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CELEBRATING 5 YEARS OF QUALITY WRITING

THE BALLAD OF BRITAIN

THE STORY OF NORTHERN SOUL

How Music Captured The Soul Of A Nation Will Hodgkinson

A Definitive History Of The Dance Scene That Refuses To Die David Nowell

An adventure into lyric and melody … and what it means to be British.

An engaging account of the Northern Soul scene by a key player still keeping the faith.

In 1903, the Victorian composer Cecil Sharp began a decade-long journey to collect folk songs that, he believed, captured the spirit of Great Britain.

Over a century later, with the musical and cultural map of the country transformed, music critic and TV presenter Will Hodgkinson sets out on a similar journey to find the songs that make up modern Britain and tries to understand how the country has represented, and defined, itself through lyric, melody and song.

What began as an underground 60s Mod scene in unlicensed clubs in the North West of England became a youth craze that has confounded its critics by growing into a dance phenomenon where followers share a passion for the music of Black America. The Story of Northern Soul takes the first ever in-depth look at the music, the artists and the people frequenting the all-night venues that are synonymous with the British Soul Scene.

THE HISTORY OF THE NME High Times And Low Lives At The World’s Most Famous Magazine Pat Long The definitive, history of the influential New Musical Express.

The History of the NME is an authoritative history, released in time to celebrate the magazine’s 60th birthday, and written by former assistant editor and journalist Pat Long is an insider’s account of the high times and low lives of the world’s most famous, and most influential, music magazine. The bands, the brawls, the drugs and much more, this is the first – and definitive – book about the infamous NME.

CRAP LYRICS

MIND THE BOLLOCKS

A Celebration Of The Very Worst Pop Lyrics Of All Time … Ever!

Johnny Sharp

A Riotous Rant Through The Ridiculousness of Rock ‘N’ Roll Johnny Sharp

A humorous celebration of pop’s music most ridiculous lyrics.

A hilarious collection of nonsense that orbits our beloved rock ‘n’ roll stars.

Former NME journalist Johnny Sharp has trawled half a century of lyrics to find the funniest examples of crippled couplets, outrageous innuendo, mixed metaphors, shameless self-delusion, nefarious nonsense and flagrant filth (not to mention unforgivable over-use of alliteration) of over 120 of the most ridiculous hooks, lines and stinkers from pop poetry through the modern ages.

He’s serious as cancer when he asks: Are we human, or are we dancer? And where do we go from here? Is it down to the lake, I fear?

From deeply suspect sexual politics to insane self-promotion, musicians’ elevated position in popular culture allows them to hold forth freely on subjects about which they know precious little. For the first time, Mind The Bollocks collects some of the finest stools of wisdom ever to fall from their foul, ill-educated mouths. The book also digs beneath the ‘culture of nonsense’ surrounding popular music including hyperbolic album reviews, unkind quotes and unbelievably believable urban myths.

To celebrate our fifth birthday, Portico is proud to present five music titles to sing out loud about. Written and published with passion and authority by popular authors, each one of these fantastic books is a genuine first of a kind. Be it the story of Northern Soul, the history of the infamous NME, a simple ballad of Britain or just a big bunch of bollocks, each book in this series will strike a major chord. Go on, pick up a Portico and press play.

The Ballad Of Britain Will Hodgkinson

The History Of The NME Pat Long

The Story Of Northern Soul David Nowell

Buy the book

Buy the book

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Crap Lyrics Johnny Sharp

Mind The Bollocks Johnny Sharp

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www.anovabooks.com PORTICO

The

Ballad of

Britain How Music Captured The Soul Of A Nation Will Hodgkinson

PORTICO

Contents Preface

1

chapter one

Before the Journey Started

3

chapter two

Morris Dancing in Oxford

25

chapter three

Cornwall

38

chapter four

Devon, Somerset and The English Air

65

chapter five

By the Light of the Magical Moon: Gypsies in Sussex

90

chapter six

The Garden of England: Kent

110

chapter seven

London, Part One: Pop in Suburbia

130

chapter eight

London, Part Two: The Underground

151

chapter nine

The Ancient Spirit, Part One: Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire

170

chapter ten

A Town of Bob Dylans: Anstruther in Fife, Scotland

194

chapter eleven

The Ancient Spirit, Part Two: Edinburgh to Bradford

210

chapter twelve

Sheffield

228

chapter thirteen

Why Does Everyone in Liverpool Love Pink Floyd?

251

chapter fourteen

The Dyfed Triangle, West Wales

267

chapter fifteen

The Ballads of Britain

294

Bibliography

303

Acknowledgements

305

Tracklisting

307

Chapter One

Before the Journey Started T WAS A SPRING MORNING IN PECKHAM, SOUTHEAST London, a Saturday, and there was that rare wonderful feeling of not having to do anything at all. ‘Lord And Master’ by Heron melted out of the speakers of the spillagestained portable CD player in our kitchen. ‘See the waters drifting by, on a winter’s day in the cold,’ whispers Tony Pook, lead singer of this short-lived and obscure band from the early seventies, who recorded their debut album in a field in Berkshire. ‘I am the lover of everything, and I walk with a friend of the trees.’

To an acoustic guitar, mandolin and accordion accompaniment Tony Pook (graduate of Reading University, part-time musician, full-time dreamer) creates a gentle vision of a rustic, peaceful Britain. ‘Lord And Master’ is redolent of hedgerows and muddy fields, of dappled sunlight on a forest floor. You can hear birdsong in the background, and at one point what sounds like a tractor. The words speak of being at one with the land, of soaking into the eternity of nature. It makes you think about the mysteries of British life, and it makes you want to be in the countryside, preferably with a jug of ale, sitting in the shade of an oak tree beside a flaxen-haired English rose, the laces of her bodice slightly loosened. The nineteenth-century French historian Hippolyte Taine claimed that the first music of England is the patter of rain on oak trees. Listening to Heron, you know what he means.

I

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Our house is a modern semi in one of London’s less bucolic neighbourhoods, and it sits in the shade not of an oak but of a large brick wall with broken glass along the top.

The transformative power of ‘Lord And Master’ is such that the ancient spirit of the land soaked through the house that morning. Music twinned with imagination has a transcendent quality. If William Blake could see angels in the trees of Peckham Rye then I don’t see why we shouldn’t hear the scrambling of woodland creatures in our privet hedge, even if it was only the rustle of crisp packets being stuffed into it by the boys from the school across the road.

The coffee bubbled up. I poured it into a large mug and added enough hot milk to turn it the right shade of golden brown. I rubbed my eyes and stretched and thought about the pleasant dream of a life lived close to the earth.

Suddenly a bass boom of the kind that has been known to cause involuntary bowel movements among the elderly exploded into life on the street outside. The boys that live in the house opposite spend every weekend tinkering with their Audi TX and they had just successfully installed two enormous speakers. The rustic whimsy of Heron was smashed into oblivion by the dominant sound of Peckham: electronic beats, heavy bass, incidental whoops and a rap in a growled, ultra-masculine voice that was saying something about wanting to scare dem bad. Then the Doppler effect of a police siren waxed and waned. Then our children attacked each other. Then our flame-headed neighbour ran down the pavement shouting, ‘Ya facking carnt!’ as she chased her husband with a cricket bat.

What is British music? It’s a question the musician Cecil Sharp sought to find an answer to when, in 1903, he embarked on a 21-year quest to notate traditional English songs that were otherwise in danger of dying out. Concentrating mainly in Somerset, Sharp wound his way through pubs, farms and vicarages in search of songs passed down

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through oral history that captured the story of the land and its people. Many were based on ballads written down on single sheets of paper called broadsides, sold by pedlars from the sixteenth century onwards and describing in narrative form a current event like a military victory or a society scandal; but now these were the organic songs of the people, changing lyrically and musically as they travelled from village to village and telling the story they needed to tell.

Sharp believed that such songs offered ‘the expression of aims and ideals that are primarily national in character’; unconsidered utterances that exposed the real nature of the people and the land they were a part of. This was the organic music of rural England; the music that, according to the composer and fellow collector Ralph Vaughan Williams, lived ‘in the minds of unlettered country men, who unknown to the squire and the parson were singing their own songs’.

Sharp grew up in Denmark Hill in Camberwell, about a mile from our house, and made a living as a conductor, pianist and teacher. It was a middle-class suburb then, with the kind of high terraced houses, now mostly broken up into flats, which had enough space for servants’ quarters. He had passed forty before he discovered there was such a thing as English folk music. ‘It was generally assumed that the English peasant was the only one of his class in all Europe who was unable to express himself in terms of dance or song,’ writes Sharp in English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions, which was published in 1907, a time when the idea that rural England could produce its own culture of value was something of a novelty.

Even morris dancing, that staple of village fetes the country over that has its roots in the ancient seasonal pageants known as mummers’ plays and possibly the Moorish traditions brought back from the Crusades, was almost extinct in Sharp’s day. He had never come across it

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until Christmas 1899, when he was staying with his wife’s mother in Headington, near Oxford. Bad-tempered, tired and suffering from eye-strain considerable enough to cause him to wear shades during daylight hours, he looked out of the window to see a strange procession of eight men in white, garlanded with ribbons and bells, carrying sticks and handkerchiefs. A concertina player and a man dressed as a fool – tattered ribbons, odd-coloured leggins and a stick – accompanied the procession, which formed into two lines in front of the house, jumped high into the air, and danced with springs and capers on the frosty ground.

Sharp was transfixed. He introduced himself to the concertina player, a 27-year-old called William Kimber, who told Sharp that they were called The Headington Quarry Side and were performing a dance called ‘Laudnam Bunches’.

They were touring around town in the hope of making a little money to help their families get through Christmas. Enraptured and fascinated by this aspect of rural Britain he never knew existed, Sharp notated the five tunes to which the dancers performed. So began a mission to capture the folk traditions of Britain that continued for the rest of his life.

Sharp’s second eureka moment came on 22 August 1903, when he was visiting the vicarage of his friend Charles Marson in the village of Hambridge in Somerset. Marson’s gardener, a local man called John England, was singing a song called ‘The Seeds Of Love’ to himself as he mowed the vicarage lawn.

I sowed the seeds of love And I sowed them in the spring I gathered them up in the morning so soon While the small birds do sweetly sing.

According to his assistant and fellow collector Maud Karpeles, Sharp whipped out a notebook and wrote down

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the tune there and then, before getting England to repeat the words. He harmonised the song and persuaded a fellow guest to sing it at dinner that evening. As Karpeles wrote: ‘The audience were delighted . . . it was the first time the song had been put into fancy dress.’

For England, a labourer’s son from Hambridge’s neighbouring village of Westport, father of eight children and husband to the fragrantly named Rose Morris, ‘The Seeds Of Love’ was a nice tune to accompany his work, probably learned when he was working in Dorset as a young man.

To Sharp it was a revelation. Over the next two years he collected 1,500 songs in Somerset alone, which he then published in the five-volume edition, Somerset Folk Songs. In 1911 he founded The English Folk Dance Society. It remains in operation to this day, continuing Sharp’s goal of preserving the sword dances, morris dances, folk tunes and ancient pagan traditions of England that had, until Sharp and his contemporaries came along, often existed only in the shared memory of the people that performed them.

Sharp came with an agenda, though. He did want to preserve the folk music of rural Britain, but only in a version that could be taught in schools without fear of reprisals from outraged parents or churchmen – and a song like ‘The Seeds Of Love’ is quite obviously about sex. ‘When every English child is, as a matter of course, made acquainted with the folk songs of his country then, from whatever class, the musician of the future may spring in the national musical idiom,’ he writes in English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions. But he could hardly offer a traditional Somerset ballad like ‘The Keeper’, which celebrates rape, to the music teachers of primary schools the country over in the hope of getting their young wards to perform it at the end-of-term pageant. So he sanitised the words, turning what was once organic into something refined and fashioned, and sharpened up the melodies which, having previously only existed in the oral

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tradition, changed according to the person singing them.

By notating English folk songs and writing piano parts he created a body of national music for schoolchildren to learn, thereby strengthening the artistry and identity of England itself.

Not so long ago NJ (my wife, whose actual name is Nichola Jane) and I were invited to a centenary celebration of the English Folk Dance and Song Society at their headquarters at Cecil Sharp House on the corner of Regent’s Park Road and Gloucester Avenue in Camden, North London. The invitation came out of the blue. I knew nobody at Cecil Sharp House. But the fact that the letter had clearly been written on an old typewriter by the society’s secretary in an age when even Christmas cards from one’s parents take the form of an email intrigued and charmed me. So we duly turned up to the high-windowed red-brick hall at half past seven to be met by a lanky man with large glasses who welcomed us with effusive enthusiasm. First he took us into the building’s basement, where a tiny, youth-hostel-like bar was manned by a ruddy-cheeked fellow with a lustrous beard who served real ale with ebullience and wine with resentment, and then to a hallway upstairs where a woman was standing behind a trestle table stacked with CDs and leaflets. The atmosphere was more like that of a jumble sale in a village hall than a major event in the centre of London.

