, but each time one of the 'rock and roll' bands interrupted the story of the film with the first manic whine of a saxophone, boys leapt from the front stalls into the front aisle and stamped their suede shoes in the octopus whirling of jive. |
| Young people at the back of the cinema, when they were not training fire-hoses, gave vent to their emotion by stretching their arms out to the screen like savages drunk with coconut wine at a tribal sacrifice. Sometimes they flung their lighted cigarettes about: always they chanted the songs and banged out the insistent beat on the carpet. Even two usherettes were seen tapping their hands against the chocolate trays. |
| Two days later, the rioting spread to the streets. The Times kept track of the damage: |
| Two policemen were injured when police were called to disperse a crowd singing and 'jiving' in the New Kent Road, near the Elephant and Castle, London, late last night after a performance of the film Rock Around The Clock at the Trocadero cinema. Bottles and fireworks were thrown and four shop windows were smashed. |
| Watch committees in other towns and cities moved quickly to ban the film. It was debated by eminent panelists on 'Any Questions'; Lord Boothby declared that 'one of the purposes of us old fogies in life is to stop young people being silly.' Jeremy Thorpe MP called the film 'musical Mau Mau' and said he was worried that 'a fourth-rate film with fifth-rate music can pierce through the thin shell of civilisation and turn people into wild dervishes'. |
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| The Bishop of Woolwich wrote to The Times supporting the idea of a ban. He was worried about 'a steady growth of jive': |
| The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm-loving age-group and the result of its impact is the relaxing of all self-control. |
| The hysteria soon cooled and rock'n'roll became a youthful foible to be greeted with an indulgent smile. In December 1956, when a group of people yelled 'See you later, alligator' to the Duke of Edinburgh as he boarded the Royal Yacht Britannia in Port Lyttleton, New Zealand, he shouted back 'In a while, crocodile' and, according to the Daily Telegraph, 'young people in the crowd howled their delight'. |
| By the time the next big rock'n'roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, arrived the following year, the royal family's hepcat credentials were impeccable. Princess Margaret not only went to see the film, she was reported to have actually tapped her stockinged feet on the brass rail of the Royal Circle. |
| Meanwhile Haley himself had come and gone. His UK tour in February 1957 effectively burst the bubble. Promoter Tony Hall, who hated the music anyway, was gratified to note that: |
| When the kids saw what he looked like - an old man with a kiss-curl and a band full of even older men in plaid jackets, lying on the floor playing double basses under their chins - it was just terrifying, it really was. Ironically, they never sold any records at all. You couldn't give them away after they'd been here. |
| Fortunately, other American rock'n'rollers were on their way. In the meantime, Tin Pan Alley, still wedded to the supremacy of moon, June and David Whitfield, was fighting off a guerrilla movement - skiffle. |
| Lonnie Donegan arrived in the Top Ten in January 1956 with three great advantages over his competitors. First, although he sounded American, he was British; this helped him survive the first wave of imported rock'n'roll. Second, although he was British, he sounded American; this made him fashionable. Third, any British youngster who could afford five shillings' deposit for a guitar could hope to sound like Donegan inside a fortnight. |
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| Skiffle was black American folksong of pre-war vintage, set to a shuffle rhythm supplied by such improvised instruments as washboard, tea-chest bass, gallon jug (which, blown correctly, makes a wonderful farting noise but which never caught on in the British revival) and even comb-and-paper. Chris Barber's Jazz Band featured interludes of skiffle in performances during the early fifties, and Donegan, who had featured in these sessions, put a couple of the songs onto a Chris Barber LP. One in particular, 'Rock Island Line', was requested so often on the radio that it was released as a single, furnishing the first of twenty-six Donegan hits and starting a craze. |
| I was in a skiffle group. We used to have red shirts and black jeans. We were called the Blackjacks. I could play one doo-dah on the guitar, and that was D7. That meant three fingers, and all the time on D7 I was just strumming away, and I thought that was terrific! |
| In '56 it was a guitar! They were things that they had in the window at Woolies and they were six pounds, nineteen and sixpence. It was your wildest dream until you got it home and you started to press down those three strings to make “A”. Goodness me! I remember it actually shredding your fingers. What do you expect with a guitar that cost six pounds nineteen and six? |
| The skifflers who persisted and progressed went in two directions. Some acquired primitive amplifiers, electric guitars and drums and mutated into rock'n'roll groups along the lines of Cliff Richard and the Shadows or Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Others retreated into the insulated world of the folk clubs, where electricity was a dirty word and the perennial topic of conversation was 'Can white men sing the blues?' |
| To the purists, skiffle and rock'n'roll are entirely different kinds of music, but to the teenagers it was all the same thing: it was rhythm, drive and excitement, it came from the US, it made you want to jig about and it was for you, not your parents. |
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