Our host took us into the main room. It was full of mostly middle-aged and elderly people sitting on the kind of stacking chairs used for school assemblies. We took our seats and watched as one astonishing scene after another unfolded before us.

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Cecil Sharp House is in the heart of Camden, London’s alternative-music neighbourhood. Dank, blackwalled venues are filled every night with an endless parade of image-conscious young people hoping their next gig will be the one that propels them towards the dazzling heights of fame and glory. In Cecil Sharp House, processions of men with beer guts and beards danced with sprightly glee around swords and whacked at each other with clubs. At one point a teenager in tight white trousers and gelled hair was wheeled out for a special solo dance. A woman in the audience fainted.

A man dressed as a crocodile – large green head, snapping wooden jaw – prowled up the aisle and attacked an innocent-looking girl who could not have been more than twelve. A tiny, fierce-looking woman with enormous owl-like glasses, who was standing entirely still on the stage and had been intermittently barking orders and admonishments at audience members for arriving late or talking during performances, bellowed, ‘Leave that virgin alone!’ A man dressed as a Victorian milkmaid stumbled about as if drunk.

A timid-looking boy of eight or nine sprinkled talcum powder onto the hall’s wooden floorboards, only to be interrupted by a solid-bodied woman who, with her lank brown hair, swaying foot-length tasselled skirt and sensible jumper, looked rather like my old sociology teacher. ‘Not like that, darling, not like that!’ she bellowed in a piercing, teacherly voice, grabbing the talcum powder from the cowed child and shaking the stuff with a rhythmic samba-like swing of her impossible-to-ignore bottom. Then a group of men leaped out and attacked each other with brooms.

The evening had been made up of dances and songs that belong to the ancient traditions of Britain; traditions that NJ and I, like most people in Britain, had scant knowledge of. We had both seen morris dancers, but this tended to be on a Saturday morning in a town quadrant outside a

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branch of Mothercare and hence didn’t make too much of an impression on us. Growing up in Cornwall, NJ took for granted bizarre rituals such as the Padstow ’Obby’Oss (a man dressed as an ornate decorated horse, a remnant of the goddess Epona, leads a procession through the town of Padstow on May Day) and Flora Day in Helston (an evolution from the medieval feast day of Saint Michael, featuring a garlanded parade that cuts right through people’s houses whether they like it or not on 8 May), but even she was amazed by the evening’s entertainment.

‘It’s so elemental and mysterious, yet so domestic,’ she said as we walked to the Underground. ‘It’s just like The Wicker Man.’ The performances at Cecil Sharp House were indeed reminiscent of the cult British musical horror comedy from 1972 in which a seemingly cosy world – a Scottish island – is revealed to be filled with erotic murderous foreboding and pagan exoticism after a policeman from the mainland goes there to investigate the disappearance of a girl. The islanders are seemingly happy living close to nature, in communion with the rites of fertility and the changing of the seasons, and not too worried about sacrificing the odd virgin to ensure a good harvest. The songwriter Billy Bragg once described the film as ‘a terrible juxtaposition of sad folk songs we sung at school, and Britt Ekland’s tits’. The film does indeed feature Britt Ekland’s tits, but not her bum – that was supplied by a bum double.

What really astounded us about the evening was that, however parochial and unsophisticated it might have seemed, it had an abundance of character – and theatre.

This was the world that had fascinated Cecil Sharp a hundred years previously: an anarchic world where distant memories of mysterious pagan rituals blend into the familiar and everyday, and which was in Sharp’s time totally divorced from urbane middle-class life. It was a world the quintessen-

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tially English composer Vaughan Williams turned into national property. He based his melody for ‘To Be A Pilgrim’, which every child of my generation would be made to sing in school assembly, on that used in an old Suffolk seduction-and-desertion ballad variously known as ‘The Blacksmith’ and ‘Our Captain Calls’. And yet at the beginning of the 21st century this localised world occupied such a small patch on the landscape of the British imagination.

If Cecil Sharp was the great chronicler of English music, Ralph Vaughan Williams was and remains its greatest exponent. Vaughan Williams, born into upper-middle-class gentility in Gloucestershire, had been exploring the music of Henry Purcell and English hymns when in 1903 he began his own quest to rescue traditional rural songs from extinction after embarking on the ancient ceremony of taking tea with a vicar. It was in the market town of Brentwood in Essex, and the vicar had invited an old labourer called Charles Pottipher along. Pottipher began to sing an old tune called ‘Bushes And Briars’, and although Vaughan Williams had never heard it before he later wrote of having ‘a sense of familiarity . . . something peculiarly belonging to me as an Englishman’.

It wasn’t just the delicate melody of ‘Bushes And Briars’ that entranced the composer; it was the way it captured something of the dreams and concerns of anonymous people. He felt that this was our real national music, not the national anthem or music from a military brass band.

Vaughan Williams, a confirmed atheist, sought to distil the spirit of English life in his music whether that meant borrowing ideas from the Elizabethan organist Thomas Tallis, taking a melody from an old folk song or finding inspiration in a walk on the Sussex Downs. It was that blend of the commonplace and mystical, the melancholic and hopeful, that he rightly identified as lying at the heart of the national character; at the heart of the national music.

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There’s no single word to describe the type of yearning sorrow you can hear in Vaughan Williams’ ‘Pastoral’ Symphony or ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, but I think it is something intrinsic in the English character: of dreaming of things as they fade and die, of the constant battle against attachment to all things transient. It’s a reflective, comforting type of sadness. There is a Brazilian term for this mood, forever found in the words of sambas: saudade. It’s that feeling of being in a glorious place and knowing you can’t stay there for ever; of being in love and aware that you are creating a fantasy for yourself. Vaughan Williams probably knew, consciously or not, that the magic of his music, and of English music as a whole, lay in this idea of something intangible and impossible to capture; the paradox of a living past.

There’s a controlled sadness to the English – and possibly British – character. We may not throw ourselves over to drama and tragedy, at least not during working hours, but it seems that so many of us are forever battling a sense of loss. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ wrote Pink Floyd on ‘Time’, from 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. You can hear it in British music from ‘Greensleeves’ to Radiohead: a sound, or an underlying mood, which suggests everything isn’t simply going to work out for the best. But that doesn’t mean we’re all doomed either. We keep calm and carry on.

Not everyone felt the patrician, educated approach of Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams was in the interests of the British people. In 1944 A L ‘Bert’ Lloyd, a journalist, broadcaster, folklorist and committed communist who was born in Wandsworth in 1908 to an AA patrolman father and a mother who mimicked the songs of the Gypsy singers she heard in her childhood, published a pamphlet called ‘The Singing Englishman’. Lloyd argued that the early-twentieth-century collectors presented a sanitised

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version of traditional British music that was a travesty of the real thing. ‘Englishmen who only know their own folk songs through cultured arrangements of the more insipid melodies will be surprised to hear that, really, English traditional music is among the very best in Europe,’ he wrote.

‘Hungary has her Bartok, Spain her Pedrell and Torner.

The USSR has the collaborators at the folklore institute in Leningrad. But the best we can produce are Cecil Sharp and the Rev. Baring Gould (who wrote of English agricultural labourers as ‘the peasantry’). The old traditions exist, as a rule, merely as something artificial. Folk-dance means a prancing curate in cricket flannels. Folk song means the BBC Singers cooing quaintly in the accents of Palmers Green and Ealing.’

Lloyd claimed that rural folk-song was a fantasy. It had been appropriated by the bourgeoisie who found it to be charmingly romantic, much like the Pre-Raphaelite painters re-imagining the myths of old Albion. A year after ‘The Singing Englishman’ was published Lloyd went even further, claiming that traditional music in England was completely dead. ‘There’s no two ways about it: in England folk music has to be looked on as a thing of the past,’ he concluded in an article in the magazine for the Workers’ Music Association. ‘The series has long since been discontinued and all we have are the back numbers.’

In the years that followed Lloyd discovered that the situation was not as bleak as he had painted. In Newcastle he was introduced to the lost heritage of mining songs of northeast England; in East Anglia he was reacquainted with Harry Cox, a farmer with a huge repertoire of traditional songs.

Lloyd went on to become a key figure in the folk-song revival of the late fifties and sixties, staging concerts by Anne Briggs and The Watersons and recording albums of traditional English and Scottish ballads with the hard-line communist actor, playwright and songwriter Ewan MacColl.

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He formed Centre 42, a touring arts festival that aimed to ensure folk music was performed throughout the workingclass towns of Britain. His goal was to promote the kind of urban folk-song found in America at the time, music that spoke of the realities of working-class life in a post-industrial climate. He believed that unless British music lived in the moment and reflected the realities of the people involved in it, it would die.

I could understand Bert Lloyd’s concerns. The evening at the English Folk Dance and Song Society, fascinating as it was, had more than a touch of the museum piece, like a preservation society containing something the rest of the world couldn’t care less about. Most of what we call folk song has its roots in the countryside of a pre-industrial Britain, which is a very different place from the Britain we live in today. But Lloyd had as much of an agenda as Cecil Sharp did. In viewing traditional folk as the music of the British people he politicised what was formerly a mostly unselfconscious expression of daily realities, hopes, dreams and loves. MacColl started The Singers’ Club, where performers were only allowed to sing songs from the places they came from in an attempt to instil purity of purpose; a joke considering MacColl was from Salford but sang in a Scottish accent in honour of his ancestral roots. The Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch got thrown out of The Singers’ Club in the early sixties for daring to perform ‘Anji’, an instrumental classic that every would-be guitar maestro across the land was currently trying to master, making it the folk tune – the shared experience that had entered into public ownership – of the moment.

For Lloyd and MacColl British music had to be about joining unions and squaring up to exploitation and most of all about rules: they saw a right way and a wrong way of approaching the music of the people. For all his immense talent and evangelising zeal MacColl was more like a trade

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union leader than an artist, which helps explain why the one-time leader of the National Union of Mineworkers Arthur Scargill held him in such high esteem: on MacColl’s seventieth birthday in 1985 Scargill presented him with a miner’s lamp inscribed, ‘To Ewan MacColl for outstanding service to the British working class’. But there’s a reason why there are a lot more love songs in the world than songs about working in a factory: because artistic expression is far more likely to be an emotional pursuit than a political one.

A hundred years on from the days when Sharp was collecting songs like rare butterflies and Vaughan Williams was dissecting and reworking them into something of his own, British music is as different and varied as the country itself. Listening to Heron on a CD on a Saturday morning as the far more urban sounds of young Black Britain blast out of a car stereo outside goes some way to show how much things have changed. Vaughan Williams and Sharp were searching for music that was affecting because it had a deep truth to it, but I was listening to what would generally be called folk music in an environment that was alien to it, while the music that came out of the car across the road, which nobody in their right mind would call folk, was producing a far more prescient soundtrack to the reality of life in a notoriously crime-ridden if nonetheless charming (you have to live here to feel it) neighbourhood.

Sharp was notating the songs of the rural working classes at a time when Britain was predominantly white, and when people travelled far less and had a much narrower access to global information. He believed that even different parts of the same county developed their own musical style, just as those who lived and died in the countryside could probably tell which town and village somebody came from according to the intonations of their accent. ‘Tunes from West Somerset are partly Celtic and are smoother and more polished than those from East and Mid-Somerset,’ Sharp

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concluded. ‘“Bruton Town” is forceful and rugged and typifies the Anglo-Saxon, one in whom the need for self-expression is the dominant feeling.’

Bruton Town in South Somerset is just off the A303, which cuts past Stonehenge and features some of the most dilapidated Little Chef transport cafés known to humanity.

It is also the name of a mournful if elegant song, possibly dating back to the fourteenth century, that tells the story of two brothers, sons of a farmer, who murder the family servant sleeping with their sister. In some versions of the song his ghost comes to the sister in the dead of night to tell her where she can find his bloodied body (in a ditch alongside a bush); in others she finds the body herself. Are these stories and the melodies they are couched in still a reflection of whatever it is that gives Britain its identity? Beguiling as they are, they only make up a part of a bigger picture.

Listening to Heron in the unlovely environs of Peckham on a Saturday morning in spring got me thinking about the forces that shape music: history, place, characters, stories, and most of all the land itself. If you take note of the accent of someone from a large city like London or New York the chances are they’ll talk in a fast, clipped tone without too many drawls or long pauses. The further away from the city you go, the deeper into the countryside you venture, it seems the people speak slower and slower. A few years ago I visited some small towns in Mississippi and noticed that the people I met spoke in drawled tones without too much variation in pitch. They spoke like the blues – the music that Mississippi gave birth to – sounded.

Surely the same rules apply to British music. There must be a reason why Sheffield, a city I hardly know but associate with large factories and brutalist architecture, has produced erudite, observant, slightly cynical bands from the nineties and 2000s like Pulp and The Arctic Monkeys alongside a welter of futuristic, experimental groups from the

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seventies and eighties: ABC, Heaven 17, The Human League, Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire. Presumably there’s something in the water that makes everyone in Liverpool go mad for Pink Floyd, one of the most archetypal southern products of melancholy-indulging privilege there is. Why is everyone in Cornwall a hippy? And what is the folk music of London, a city that is more cosmopolitan, diverse and aspirational than anywhere else on the planet?

The idea to try and answer these questions, and the bigger one of what British music is, germinated in our kitchen in Peckham to the combined sounds of rural hippy folk and urban grime, and took flower in the fastnesses of rural England over an early-summer weekend. Our friends Will and Stacey had invited us to come away to the tiny cottage in Bedfordshire that Stacey’s family had been renting for a nominal amount since the 1960s. Once there had stood nearby a grand stately home called Battlesden House, which the ghost of a dishonest steward atoning in death for the misdeeds he committed in life is said to have haunted. There’s very little about the cottage to reveal we are no longer in 1972, making it one of my favourite places in the world. You need to get a coal fire going to have hot water, the games cupboard is stacked with such decidedly non-21st-century diversions as Boggle and Mastermind, and the old brick walls are sparsely decorated with paintings Stacey’s hippy uncle did forty years ago. Best of all is the collection of LPs that goes with the Dansette in the corner: Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin III, The Basement Tapes by The Band and the debut by the Americanborn, Britain-based singer Madeleine Bell are played on rotation whenever we visit. They made up the soundtrack to this idyll. And Will and Stacey are about as English as it gets.

Will has a permanent frown and an ability to make the simplest things complicated. Stacey hates the sun, loves cold rainy days, and will crease up at the mention of anything

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fart-related. Both are very kind. All of this contributed towards a rather British experience, especially when added to our national preoccupation: the weather.

The weekend we went to the cottage it did little but rain. This meant we did little but eat, read, drink whisky and listen to records as the children played games and drew pictures. ‘This could be an advertisement for rustic contentment,’ said Will as the children read Richard Scarry books on the old sofa and we sat around the aged wooden table flicking through 35-year-old copies of House And Garden magazine, ‘if it were 1971.’

Will and I did manage to take my son Otto and daughter Pearl out on a kite-flying expedition, through yellow fields of the unfortunately named rape crop. The wind was high and flying the kites was easy; for about a quarter of an hour I lay down in the rape and attached the single string of a kite to my belt buckle, dreaming of English bliss. We walked through the field and along a path that passed a single oak tree filled with birdsong, and then by the side of a small stream that ran alongside a field with rather large cows with horns. It was only when we had left the field that we realised they were actually bullocks. We arrived at a church, cold with its 800-year-old stone walls, high stainedglass windows and empty pulpit and pews. I had to tell the children not to go up to the altar where the cross stands aloft.

‘Why not?’ asked Pearl, who was five.

‘Because it’s disrespectful,’ I replied.

‘Why is it disrespectful?’ asked seven-year-old Otto.

‘Because it . . . it . . . it . . . do what you’re told.’

I sat down at a pew and flicked through a hymnbook, my head filling with never-to-be-forgotten melodies as I read the words to ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ and ‘To Be A Pilgrim’. When William Tyndale’s New Testament was distributed and published in 1526 a significant step towards the creation of a Church of England was made. The absolute

18

The Ballad of Britain

power of the Catholic Church and the Pope at its head was undermined for the first time. Hymns about being British became known in the centuries that followed. Catholics and witches were persecuted; in 1642 a Protestant parliament declared war on a Catholic-sympathising king. Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas. The English made God one of their own.

We took a small road back to the cottage garden, where apple and pear trees break up the lawn and strawberries and broad beans and potatoes grow in a vegetable patch next to a derelict caravan that was up until a few years previously occupied by an elderly man with no teeth and a back-to-front wig. Will put the kettle on and I dropped Led Zeppelin III onto the Dansette. I listened to the strange distant blues of ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’, and read the portentous sleeve notes inside the gatefold: they explained how the band had written much of the album at a derelict cottage in Snowdonia, which helped in ‘painting a somewhat forgotten picture of true completeness which acted as an incentive to some of the musical statements’. It was a reminder of what a strange achievement Led Zeppelin made. They took traditional English songs and American blues, envisioned a mystical Arcadia, sprinkled in a dash of the occult and became the biggest band in the world. When I was at university a girlfriend from the Midwest told me that most American kids in the eighties grew up listening to Led Zeppelin. That means soaking in old, anonymous tunes like ‘Gallows Pole’ and ‘Blackwaterside’ (which found its way onto the band’s first album with a Jimmy Page writing credit as Black Mountainside) without realising it; tunes that had been almost forgotten in this country.

It was raining again by now. Rivulets of water made snaking patterns on the window pane, while Will did his best to make a fire in the hearth out of damp wood and newspaper as thick smoke mingled with the twisting steam rising

19

Before the Journey Started

from the large brown teapot that Stacey had just filled. The children made a line of discarded raincoats and boots that went from the front door to the back room, where they had discovered a wooden box filled with prehistoric Lego. We sat by that gnarled wooden table, moved from cups of tea to tumblers of whisky, played one Led Zeppelin record after another and talked about what made British music.

‘It’s the post-war, music-hall tradition of Alma Cogan and The Andrews Sisters,’ offered Stacey, who has always had a weakness for this sort of thing – chirpy pop made by desexualised, unthreatening elder-sister types. ‘And Kate Bush and Morrissey.’

‘Of course, that’s nonsense,’ said Will, closing his eyes, leaning backwards and scratching his head in the way he does when he’s feeling mildly irritated by and intellectually superior to everyone around him. ‘It’s George Formby and his ukulele.’

‘Everyone knows British music is The Zombies and The Kinks,’ I announced, haughtily. ‘It’s that combination of whimsy, childishness, surrealism and cynical humour that all those sixties bands did so well. Big truths are captured in a small-minded way. Even the songs of The Who were based on everyday observation – I think they only became a stadium rock band by mistake. Syd Barrett sang about a man who stole knickers from washing lines on Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne”, and there’s a sense of loneliness to it all. It’s not grandiose – it’s eccentric. Even when it gets pompous and overblown, as happened in the early seventies with progressive-rock bands like Yes and King Crimson, there’s still something rather absurd about it. I mean, Rick Wakeman staging a musical called The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table On Ice and then having so much dry ice that all the dwarves kept crashing into each other . . . it’s ridiculous.’

‘Why don’t you go off around Britain and make field

20

The Ballad of Britain

recordings?’ said NJ, who until now had been reading a magazine, declining to take part in the debate. ‘That would give you an answer to the question.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who was that guy who travelled across America making recordings of all the old blues and country singers?

Alan Lomax? You could do the same thing here in Britain.

Find the real Britain. After all, you have the gear for it.’

Alan Lomax was one of the great collectors of folk music. The son of the musicologist John Lomax, he travelled not only across America but also through Europe and the West Indies, recording interviews and songs with the people he met everywhere he went. He understood that everyone has a story to tell; everyone has a song worth singing. Lomax and the young Sussex folk singer Shirley Collins travelled through the southern states of America in 1959 and discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell, now rightly regarded as one of the giants of country blues, alongside hundreds of other singers and musicians both black and white – a significant gesture given that they were moving through the South at a time of high racial tension. He understood the value of musical expression from any place in the world. He promoted multiculturalism before there was such an idea. He was a heroic figure. Who wouldn’t want to walk in his footsteps?

As for the gear NJ mentioned, she had bought me an eight-track portable recording studio for my birthday six months previously as a way of encouraging me to write songs. It was called a Zoom MRS-8. It was less than a foot long, but I found I could record an entire album on it. Technology had moved on so much that, while Lomax had to lug a weighty reel-to-reel tape machine through the fields of Mississippi to capture authentic moments of spontaneous musical expression, you could take a Zoom in a supermarket carrier bag to pretty much anywhere. It ran on batteries and

21

Before the Journey Started

had a built-in microphone. Lomax had to make sure his subjects were ready before recording them since tape was finite and expensive, and this destroyed spontaneity somewhat. With the Zoom’s digital memory you could record as many times as you wanted and it cost nothing – if the recording went wrong you could just wipe it out and start again. But so far I had done little more than take it out of the box. I fear technology, and the instruction manual for this complex piece of machinery was an inch thick.

‘Cecil Sharp went around Britain collecting songs, but that was a hundred years ago,’ she continued. ‘It’s been fifty years since Alan Lomax did his recordings. Things have changed. You could try and update what they did. You know, get a sense of Britain now.’

Making field recordings meant that it wouldn’t be necessary to get to grips with the portable studio’s multiple functions. One track was all it took. Surely even I could manage to press play and record and point the thing in the direction of someone singing.

‘Why do you want me to do that?’ I asked. ‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’

‘I’m trying to get you to use that bloody thing I saved up to get you for your birthday,’ NJ replied. ‘It cost a fortune.’

Summer was about to begin. It was the festival season.

The cash-rich era of the music industry was over and a new haphazard model was taking its place. We could be returning to an age where the pub and the church became the temples of the land once more, where people were rediscovering the simple joys of singing together, of making music for its own sake, of representing the reality of their lives through song. And I had got through half a bottle of whisky and wasn’t thinking straight.

Slamming my fist down on the table, I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’

22

The Ballad of Britain

‘You could make a musical document out of it,’ said NJ, biting into an apple. ‘A portrait of Britain. Maybe record something from each place you go to.’

‘Yes! And I can travel around on bicycle, just like Cecil Sharp.’

‘You still haven’t fixed the puncture on the back wheel that happened about four months ago,’ interjected Will, who is the kind of man who thinks nothing of cycling from London to Brighton and back again after work – in a corduroy suit.

‘All right then, by car.’

We owned an extremely unpleasant white Vauxhall Astra, bought for £500 from my mechanic because he was dying and I couldn’t say no. (He’s dead now.) We never washed the car and the back seat was covered in the kind of sickly detritus only children are capable of producing.

Shards of lollipop, chocolate wrappers, crayons, plastic toy parts and comics with titles like Sparkle Girl combined to turn the rear half of the car into a sugary hell. NJ hated it with a passion. In what I think might have been an unconsciously deliberate gesture she drove it into a wall a month after I returned from the garage with it and so, my regular, reliable mechanic now being dead, I had to take it to the one at the top of our road in Peckham. He welded a black side panel on what is otherwise a white car. When I pointed out his quite noticeable mistake he shrugged, blew a cloud of smoke into my face, and asked for a hundred pounds.

‘Are you going to include Ireland?’ asked Stacey.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘It’ll have to be contained by car journeys and the island we live on, and the music of Ireland is such a huge story in its own right. But I don’t really know what I’m going to include or where I’m going to go yet. NJ only just came up with the idea five minutes ago.’

‘As long as you don’t leave the kids for months on end or make me sleep in a tent I don’t mind what you do,’ said

23

Before the Journey Started

NJ. ‘But I think it will be a good project for you. You’ve been moping around the house for too long now.’

She was right. It was time to get out there and, as tourist boards the nation over implore us, discover Britain.

For the next hour or so we worked out a plan. Half-term was coming up and NJ wanted to visit her parents in Cornwall. This is the isolated, wind-ravaged county she had grown up in, despite appearances to the contrary: NJ’s chief interests are fashion and glamour while the rest of her family enjoy growing vegetables and dismantling tractors.

It would be a good place to start making field recordings.

NJ wanted to travel down with the children a few days ahead of me by train, in part I think because she was ashamed to be seen in the Astra.

London to Cornwall would thus be the first leg of the journey. But en route I would make my first field recording at the place where it all began: in that little village in Oxfordshire where Cecil Sharp first saw the rather odd, uniquely British phenomenon that is morris dancing.

24

A DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF THE DANCE SCENE THAT REFUSES TO DIE

PORTICO

Contents Foreword Introduction

vi 1

Part I 1 I Can’t Help Myself 2 Boogaloo Party

9 26

Part II 3 A Little Togetherness 4 Turn the Beat Around

72 92

Part III 5 I’m Coming Home in the Morning 6 Turning My Heartbeat Up 7 Don’t Take Away the Music

118 161 185

Part IV 8 The Panic is On 9 Time Will Pass You By 10 I’ll Never Forget You 11 Soul Self Satisfaction 12 It’ll Never be Over for Me 13 The End?

208 222 257 291 316 319

Useful Information Acknowledgements

329 330

Part I

1. I Can’t Help Myself ‘Motown basically formulated the disco scene. Without Motown we wouldn’t have been able to keep the dance floor going . . .’

Mojo paused for breath, sweat running down his face, and ran his hand through his close-cropped hair. Around him the legions of other dancers ground to a halt and spontaneously applauded the DJ as the record faded out.

‘This place is amazing,’ gasped Mojo for the tenth time that night. And then the bassline and driving beat started again and he vanished back into the darkness of the dance floor, gone again, lost in a Northern Soul heaven.

Mojo, alias Blackpool Pleasure Beach worker Wayne Morris, is enjoying his first all-nighter for twenty years; the first allnighter since the heady days of Wigan Casino, which he frequented with the Blackpool lads for several years. Now in his forties, he finds himself in the late 1990s moving and grooving once more in the company of a thousand like-minded souls.

His sense of disbelief is shared by everyone else who has been away from the Northern Soul scene for two decades or so. Just when you thought you had said goodbye to the ridiculous demands of an all-nighter, the anti-social hours, strained domestic relationships, obsessive record collecting, the heartthumping anticipation, the legs-turning-to-jelly ordeal of dancing for hour after hour, marathon motorway journeys, the naughty substances and the sheer exhilaration of being part of 9

The Story of Northern Soul

your scene, Northern Soul jumps back up and bites you.

Tonight the venue is the glorious King’s Hall in Stoke-onTrent. Its vast oblong dance floor, raised stage and balcony ensure that stepping inside is like entering a timewarp for former Wigan Casino-goers. Twenty years, marriage, children, hard work at a career, a more mature outlook on life, a whole succession of hobbies and interests, and what happens?

You’re back on the dance floor in the middle of the night while the rest of the world sleeps, surrounded by gyrating, spinning, jumping and shuffling bodies that, like yours, don’t seem to move quite as quickly as they did in 1975. And do you care? Do you hell! Northern Soul fans are getting what most people can only dream about – a chance to relive the music, the company and the magic of their youth.

The cavernous King’s Hall is tonight hosting the 25th anniversary of the long-gone Torch all-nighters. A quarter of a century! The whole world is a radically different place and so much has happened to its inhabitants both collectively and individually. But tonight, in Stoke, from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m., Northern Soul fans are converging to celebrate their music and their lifestyle, which has remained virtually unchanged.

No other underground music scene has survived for so long and demands such dedication and commitment from its followers. No other music scene can inspire men and women in their thirties and forties to embark on marathon car and train journeys to reach an event they feel they simply can’t afford to miss. No other music scene can turn otherwise sensible and mature people into latter-day versions of the excitable teenagers they used to be.

The Northern Soul scene did not start with the Torch allnighters. Ex-regulars at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester will tell you they did it first. As, probably, would ex-customers of the Flamingo in London.

The heritage of the Northern Soul scene from the viewpoint of the new millennium is a long and chequered one indeed . . .

Northern Soul by its very name must have been created, moulded and sparked into life by the clubs and music enthusiasts 10

I Can’t Help Myself

of the North of England, right? If only it was so simple. To look at the roots of what became known as Northern Soul one has to acknowledge the trends, style and sub-culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the ‘in’ scene in London.

It is impossible for those of us who came into the world during a later era to appreciate fully the tremendous social changes that happened during that momentous period. It took the advent of rock’n’roll, or ‘the devil’s music’, depending on your age or your point of view, to bring about a chain of events that led to that dreaded creation, The Teenager.

Pre-1950s, youngsters were basically younger mirror images of their parents. The austere post-war years, rationing, and the social and class structure of British life in particular all had a profound impact on the way families thought and acted. Young fashion was non-existent. Young people dressed and styled themselves as their parents did. The pop charts of the time reflected the ‘grown-up’ tastes of the record-buying public.

Enter the rock’n’roll years, which hit Western society with the force of an atom bomb. Young people had money in their pockets, for the first time, something to say and were becoming a force to be reckoned with. The record, film and clothes industries were awakened from their slumbers and realised that here was a vast untapped market.

In 1955 pent-up teenage frustrations and aspirations towards setting their own identity were sparked into life by the unlikely figure of Bill Haley. The 29-year-old former hillbilly singer hit gold dust with a fusion of country and western and rhythm and blues that was becoming known as rock’n’roll.

‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ catapulted Haley and The Comets to international stardom. Here was an exciting, unique youthful-sounding music that teenagers could call their own. Meanwhile Black American rhythm and blues artists were already experiencing mixed feelings about their music proving so popular with white teenage audiences. For every original black recording finding a niche market and healthy sales promoted by plays on black-only radio stations, there were several more that were overlooked in favour of cover versions by white artists, which then stormed up the national 11

The Story of Northern Soul

pop charts. The then top-selling R & B label, Atlantic, was the first to complain about the raw deal meted out to black artists, a cry that would often be heard in ensuing years. Small, blackowned independent labels simply could not compete with the major, white-owned labels in terms of promotion and exposure and distribution to a mass audience.

One man who championed the cause of black R & B artists was the ‘King of rock’n’roll’, American DJ Alan Freed. As well as playing the ‘new’ music to ever growing audiences on his radio show in Cleveland, Ohio, he was also promoting tours of R & B artists. He wasn’t without his critics. ‘All rhythm and blues records are dirty and as bad for the kids as dope,’ one sniped. Freed snapped back: ‘As in the past, the shrill outraged cries of critics will be lost beneath the excitement of a new generation seeking to let off steam. There’s nothing they can do to stop this new solid beat of American music from sweeping across the land in a gigantic tidal wave of happiness.’

In 1956 a former Memphis truck-driver called Elvis Aaron Presley was signed to RCA Victor. This young upstart was bound to upset the status quo right from the start. Not only was he young and darkly good-looking, he made riotous dance music that got the pulse racing. But even that was forgivable compared to his most heinous sins that would drive strait-laced parents all around the western hemisphere to apoplexy: he had SEX APPEAL and he SOUNDED BLACK. Together with Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, et al., Elvis would personify the rock’n’roll revolution.

Suddenly here was a young guy with attitude, slicked-back hair, tight jeans, and who moved his body on stage in such a way that led some TV stations to show him from the waist up.

Together with movie icons James Dean and Marlon Brando, he helped the youth of America to forge their own identity, one far removed from that of their parents.

Many white middle-class American and British parents openly despised rock’n’roll. It was unchristian, unwholesome and the jiving, gyrations and mass hysteria it brought from youngsters would lead to the end of the world as we know it. At least that’s what opponents of this musical revolution would 12

I Can’t Help Myself

spout from the pulpit, on TV and in newspapers at every opportunity. As every teenager knows, this only increased the attraction of ‘their’ music and ‘their’ scene.

Across the Atlantic, Britain was avidly following this social and musical upheaval. Rock’n’roll groups and Elvis imitators sprang up and suddenly the British pop charts were taking on a more youthful look. Teddy boys appeared, with their slickedback hair, flamboyant jackets, drainpipe trousers and arrogance.

Phrases like ‘the generation gap’ and remarks about how teenagers were dressing and behaving confirmed that youngsters now had a different outlook and different needs from their parents.

Coffee bars became places for teenagers to meet, chat, listen to their favourite 45s on the recently invented juke box, fight, seek members of the opposite sex, and plan the downfall of the civilised adult world. By the early sixties there was no going back, and fashion, pop music, politics, and social change were on the agenda.

For many, the mainstream rock’n’roll offerings of Elvis, Cliff Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Big Bopper, etc., provided more than enough musical satisfaction. But for others, those exciting recordings merely whetted their appetite for more American recordings. There was a growing fan base in Britain of black American blues and rhythm and blues artists. The fledgling Beatles and Rolling Stones were among those turned on by Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker.

Guitarist Alexis Korner is often credited with forming the first British R & B group, Blues Inc, in 1961. His famous clubland ‘jamming’ sessions would bring on stage a veritable Who’s Who of future rock stars, like Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and John Mayall and Paul Jones of Manfred Mann.

Many R & B fans were forming local groups all over Britain and bashing out cover versions of their American idols, and among them were the young Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison. It was in October 1962 that The Beatles had their first hit with ‘Love Me Do’, starting a spiral of success that 13

The Story of Northern Soul

had never been seen previously, or since. By the time ‘She Loves You’ hit number one for four weeks in September 1963, Beatlemania was in full swing. It has been argued that this one record was the trigger for the swinging sixties, moptop hairdos, free love, and hedonism on a large scale. What is beyond dispute is that the Lennon-McCartney composition sold over a million copies in the UK alone, showed both their talent for writing original material and the fact that there was a market for it.

The Rolling Stones and others, meanwhile, were slower in putting their faith in their own compositions. Mick Jagger, acknowledging that in the early days his band like many others was primarily an R & B cover band, once remarked memorably: ‘We do not use any original material. After all, can you imagine a British-composed R & B number? It just wouldn’t make it.’

Both supergroups would find success with cover versions of black American artists’ songs. The Detroit-based Motown label, founded by ex-boxer Berry Gordy, was having a major say on the American charts, but was hitherto little known among the general music-buying British public. This would be rapidly rectified (as we will see later), as a result of the Beatles recording three Motown songs on their second album, ‘Please Mr Postman’ (originally cut by the Marvelettes), ‘Money’ (Barrett Strong) and ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me’ (The Miracles).

The Rolling Stones would the following year find chart success with cover versions of Bobby Womack’s ‘It’s All Over Now’ (which they cut at Chess Records in Chicago) and Irma Thomas’s ‘Time Is On My Side’. A further look at just some of the cover versions that stormed the British charts in the early 1960s shows how much influence black America was already having on the UK. The Beatles and the Tremeloes covered ‘Twist and Shout’ (previously done by the Isley Brothers). The Tremeloes also covered the Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me’; the Hollies did Maurice Williams’s ‘Stay’ and Doris Troy’s ‘Just One Look’; Sandi Shaw covered Lou Johnson’s ‘There’s Always Something There to Remind Me’.

More and more British bands were modifying the American R & B sound and calling themselves beat groups. The British 14

I Can’t Help Myself

pop-buying public went mad, snapping up the ‘Merseybeat’ releases with gusto. For every few pop fans there was a purist in the background shouting: ‘Hang on a minute, these are R & B recordings. Let’s see what else the original artists have to offer.’

It suddenly became hip to know, or own, records by the American R & B and soul artists whose success on the other side of the Atlantic had not yet translated into British pop sales.

One of the forerunners of the underground soul scene in Britain was the Flamingo Club in London. Long before the term soul was even coined, the Flamingo Club was at the heart of the capital’s jazz and rhythm and blues scene in the late 1950s and early 60s. Starting life as a Jewish social club, moving on to modern jazz and later staging live jazz gigs, the Wardour Street club gained a reputation second to none. Its weekend allnighters, running from midnight to 6 a.m., attracted a wide following among the local music cognoscenti, black American servicemen based around the capital and recently-arrived West Indian immigrants. Fashion-conscious youngsters – more than a few of whom were gay – and increasing numbers of black music fanatics were attracted out of the coffee and jazz bars to sample the Flamingo’s unique atmosphere.

The American Forces Radio Network, set up to cater for visiting servicemen, was also gathering a cult following among the indigenous population. The BBC in the early sixties was still entrenched in classical and easy-listening music. The Musicians’ Union had a stranglehold over the amount of BBC air time given to playing recordings. This did much to protect the livelihood of professional musicians but little to promote popular music. Jazz, rhythm and blues, or beat music had even less chance of finding its way onto Auntie’s airwaves.

Oddly enough, certain types of music, such as classical or ‘songs from the shows’ were exempt from such restrictions.

(With the benefit of hindsight, a knowledgeable DJ could, for instance, have played April Stevens’ ‘Wanting You’ without fear of being castigated because the original song derived from a show.)

In the pre-Radio 1 days of 1962, the more adventurous teenagers found music more to their liking on the American Forces 15

The Story of Northern Soul

Network, which could be easily picked up on their portable radios. Radio Luxembourg was also essential listening under the bedcovers at night when your parents thought you were asleep.

AFN in particular featured a heavy sprinkling of blues, jazz, R & B and current material by black artists like the Coasters and the Drifters. One of the many people drawn to this style of music was veteran Northern Soul DJ Brian Rae. ‘I just preferred that sort of music,’ he said. ‘It never entered my head that it was soul or R & B, or whatever. The first record I ever bought myself was “Charlie Brown” by the Coasters.’

Warrington-based Brian was at the time attending college in Manchester, and won himself a scholarship to a one-year course in food studies at the College of Distributive Trades in London.

So, aged sixteen, he found himself living in the capital and soaking up the different culture and experiences of big city life. Armed with the American Forces Network, Radio Luxembourg and the American charts courtesy of Record Mirror, he gradually learned more and more about the wonderful black music he was listening to. His record collection was also growing and an invitation, which he accepted, to play them at a function for a group of Kensington College students gave him a liking for DJing.

Then one night Brian found himself in the West End near the Flamingo, watching streams of suit-wearing young Mods coming off trains and buses and frequenting the all-night clubs and café bars. He was fascinated by the fashions and the ‘cool’ but slightly glazed look that the Mods had as they passed him by.

He was particularly fascinated by the amount of business a hot dog stand appeared to be doing. The owner had two separate lines of bottles of Coca-Cola, and the Mods were showing great interest in one particular row. Brian was later told by a friend that the hot dog seller was actually pushing bottles of SKF ‘blueys’ – amphetamine pills used by Mods to keep them going at all-nighters.

Finding himself a £12-a-week job in Tottenham Court Road with a firm of wallpaper and paint distributors, Brian made friends with his colleague Chris Lorimer, who went to the Flamingo and shared his love of black music. Chris explained to a naive Brian the illegal trade the hot dog seller was doing. It also 16

I Can’t Help Myself

turned out that he was living next door to an up-and-coming singer called Rod Stewart who, with his group Steam Packet and other R & B acts like Long John Baldry, was playing at the Marquee.

Monday night became a regular Marquee night out for Brian and Chris, and the young northerner even managed to land a job as a roadie helping out the Marquee acts. Back at the Flamingo, the R & B diet of live music was dished out by the resident band, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, who did many cover versions of black American recordings. In the interval, the records maintained the jazz/R & B format that was pulling in an ever more enthusiastic crowd.

One Friday night, Brian made his debut at the Flamingo allnighter (a less than wise decision as he was working the following day) and slightly apprehensively spent most of the night sitting in the theatre seats in front of the stage while people danced all around him. ‘I found it all very seedy but yet very exciting,’ he confessed. Through Chris he found a whole new circle of friends, including one Dave Godin, who would later become a columnist for Blues and Soul magazine. Dave had founded the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society and during a visit to his flat in Camden Town, Brian was handed an honorary membership card.

Dave’s presence and influence immediately captivated Brian.

‘There was the guy in this room with all these records. He played the Little Eva album and talked about Doris Troy and “Just One Look”.’

Brian also became aware that his circle of friends included a number of homosexuals. ‘I once found two blokes in bed together in this house. I had no idea they were gay. I was really naive. It was all a hush hush thing then. Nobody talked about being gay. It made me feel a bit uncomfortable.’

Returning to the north older and wiser about the ways of the world, Brian continued to develop his DJing career. An early highlight had already been DJing at a function at Northwich Memorial Hall where the Beatles were crowning the May Queen. Their first hit single, ‘Love Me Do’, had just been released and Brian was witnessing their transformation from a 17

The Story of Northern Soul

decent local band into rulers of the pop world.

By now his material included items like Len Barry’s ‘1-2-3’, Phil Spector productions and the ever-reliable Tamla Motown current releases. He recalled: ‘I was playing mainly soulinfluenced material. Some of it charted, but only after it had been played for a while. All we were trying to do was find our own way and a musical direction.

‘I loved DJing. I had a million jobs in the sixties. I was fired left, right and centre for not turning up because I had been up late the night before!’

By 1964, with the Tamla Motown hit factory in full operation and labels like Stax, Atlantic and Chess all producing quality material, the hip DJs knew they had to have all the new release material in order to keep ahead of the game. So Brian placed a regular order with his local record shop to reserve his copies of all the UK Tamla Motown releases. They were almost without exception guaranteed floor fillers wherever Brian worked: ‘It was a form of dance music that worked well and was very playable. It was a bit more earthy and had such a wide appeal.

Motown basically formulated the disco scene. Motown was responsible for people being able to dance to records all the time.

‘If you were playing, say, Billy J Kramer, or a lot of the chart stuff you never got a constant dance beat. Motown became so popular because it was so danceable. Before long there were disco juke boxes in pubs. Without Motown we wouldn’t have been able to keep the dance floor going for hours.’

Without Motown it is debatable whether there would have been such a groundswell of followers to sustain the future Northern Soul scene. What Motown did, via its irresistible dance riffs, catchy choruses and memorable melodies, was popularise soul music in an unprecedented way, and almost single-handedly bring about the discotheque phenomenon.

The story of the Motown empire is the kind of rags-to-riches tale that is the stuff of fiction.

Motown founder Berry Gordy’s dream of a musical empire and a ‘family’ of recording artists that would help, inspire, nurture and fight for each other, came so spectacularly true that 18

I Can’t Help Myself

his accomplishment surpassed all before it and has never been equalled since. Berry Gordy set out to make music that would strike a chord in the hearts of everyone across America, and later the world, and that is exactly what he achieved.

Is there anyone over the age of thirty who hasn’t got at least one Tamla Motown record in their collection? Is there any adult, of any age, who hasn’t sung along to ‘Tracks of My Tears’, ‘My Girl’, or ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ on the radio? The appeal of Motown in many ways reflects the enduring appeal of Northern Soul. Regardless of race, age, or class, there are always delights to be found in the Tamla Motown catalogue, just as there are always delights to be found in the more obscure output of the American soul labels of the 1960s.

Berry Gordy billed his empire as ‘The Sound of Young America’. Not ‘The Sound of Young Black America’ or ‘The Sound of Young Black Americans for White America’. He wanted to create music that appealed to young people regardless of their background or colour. He dreamed of a record label where young talented singers and musicians could walk into Motown as unknowns and emerge as polished, hit-making performers. The Motown legend surely changed the face of popular music for ever.

Berry Gordy Jnr was born in 1930, the son of a small Detroit businessman and one of eight children. Always creative and innovative, Gordy discovered a talent for music and songwriting that for years did not necessarily translate into a steady income.

Scorned by his family at times for ‘not getting a proper job’, he persevered and in 1957 wrote a song with his friend Roquel Billy Davis that was to prove the launching pad of his career.

That song was ‘Reet Petite’, which the already-popular Jackie Wilson recorded and took to number one across America.

Learning fast about the realities of royalties and profits from recordings, Gordy formed his own song-publishing company, Jobete (an anagram of his children’s names, Joy, Betty, and Terry).

In 1959 he borrowed $800 from the family savings to set up his own record label, figuring that as writer, publisher and label owner he would have complete control (and maximum income) 19

The Story of Northern Soul

over all future releases.

Toying with a name for his new label, Gordy wanted something familiar and thought of Tammy – the title of the number one pop hit at the time by Debbie Reynolds. But, on going to register the name, he found to his dismay that someone had already beaten him to it. So he dropped the last two letters and came up with Tamla. In 1959 Tamla’s first release was ‘Come to Me’, which he co-wrote and produced with the performer Marv Johnson.

It was a big hit regionally, and when United Artists picked it up for national release it became an American best-seller. Gordy and his Tamla label had arrived.

A young songwriter and singer called William ‘Smokey’ Robinson had by this time become friends with Gordy. When he rushed in excitedly and told Gordy to listen to his song ‘Bad Girl’, his friend recognised another hit.

Gordy also recognised that he needed another label, and cash to manufacture and distribute the new pressing. He recalled in his autobiography, To Be Loved: ‘The Tamla name was commercial enough but it had been more of a gimmick. Now I wanted something that meant more to me, something that would capture the feeling of my roots – my home town.

‘Because of its thriving car industry, Detroit had long been known as the Motor City. In tribute to what I had always felt was the down-home quality of the warm, soulful, country-hearted people I grew up around, I used “town” in place of “city”.

‘A contraction of Motor Town gave me the perfect name – Motown. Now I had two labels. My original plan was to put out all the solo artists on the Tamla label and the groups on the new Motown label. But this plan, like some others, turned out not to be practical.’

Gordy made test pressings of ‘Bad Girl’ by the Miracles using the famed United Sound Studios in Detroit, but found he could not afford to put it out nationally. (After much haggling and hawking the tape around music moguls, the Chicago-based Chess label took the master from him and the Miracles had a hit.)

Fired with his success as a songwriter and producer, and bolstered by the belief in his own talents and those of the people around him, Gordy bought a two-storey house at 2648 West 20

I Can’t Help Myself

Grand Boulevard in 1959 from which to launch his music empire. The building – which became known as Hitsville – was converted to meet its new identity. The garage became a recording studio, the first floor became a lobby and control room. Living quarters were located between the basement and the first and second floor.

Singer Barrett Strong literally ran into the studio one day as Berry Gordy was going through a raw version of ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ on the piano. Barrett took up the tune, ‘Money’ became Tamla recording 54027 and Gordy had another hit, via his sister Gwen’s label, Anna. (He could not press and distribute enough to meet national demand.)

By now he had assembled a wealth of talent. The cramped basement studio became the territory of the musicians subsequently known as the Funk Brothers. Many musicians were used

by Motown, but the core group who generated the ‘Motown sound’ were Benny Benjamin (drums), James Jamerson (bass), Earl Van Dyke (piano), and Robert White (guitar).

Some of these fine musicians would later earn Gordy’s wrath by doing freelance sessions at Ed Wingate’s Ric Tic and Golden World labels, which themselves became sought-after Northern Soul labels. (Edwin Starr and J J Barnes were just some of the artists who graced Wingate’s labels. Ironically, Gordy later bought both labels and incorporated both acts into the Motown family.)

‘Way Over There’ by the Miracles became Tamla 54028 in 1960 and went on to sell sixty thousand copies. Yet bigger success came with ‘Shop Around’, which soared to number two in the pop charts and shipped around a million copies.

The Motown empire never looked back and generated hit after hit for artists who became household names – Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Temptations and Stevie 21

The Story of Northern Soul

Wonder, to name but a few.

Oh yes, there was also the ‘No Hit’ Supremes. They were socalled because for three years they failed to emulate the success of their peers. Yet when they finally made the breakthrough with ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ in 1964, giving Motown its first ever USA and UK number one, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard went on to become the most successful girl group ever.

A major driving force behind the Motown empire was the songwriting and producing team of Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier. The latter told Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine that the Motown sound was born during the recording of Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Come And Get These Memories’.

Lamont Dozier, said Ian, ‘went to Berry Gordy and said he wanted to put jazz chords on a stomping rock beat. That created the Motown sound and the Northern Soul sound.

‘Northern Soul is basically the Motown sound that other people tried to imitate. Motown was the Detroit sound and when the recordings came out of other cities like Washington and Chicago they often ended up with a fuller, blacker edge than Motown did. Personally I hated the Memphis stuff, Otis Redding, and all that, but I loved many others.’

In October 1964, the Supremes visited Britain for the first time to promote their single ‘Where Did Our Love Go’. That same year, the pirate radio station Radio Caroline started broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. The conservative BBC Radio service had still not woken up to the interest in black music, so it was left to Caroline DJs like Tony Blackburn to unleash current soul recordings to the listening public. Tony Blackburn himself, often the butt of many jokes, is credited by many soul fans for helping to make some of the more commercial-sounding Tamla Motown productions into hits in Britain.

In March 1965 Gordy sent a specially-assembled package of Motown stars to Britain. Billed as the Motortown Revue, it included a mouthwatering line-up of stars: the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Miracles, Earl Van Dyke, the Contours, Marv Johnson, and the Temptations. British R & B keyboards maestro Georgie Fame completed the bill of 22

I Can’t Help Myself

what turned out to be a financial flop. Although Motown artists had a large fan base in Britain, their following in Beatlemaniadominated times was not sufficient to ensure sell-out shows from city to city.

Ex-Supreme Mary Wilson recalled in Sharon Davis’s The Motown Story: ‘The audiences were good but kinda thin . . . in my opinion the show was too specialised for British audiences.

We should have had a few more British bands with us.’ The author related how one promoter’s theory for the small audiences was that ‘By the time people got to know how good the show was, the revue had moved to another town. I didn’t make any money at all, but I have to admit those Motown people know how to put on a very good show.’

Newspaper critics were equally enthusiastic but baffled by the low turnout for each show. ‘What’s the matter with the British public when they won’t support such brilliant artists?’ questioned one writer.

The tour, however, served to reinforce the growing reputation of the Motown artists. The Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, headed by journalist Dave Godin from his home in Bexleyheath, Kent, ensured a hero’s welcome for the visiting acts from Detroit. When the revue touched down at Heathrow Airport, they were met by Godin and company bearing banners proclaiming: ‘Welcome to all from Hitsville. We Love You’ and ‘Welcome the Supremes’.

What sealed Motown’s invasion of Britain was the Beatles’ recording of three Motown songs for their second album. ‘Please Mr Postman’, ‘Money’ and ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me’ all found a totally new European audience.

Gordy consolidated his output in the UK on the TamlaMotown label and the classic black label sold by the shipload to teenagers, pop fans, R & B fans, and mums and dads. Motown’s musical output had achieved exactly what Gordy had dreamt of.

Gone were the racial divides that had existed for so long in American music: no longer was it white music for white folks, black music for black folks; no longer radio stations that only played songs by white artists and black music ratio stations that only played songs by black artists.

23

The Story of Northern Soul

The Sound of Young America was uniting audiences of all colours, creeds and backgrounds in a way that nothing had ever done before. The worldwide hits went on and on, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Contours, the Velvelettes, the Isley Brothers and David Ruffin were just some of the artists who enjoyed worldwide hits via the Detroit music factory.

By 1966 the hits were so prolific that Berry Gordy decided at his make-or-break quality-control Friday meetings – at which all the new material was heard and evaluated – that no singles would be released that weren’t guaranteed Top Ten hits!

In the case of the Supremes, nothing less than number one would do.

This ensured that only the most commercial-sounding recordings were released, while thousands of superb-quality master tapes never saw the light of day. At least it gave the Northern Soul fans of the future something to hunt for (a certain Frank Wilson record springs to mind) and provided some legal and illegal ‘from the vaults’ type compilations in years to come.

By the time Berry Gordy sold his Motown empire in 1988 to MCA, virtually all of his hit acts were long gone and the everfaithful and creative Stevie Wonder and Lionel Ritchie were holding the fort. The asking price was a cool 61 million dollars.

Of course, Mr Gordy and company did not have a monopoly on American soul music output. The Chess, Atlantic and Stax labels, to name but three, had their fair share of talent. Ike and Tina Turner, Ben E King, The Drifters, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, James Brown and of course the legendary Otis Redding were just a few of the fine artists who were no strangers to the Top Twenties on both sides of the Atlantic by the mid-60s.

Hundreds of labels sprang up all over the States trying to emulate Motown’s success, sometimes even cheekily recording in Detroit using Motown’s own musicians. Others brought their own personalised sound to soul recordings. These labels would form the basis of Mod culture in Britain and later become an integral part of the phenomenon that would become known as Northern Soul.

Ex-Twisted Wheel DJ Rob Bellars said: ‘The Motown sound was the base of Northern Soul. It got you interested. If you then 24

I Can’t Help Myself

saw a label like Ric Tic and saw the names Edwin Starr and J J Barnes or the likes of them, you knew you were onto a winner.’

What has puzzled Northern Soul fans over the years is how some of the most instantly-likeable records that have become dance floor anthems could have been such commercial flops at the time of their release. How could a classic Northern Soul discovery like Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’, recorded for the tiny Champion label in 1965, fail so utterly at the time of its release? It would later sell in vast quantities when reissued in Britain and in the 1980s when it became a worldwide hit after being covered by Soft Cell.

One possible explanation is the actual quality – some of the obscure labels like Shrine made some pretty poor recordings – but this was not always the case. Another is distribution and promotion – the small, independent labels might only have been able to afford to press a thousand copies and circulate them to local DJs and shops in their part of the city. Another possibility is that they simply got overlooked in the avalanche of material put out by the major players like Motown, Atlantic, Stax and RCA. Whatever the reason, many very commercial-sounding soul records failed to sell enough copies in America to keep the artists, writers, producers and label owners in work. Many Northern Soul icons would quit the music business and end up as office janitors, cab drivers or just plain broke.

Northern Soul DJ and Motown specialist Chris King said: ‘Northern Soul is basically an off-shoot of people trying to copy Motown records. When you listen to something like Larry Clinton doing “She’s Wanted In Three States” you wonder who on earth it was recorded for. Who were they hoping to sell it to?

How on earth did they expect someone to dance to a 100 mph stomper?

‘The records that we love did nothing – the odd one crossed over but most were commercial failures. Thank God that they did get it wrong – the music has given us so much pleasure over the last thirty years or so.’

25

THE HISTORY OF THE

HIGH TIMES AND LOW LIVES AT THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS MUSIC MAGAZINE

PAT LONG

Contents

Introduction

7

1.

Don Porto and his novelty accordions

10

2.

Rough, ragged, rock’n’roll

19

3.

Meet the cockroaches

25

4.

Five to midnight

41

5.

Bugging the decent folk

52

6.

How gauche can a gaucho get?

61

7.

The three-day week

79

8.

Two sevens clash

85

9.

I use the NME…

94

10. Hip young gunslingers

100

11. An obituary of rock’n’roll

117

12. The ghost of Roland Barthes

128

13. Scum

142

14. Youth suicide

159

15. Lovely, lovely, lovely!

169

16. Mental, mental

175

17. Kings of the world

182

18. The New Morrissey Express

188

19. Cambridge for losers

194

20. Don’t forget about the rock

203

21. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

210

Epilogue

215

Endnotes

219

Bibliography

227

Acknowledgements

232

Index

233

Picture Credits

240

1.Don Porto and his novelty accordions

‘They were on their knees – within 15 minutes the receivers were going to be called in…’

The past is a foreign country, one where people are inordinately fond of polka music. Yes, despite its iconoclastic later reputation, the most culturally important British magazine of the second half of the 20th century had its roots in… the accordion.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Britain found itself in the grip of an absolute mania for accordion music. At an accordion convention organised by instrument manufacturers Hohner in 1932, almost 40,000 people turned up to hear bands called things like Don Porto and his Novelty Accordions, causing a minor sensation when the crowd all tried to cram into the 2,000-capacity Westminster Central Hall just around the corner from the Houses of Parliament.

It was an austere time, but the flamboyance of these acts – who often dressed in ‘exotic’ gyspy costumes to disguise the fact that they were jobbing musicians from the Home Counties – was a welcome distraction from the drabness and poverty of a time when the National Debt was at its second highest point in the 20th century. Indeed, so popular was this movement that it had its own magazine, Accordion Times, established in 1935 and catering entirely for the manifold requirements of the professional and amateur squeezebox aficionado.

Sadly, though, the boom didn’t last. The accordion bands struggled on, but by the end of the Second World War life was getting tough for the publishers and staff of Accordion Times. They were on the brink of closure when salvation came in the form of a merger with a brand new weekly paper, and so it was that on the first Friday in October 1946, professional musicians nationwide were able to pay fourpence for a four-

1

Maurice Irving Kinn belonged to a breed of men that had become a showbusiness archetype by the early 1950s: the working-class East End Jewish impresario. Born in Poplar in 1924, he started his career on Fleet Street as a teenage tea boy for the Irish Times, leaving to move into showbusiness. Kinn overcame a natural shyness and stammer to make a

2

D O N P O R T O A N D H I S N O V E LT Y A C C O R D I O N S

page black and white tabloid aimed directly at their needs and interests.

Inside that first issue was a hot-blooded editorial about Musicians’ Union toothlessness, adverts for instrument manufacturers, a letters page soliciting contributions, a cartoon strip and stories about the most popular crooners, bandleaders and jazzmen of the day (‘Paul Robeson indicts Britain!’). And there on the masthead, next to a woodcut illustration of a metronome, proud gothic script proclaimed the name of this new venture: Musical Express, with the slightly smaller subtitle ‘Incorporating Accordion Times’.

From its offices at 33 King Street, just down the road from Covent Garden fruit and veg market and the recently reopened Royal Opera House, Musical Express exuded a raffishness and Bohemianism that is still striking today. Specialising in news aimed at professional musicians, rather than music fans, it was a cosmopolitan and glamorous paper that transcended the mood of the threadbare, gloomy Britain of bombsites and ration cards. Musical Express dealt with music like it was the most important thing in the world, and that the people who played it were an elect group, apart from everyday society, regardless of their instrument or nationality. Many of the conventions established in those first issues of the paper – the tour news (‘Band swap rumour – whose band is going to play in America?’), the classified ads, the outraged letters from readers – would still be in place over half a century later. Indeed, one early issue ran an outraged editorial expressing shock at the fact that a rival paper, the Melody Maker, had fixed its annual readers’ poll. It was a rivalry that would only grow in rancour over the next 50 years.

With the end of wartime paper rationing, Musical Express doubled in size, although its accordion coverage suffered, trimmed back first to a column and then dropped entirely. The readers didn’t seem to mind – by the end of the decade, Musical Express had become the biggest-selling weekly music paper in the country, leaving Melody Maker to cover the more serious end of jazz while it wrote about the more populist Big Band craze. For the Musical Express, like the people of Britain emerging from the ordeal of the Second World War, the future must have seemed glowing.

THE HISTORY OF THE NME

healthy amount of money managing Cyril Stapleton and Joe Loss, the most successful British big band leaders of the post-war period, before becoming a promoter of high-profile dance band concerts. Perhaps unusually for someone in his line of work, Kinn was regarded as fair and trustworthy in a business populated by sharks and hustlers, which is why he received a phone call out of the blue from one of his debtors, the advertising director of the Musical Express, late one Friday afternoon in 1952. Far from being a success, the paper was losing money hand over fist. ‘The paper had lost so much money that it was going to close down if they couldn’t find a buyer by the following Monday,’ said Kinn in an interview with the writer Paul Gorman in 2001. ‘I went in there to talk to them because they owed me money and got caught up with this idea of running the paper. They were on their knees – within 15 minutes the receivers were going to be called in.’1 Maurice Kinn was nothing if not a shrewd businessman, and could see the immense value of running his own music paper. He’d be able to use it as a promotional tool for the concerts that he was staging, while the prospect of receiving regular advertising revenue from his competitors must’ve been appealing. He paid the thousand pounds2 Musical Express’ owners were asking for the title and duly found himself the proprietor of an ailing and unpopular weekly paper with a disgruntled staff, a low readership of 20,000 a week and no knowledge of how newspaper publishing actually worked.

What he needed was an expert, so Kinn recruited his old friend Percy Dickins to help out. Dickins was a former jazz saxophonist who had ended up on the staff of Melody Maker as advertising manager and was tempted to defect by Kinn with a promise of shares in the new title should it prove successful. Kinn and Dickins now needed an office, and, really, there was only one place they could consider: Denmark Street.

Named after Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, since the late 19th century Denmark Street in London’s West End had been a hub for the capital’s music publishers, earning itself the nickname Tin Pan Alley in tribute to its New York counterpart.3 Just as the film companies colonised nearby Wardour Street across the Charing Cross road in Soho, this narrow row of shops and offices was synonymous with the music business: nicknamed the ‘200 Yards of Hope’, Tin Pan Alley was where aspirant songwriters or musicians would come to try and peddle their latest wares to cigar-chewing publishers in camel-hair coats, or where band leaders would raid the cafes and coffeeshops for new musicians for one-night stands and tours.

3

‘The presentation and contents will be fresh and stimulating because the New Musical Express will be produced by a brand new, hand-picked staff of editorial experts with long experience in musical journalism.’

Kinn was true to his word. On Friday 7 March 1952, a few weeks after the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter Elizabeth, the same month that British wartime citizens’ identity cards were finally abolished, the first-ever issue of the New Musical Express was born.

Fittingly, Kinn’s magazine felt far more modern than the old Musical Express. Readers parted with sixpence and received a magazine with The Goons, Big Bill Broonzy and bandleader Ted Heath on the front cover, inside which the magazine was laid out more clearly and written in a new,

4

D O N P O R T O A N D H I S N O V E LT Y A C C O R D I O N S

Don Black was later to become an Oscar-winning lyricist for songs as diverse as ‘Diamonds are Forever’, ‘Born Free’ and Michael Jackson’s hit ‘Ben’, but in 1952 he was a showbiz-obsessed teenager who would bunk off from his job polishing the brass on the banisters at the London Palladium to mooch about in central London. He was naturally drawn to Denmark Street. ‘There was just music everywhere,’ he remembers.

‘There were two cafes next door to each other – Julia’s and The Suffolk Dairy – where everyone would kill time: musicians, comedians, publishers, managers, agents. Someone like Frankie Vaughan or Dicky Valentine would come down to Denmark Street to find his new song and there’d be a ripple of excitement all up and down the street.’

Melody Maker had started out at number 19 Denmark Street after music publisher Lawrence Wright founded it in 1926, but it was at number 5 that Kinn and Dickins began to dismantle the ailing Musical Express. They set to work by immediately recruiting a new staff; Kinn and Dickins coaxed the seasoned writer Ray Sonin out of an early retirement to be their editor. A former Melody Maker staffer who had written successful songs for Vera Lynn and BBC radio comedy scripts for Noël Coward and the popular wartime comic Tommy Handley, Sonin had been a music journalist since the late 1930s, until a substantial pools win enabled him to retire to write crime and science fiction novels with titles like Murder in Print and The Adventures of Space Kingsley. Kinn, Dickins and Sonin decided to rip up the magazine’s tired template and start again from scratch. The front cover of issue number 268 of Musical Express duly featured a bold promise, written by Kinn, of what the dwindling readership could expect when the paper was relaunched after a fortnight’s break:

THE HISTORY OF THE NME

hipper style which suddenly made the old era of dance bands seem hopelessly formal and desiccated. In 1952, the leading music paper was Melody Maker once again, but it was still a serious trade journal, reporting stories about the minutiae of which drummer was leaving which big band for another. The New Musical Express focused on showbusiness and popular music in a way that was fresh and entertaining: establishing a tradition that would typify the magazine for the rest of its life; the subeditors, the people on the paper responsible for proofing text submitted by the journalists, as well as adding headlines and picture captions, were clearly spending a lot of time in the smoky subs’ room thinking up punning headlines, of which ‘Vocal Boy Makes Good’ was by far the best. There was news and gossip, fashion tips for female readers (‘have you tried wearing one shade of lipstick over another?’) and a reviews column written by jazz saxophonist Johnny Dankworth, as well as three anonymous columns: ‘Ad Lib’, written by ‘The Slider’, ‘The Sunny Side’ by ‘Glissando’ and, at the back of the magazine, ‘Tail-Pieces’ by ‘The Alley Cat’. The Alley Cat, although redolent of a nocturnal prowler slinking through the city’s jazz scene and listening at club doorways for the latest gossip, was actually written by the portly Kinn.

He wasted no time in settling scores, pursuing his own agenda and currying favour with acts that he could promote, clearly enjoying his new role as press baron. ‘My tip for the London Palladium and a cert success is a sexy singer from America,’ wrote The Alley Cat in his first column, ‘Tony Bennett’.

With Dickins’ Melody Maker advertising contacts, Sonin’s editorial experience and Kinn’s business instinct, the New Musical Express should’ve been an immediate success. But to Kinn’s chagrin, his new venture continued to fail. ‘I kept the [booking] agency going, which I had to, because the paper… kept on losing money hand over fist. Two months later I had to borrow money from my mother-in-law to keep the NME afloat and I felt like an idiot, like I’d really made a mistake.’4 What the New Musical Express needed if it was to see out 1952 was what marketing men today call a USP: a gimmick, something to set it apart from the competition other than just its lightness of tone and insider gossip. Inspiration came from a feature of the weekly American trade magazine Billboard, which by 1952 had already been around for almost half a century. Billboard started out as the journal of the bill posting industry, becoming the paper of record for circuses, cinemas, carnies, vaudeville, fairs and amusement parks. By the 1930s Billboard was publishing a weekly list of the most played songs on jukeboxes in America, a chart called the Hit Parade.

5

D O N P O R T O A N D H I S N O V E LT Y A C C O R D I O N S

The proud proprietor: Maurice Kinn inspects the latest copy of the New Musical Express, 1954

In the UK the popularity of a song was still measured by the sales of its printed sheet music, but Kinn was a visionary: he believed that sales of records would one day outstrip those of sheet music, as more and more households bought record players. To reflect this, he ordered Dickins to phone 20 record shops and find out which discs they’d been selling to the public throughout the week.

After gaining the support of his contacts in the industry, on 14 November 1952 Kinn published the first-ever UK singles chart, a novelty that was to change the way the British music business worked forever.

Number one in what NME called its ‘authentic weekly survey of the bestselling pop records’ was a ballad, ‘Here In My Heart’, sung by former bricklayer Al Martino, subsequently known for his role as the singer Johnny Fontane in the first of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films.

Martino, who was later forced to move to the UK when real-life Mafioso attempted to buy him out of his American management contract,

6

THE HISTORY OF THE NME

headed up a list of 12 songs that also included recordings by Nat ‘King’ Cole, Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby and Max Bygraves. Crucially, this new list reflected NME’s shift in emphasis from covering the writer of a song to its performer, simultaneously opening up a new market for the music press: instead of solely selling papers to musicians or Tin Pan Alley insiders, the New Musical Express connected with record buyers and fans.

Within a few weeks the paper’s circulation leapt up: first by 20 and then 50 per cent.

The charts grew in size and scope: Dickins’ original list of 20 shops was increased to 53, mainly in London and the Home Counties, but also in the bigger urban hubs like Manchester and Liverpool. To meet the paper’s deadline and get it to its printer in Walthamstow on time, each member of the paper’s staff was allocated a list of shops to call each Monday morning. The results of these calls were passed on to NME’s staff accountant, who took time from his duties on the payroll to collate and process the week’s research.

The NME charts were an instant phenomenon. Dickins was a man of great charm and persuasiveness who used the introduction of the charts to increase the paper’s advertising revenue by encouraging record companies to pay for adverts for forthcoming releases that they hoped would eventually make the Hit Parade. Don Black, who had been sacked from his job at the Palladium after being discovered watching one of the performances when he was supposed to be working, was recruited by Kinn as the NME’s office boy as a favour to Black’s older brother, and remembers Percy Dickins as an imposing figure on Tin Pan Alley: ‘Percy had a slightly rarified air about him – his nickname was “Sir Percy”. He used to take me to this Chinese restaurant on Denmark Street called The Universal, which was really exciting to me because I was this Jewish boy from Hackney and I’d never eaten Chinese food before, never seen anything like it.’

While Dickins was dining on spring rolls and chow mein, Kinn and Sonin were using the charts to determine methodically which artists they would cover in the paper’s editorial pages: looking down the list they realised that there were names selling huge amounts of records that were simply not being covered by Melody Maker but were obviously hugely popular among music fans. Almost overnight the old swing bands were phased out in favour of hot new American stars like Frank Sinatra and Johnnie Ray. A further circulation boost came courtesy of Radio Luxembourg. In order to circumvent the BBC’s broadcast monopoly in Britain, in the 1920s a 100-watt transmitter had been constructed in the small central

7

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D O N P O R T O A N D H I S N O V E LT Y A C C O R D I O N S

European Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, from which English and French language programmes were broadcast across the continent. During the Second World War the transmitter was commandeered by the Third Reich and used to broadcast Nazi propaganda, including that of Lord Haw-Haw5 , across the channel. But by 1952 millions of Britons were tuning in to the commercial station Radio Luxembourg on 208 medium wave every evening to hear religious programmes, along with secular fare like science fiction serial The Adventures of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future or the cockney Leslie Welch, nicknamed ‘the Memory Man’, a former vaudeville performer who would amaze listeners by correctly answering questions concerning obscure and forgotten pieces of sports trivia.

Derek Johnson was the programme administrator on Radio Luxembourg, and would pass NME’s chart to DJs in the Duchy, who started a regular weekly chart run-down presented by DJ Pete Murray, which listed all of the songs in reverse order from 12th place to the number one slot. This gave NME’s chart a new credence and Dickins responded by taking out on-air adverts, giving further credibility to the paper, even if passers-by could be forgiven for overlooking the New Musical Express’ Denmark Street offices. ‘You’d walk up this shabby flight of stone steps,’ remembers Don Black. ‘It didn’t look like anything at all.

But then you’d open this door and get this whiff of the newsroom, this real sense of excitement and energy in the air.’ Kinn also used Radio Luxembourg as a marketing tool, giving away free copies of unsold back issues of the New Musical Express to any listeners who sent in a stamped addressed envelope.

Derek Johnson became a freelancer reporter for NME, eventually joining the staff as News Editor in 1957, along with the magazine’s movie critic, future film director Michael Winner. Another crucial appointment was the photographer Harry Hammond. A successful East End showbusiness photographer-about-town a decade before Terence Donovan or David Bailey, Hammond was recruited by Kinn while taking portrait shots for sheet music covers. Hammond’s style, which comprised artfully composed portraits or seemingly miraculous live shots of artists performing, pioneered the form of rock photography, becoming much imitated for the rest of the century.

Within a year, Maurice Kinn and Percy Dickins’ blend of vision, charm, chutzpah, business sense and talent meant that the New Musical Express was thriving. In 1953 Kinn organized the first NME awards ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate – the Readers’ Poll Winners’ Concert featured the leading lights of British jazz, including Chris Barber and Eddie Calvert – and before long the paper’s circulation

THE HISTORY OF THE NME

had nudged ahead of its rival Melody Maker6 and even inspired a new imitator. Record Mirror was launched in June 1954 to try and poach some of the New Musical Express’ advertising revenue, upping the ante by printing their own albums chart as well as a singles rundown.

Record Mirror was followed four years later by Disc and suddenly British pop and jazz fans would have the choice of four music papers to buy every week. But what happened next was a remarkable, once-in-a-century concomitance of events that would have seismic consequences reaching far beyond the 200 yards of Tin Pan Alley, consequences that not even the savvy Kinn and Dickins could have foreseen.

9

JOHNNY SHARP

PORTICO

CONTENTS Introduction

vi

1.

Serious as Cancer Rhymes against humanity – Part One

2.

Isn’t It Ironic? Well, No, Not Really Lyrics that just don’t add up

12

3.

Does Your Mother Know?

Inappropriate sentiments and woefully outdated attitudes

32

4.

Look For The Purple Banana Utter nonsense

47

5.

Squeeze My Lemon Outrageous sexual innuendo and bad euphemisms

64

That Book by Nabokov Intellectual pretensions, over-reaching ambition, and impenetrable cryptic twaddle

76

Hip Hop, You Don’t Stop . . .

But Maybe You Should Rhymes against humanity – Part Two

89

6.

7.

1

8.

War Is Stupid Well-meaning words, rubbish lyrics

100

9.

But Then Again . . . No Chronic lack of inspiration

118

Keeping it real?

Hypocrisy, hokum and wildly unlikely claims

131

11.

Impeach My Bush Too much information

143

12.

Career Rhyminals For those who continue to suck . . . we salute you!

159

13.

The Bottom 10 The worst song lyrics in the world . . . ever!

170

14.

The Perfect Storm I don’t find it hard to write the next line

176

10.

CHAPTER 1

SERIOUS AS CANCER Rhymes against humanity – Part One

JOHNNY SHARP

You could probably fill this entire book with rhymes that flow as smoothly as a dead crocodile through a U-bend, as they are by far the most common and most immediately noticeable form of lyrical clanger. But we have a whole world of wrongs to cover in these pages, so we’ve dedicated a mere two chapters to them.

In this the first of those chapters you will find everything from relatively forgivable ‘rhymes of passion’ (committed on the spur of the moment, with a certain ‘will this do?’ quality) to cold, calculated rhyme rampages in which the culprits could hardly have insulted our great language any further if they had dug up Shakespeare’s corpse and dirty danced with it, then called his mum a slag.

We might as well throw you in at the deep end, then . . .

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LIFE

DES’REE In times of crisis, songwriters will instinctively invoke primal urges, such as hunger, thirst, or a big fat KitKat wrapper full of ‘brown’. How else can we explain the sentiments of this 1998 hit, wherein Des admits, I don’t want to see a ghost, it’s the sight that I fear most. I’d rather eat a piece of toast, and watch the evening news.

It is customary, when describing something you really dislike, to say ‘I’d rather . . .’ and then include something suitably horrific, such as ‘drown in a vat of Karen Matthews’ hair grease’ or ‘be stuck in a lift with Andrew Castle’. There is a slim possibility that Des’ree has a lifelong phobia of toast, and deliberately avoids walking past Currys in case she sees a Russell Hobbs Retro Four Slice at half price in the window. But my guess is that she went through the rhyme options for ‘ghost’, considered ‘even more than a nuclear bomb in the post’, and then remembered that she didn’t have any breakfast that morning.

Thanks to that rush of blood from stomach to head, everyone now remembers this line more than any of her hits.

There’s no justice. But at least she’s got some fairly esteemed company.

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DON’T PASS ME BY THE BEATLES

All the greats have dabbled in the murky waters of rhyminality1.

You’ll surely have heard this rollicking romp, in which Ringo foghorns, I’m sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair. You were in a car crash, and you lost your hair.

When it was written in 1968, this line was taken to be further evidence for the conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some months earlier. Thankfully for him, it was merely evidence of what happens when you let the drummer write songs.

1

I will occasionally refer to lyrical wrongdoers as ‘rhyminals’. I realise this is wordplay worthy of Richard Stilgoe after one too many Bristol Creams, but like many of the artists featured in this chapter, I don’t care. It’ll do, I’ve got a book to write, and you try looking for alternative words for ‘rhyme’, let alone puns involving it. Never apologise, never explain. Although I think I just did.

ROLLER SKATING CHILD THE BEACH BOYS

The Beatles’ esteemed contemporaries dropped a similar stinker here, albeit in 1977, by which time Brian Wilson was ankle deep in his sand–pit barking at the moon and no one was really listening to their new songs. I go and get my skates on and I catch up with her, they sing. We do it holding hands, it’s so cold I go ‘Brrrr!’

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Ouch. Still, they should be glad they didn’t end up among the sleazy denizens of Chapter 3, considering they tell of how we’ll make sweet lovin’ when the sun goes down, We’ll even do more when your mama’s not around.

‘Hello, is that Social Services? I’ve just seen a group of bearded musicians loitering by a frozen lake, acting suspiciously . . . ’

HIGHLY STRUNG SPANDAU BALLET

Until recently, the infamous line She used to be a diplomat, and now she’s down the laundromat was regarded as somewhat laughable. We chuckled not only at the iffy rhyme but the faintly farcical scenario presented therein. Yet in this era of global recession, their words could prove prophetic – could we see a queue of well-travelled executives lining up for a service wash after they are forced to lay off their domestic servants and flog the tumble dryer? They also say of the former diplomat in question, ‘They washed her mind’. Does that cost extra?

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RHYTHM IS A DANCER SNAP

Turbo B, the rapper who fronted this Europop outfit, was probably unaware that he was uttering the words that will one day later be inscribed on his gravestone when he boomed, I’m serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer!

He may not have written them himself, but we still have to ask the question: JUST HOW SERIOUS CAN YOU POSSIBLY BE WHEN YOU’RE SAYING ‘RHYTHM IS A DANCER’?

You can perhaps be as serious as you like when you’re saying ‘My house is on fire and I am currently trapped inside it’, but rhythm’s status as a dancer is surely unlikely to be a life-endangering situation, even if, as Inner Circle suggest later in Chapter 2, the dancer might be sweating until they can sweat no more. The only possibility that could redeem this line is that Turbo hasn’t told us the full story. If, of course, he’d announced, ‘I’m serious as cancer when I say Rhythm is a dancer who has just been kidnapped by radical Islamic jihad militia and is being held without food and water while chained to a radiator in a dark Islamabad cellar’ then we would have fully understood the gravity of the situation.

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IS THERE SOMETHING I SHOULD KNOW? DURAN DURAN

Simon Le Bon and co should know the danger of overstatement better than anyone after the unforgettable observation that fiery demons all dance when you walk through that door, don’t say you’re easy on me, you’re about as easy as a nuclear war.

I think you’ll agree, they’ve overcooked the comparison. A nuclear war would, there’s no doubt, be far from easy. All that death and destruction, eating clumps of your own hair in an underground shelter and slowly dying from radiation sickness – what a chore. But a mildly difficult romantic partner wouldn’t quite be in the same league. Whereas if he’d said, ‘You’re about as easy as finding an unrestricted parking spot in the centre of Colchester on market day’, we couldn’t really have argued.

PINK

AEROSMITH If Steven Tyler’s creaky old knees ever give up on him, there’s a gap in the market for a man who can describe colours accurately and succinctly. He was the man, after all, who sang Pink when I turn out the light. Pink – it’s like red but not quite.

Yeah, tell it like it is, Stevie! I for one would be only too happy to go into my local DIY shop and, instead of finding colour

2

JOHNNY SHARP

shadings that sound like euphemisms for drugs, like ‘intense apple’ or ‘Moroccan velvet’, you’d get straight-talking descriptions like ‘Nearly black but got scared’, ‘Would have been mauve but the magenta ink cartridge was running low’ or indeed ‘Well on the way to yellow but stumbled at the last hurdle and got splashed with a pot of cream’.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW ABC

Martin Fry of ABC professed his joy at being voted into the top ten of worst ever lyrics in a BBC poll a few years back. And I think we can confirm he was worthy of the accolade thanks to this passage: More sacrifices than an Aztec priest, Standing here straining at that leash. All fall down, can’t complain, mustn’t grumble – help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.

He might try to argue that once he’d used the word ‘grumble’ his rhyming options were limited. But what was wrong with rumble, fumble, humble, mumble, stumble, tumble or even possibly womble? Or dumbbell?

I actually rang Martin Fry, asking for an explanation. I only got his answering machine. He said he couldn’t come to the phone, as he was being kept on a leash today, making one of his regular sacrifices to the gods. He said not to worry though – he’s being well fed with popular British puddings.

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BUCK ROGERS FEEDER

We all dream of escape from time to time, to a land of sunshine and good times, where we can leave all our cares behind and duck out of the rat race. Somewhere like . . . Exeter, perhaps?

That’s what was presumably on Grant Nicholas of Feeder’s mind when he wrote ‘Buck Rogers’, a radio-friendly pop song in which he sings, We’ll start over again, grow ourselves new skin.

Get a house in Devon, drink cider from a lemon.

Now, I know they’re into New Age practices down there in the South-west, but this sounds more like some bizarre religious cult. I’m imagining allotments full of human skin, and people drinking cider from lemons, quietly muttering to each other, ‘They’re a bit small, as drinking receptacles go, aren’t they? Why can’t we just drink lemon from a lemon?’

The more smart-arsed among you might point out that human beings grow new skin all the time, so maybe we can’t argue with that part of the equation. But drinking cider from a lemon? You might as well drink wine from a fax machine.

But anything goes in this brave new society, especially when Brother Grant announces he is the son of God, and he has put something special in those lemons to transport his disciples to the next world.

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JOHNNY SHARP

FIX YOU COLDPLAY

It is traditional when considering an artist’s ‘work’ to divide it into ‘periods’. To give you some examples, Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon is the most famous piece of his ‘African’ period, Bob Dylan’s Saved and Slow Train Coming are said to come from his ‘Christian’ period, and Neil Young’s synth rock adventure Trans is part of his ‘titting about with a vocoder like Uncle Jeff at Christmas hitting the bossa nova button on his new Bontempi organ’ period.

Likewise, this song can be seen as part of Coldplay’s ‘rhyming’ era, wherein lyricist Chris Martin began to use couplets in much the same way an OCD sufferer uses soap. He was soon displaying a wholehearted passion for activities like wanting to be just you and me in a boat on the sea, drinking cups of tea with no great need to have a pee.

All harmless fun, for the most part. But when he promised on this hit single that Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, the collective intake of breath from radio listeners must have been sufficient to divert global weather currents.

I’m guessing that most people’s initial thought would have been, ‘Thanks for the thought, Chris, but I’m not sure setting light to my bones will actually do me much good in the long term.’

It’s understandable that you might want to warm someone’s bones with the glow of the light of your enduring love, but igniting them would surely be going way too far. Besides, last time I checked, bones didn’t readily lend themselves to being set alight, unlike, say, paper or matches.

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It would surely require several years’ supply of Ready Brek1 consumed in a single sitting to actually induce spontaneous combustion, combined with large amounts of a highly flammable liquid, like, say, alcohol. By which time, if he tried it, Chris Martin would probably sound more like Tom Waits singing the hits of Impaled Nazarene. Which, come to think of it, may not be such a bad idea.

1

For those readers born outside the UK or after 1985, Ready Brek is a popular oat-based British breakfast cereal which was advertised for many years using the highly suspect suggestion that consuming it would make your child glow with warmth, as if they’d swallowed liquid plutonium. And no one even reported them to That’s Life (2).

2 For those readers BOTUKOA1985, That’s Life was a popular consumer programme in which toothy harridan Esther Rantzen and a harem of turtlenecked man-slaves stuck up for the nation’s consumer rights. Then Doc Cox3 sang a ‘zany’ song about it.

3 Oh, look him up on the bloody internet.

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CO N TE N T S i N T R O D U CT IO N

1.

The First Draft of History Bad reviews that hindsight has called into question

08

10

2.

Hit or Myth?

24 Cutting the wheat of truth from the chaff of misinformation

3.

We Just Do What We Do What musicians say… and what it actually means

4.

Just Don’t Bite It Highly suspect advice in popular song

5.

46

58

Urban Myths When bollocks goes viral

66

Fiction Factory Lies, exaggeration and self-promotion

74

6.

7.

Don’t Believe the Hype Wild praise and purple prose

mind the bollocks

84

8.

Hallelujah!

Rock’n’roll’s daftest religions

100

9.

Back to School 114 Weighty subjects that popular songs have tackled… badly

10.

Myth-quoted Famous things artists (probably) never said

128

A Real Return to Form Some very overused words in popular music writing

138

11 .

12.

The Stinking Sixties The golden age of pop… or was it?

154

The Bollocks Guide to Pop History The complete history of rock’n’roll – abridged!

164

1 3.

14.

Never Say Never Again 174 Reports of my retirement have been exaggerated (by me)

15.

Sing Something Simple A foolproof guide to writing your own song

184

he title of this chapter has often been applied to the output of newspapers.

Another, less kind description is ‘Tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers’. Or it used to be, during the antiquated era when most of the news was still printed on paper.

The same applies to music reviews, which means that dubious appraisals like those found in this chapter are largely forgotten.

Or they would have been, had I not cruelly fished them out from the dustbin of history.

Music journalists and writers may not thank me for dredging these snippets up from the murky depths of Lake Forgotten, but there’s no shame in it – even the best sometimes suffer from serious lapses in judgement.

Including yours truly, undoubtedly the eminent-est critic of his day, who wrote for the super, soaraway under the pseudonym Johnny Cigarettes, and produced the searingly insightful report that opens this extensive hall of shame…

T

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Urban Myths

‘If Oasis didn’t exist, no one would want to invent them. For a start, they look and sound like they’re long overdue product from a bankrupt Polymer Records Manc scally also-rans factory. Vaguely trippy guitar almost-tunes with vaguely late 60s rock tendencies, vaguely Ian-Brownas-Tim-Burgess slob of a frontman, singing in a vaguely tuneless halfwhine, vaguely shaking a tambourine, vaguely… er, yes, well, you get the picture.

But more annoying is the fact that they’re too cool to dare to have a personality or be more surprising than the dullest retro indie fops, too well versed in old records to do anything new (e.g. a cover of “I Am The Walrus” and you know what it sounds like, kids), and evidently too few brains to realise that any of the above is true. Sad.’ Oasis, reviewed live by Johnny Cigarettes, NME, 1993 ‘Thriller is a very patchy affair indeed… if I was Jackson, I’d ditch everyone he’s ever worked with and hunt around on the East Coast for some new talent. He has the skill, but it’s wasted here.’

Michael Jackson, Thriller, reviewed by Paolo Hewitt, Melody Maker, 1982 ‘The (guest artists) put into action here reek of desperation… to cover the lack of inspiration in the music… “Beat It” is a terrible attempt at streetwise posin’… Jackson lays himself bare as a songwriter and the results are often acutely embarrassing… a barely developed artist being given too much artistic control.’

Michael Jackson, Thriller, reviewed by Gavin Martin, NME, 1982 Easily done, of course. And how could anyone have known what a phenomenon that album would become? Even those closest to Jackson could not have guessed how history would judge the whole project. Indeed, Thriller producer Quincy Jones argued against the inclusion of ‘Billie Jean’ on the record as he regarded it as its weakest track. Jackson insisted on keeping it, in particular, the relatively long opening section, because whenever he heard it, it made him want to dance.

Pffff! Imagine judging music on such simplistic dumbed down terms!

Good job Jacko never tried his hand at music criticism…

12

mind the bollocks

‘I think (this) record is lousy… Johnny Rotten sings flat, the song is laughably naïve, and the overall feeling is of a third-rate Who imitation…’

The Sex Pistols, ‘Anarchy In The UK’ (single), reviewed by Cliff White, NME, 1976 Cliff White soon became known as the man who slagged off the Pistols.

Hello from the man who slagged off Oasis.

‘Were I an A&R type, I’d say something terminally crass like, “Sack the band, give the singer a publishing deal”. As things stand, however, Radiohead are a pitiful, lily-livered excuse for a rock’n’roll group.’

Radiohead, reviewed live by Keith Cameron, NME, 1992 The headline for this review, ‘Ugly with a capital U’, accompanied by a quartet of distinctly unflattering shots of singer Thom Yorke gurning into the microphone, led to Yorke’s refusal to speak to the NME for several months afterwards.

‘Sloth posing as innovation? Not a million leg pulls away from an early Jethro Tull b-side.’

The Smiths, ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ (single), reviewed by Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 1984 ‘God knows Rock & Roll could use some good old faggot energy, but… the sexuality that Reed proffers on Transformer is timid and flaccid…

He should forget this artsy-fartsy kind of homo stuff and just go in there with a bad hangover and start blaring out his vision of lunar assf**k.’

Lou Reed, Transformer, reviewed in Rolling Stone, 1972 ‘Incredibly irritating… too trivial, too lightweight… one-song album.’

Lou Reed, Transformer, reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 1972

The First Draft of History

13

‘(Side one was) so utterly confused with itself it was difficult to follow… relies too heavily on taped sound effects of heartbeats, plane crashes and other insane utterances.’

Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon, reviewed by Roy Hollingworth, Melody Maker, 1973 ‘Neil Young devotees will probably spend the next few weeks trying desperately to convince themselves that After The Gold Rush is good music. But they’ll be kidding themselves. None of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface… apparently no one bothered to tell Neil Young that he was singing a half-octave above his highest acceptable range… I can’t listen to it at all.’

Neil Young, After The Gold Rush, reviewed by Langdon Winner, Rolling Stone, 1970 ‘The great Stones album of their mature period is yet to come… Exile On Main Street is the Rolling Stones at their most dense and impenetrable.’

Rolling Stones, Exile On Main Street, reviewed by Lenny Kaye, Rolling Stone, 1972 ‘The album has nothing new and very little that is even recent. The main sound is pre-Rubber Soul… And it doesn’t matter if the words are sung as a put-on, they still are painful to hear… they are lacking in substance, rather like potato chips… The Beatles, though they might not have intended it, have in essence produced hip Muzak.’

The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album), reviewed by Mike Jahn, New York Times, 1968 ‘(a) willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material…

If they’re to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention.

Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin, reviewed by John Mendelsohn, Rolling Stone, 1969

14

mind the bollocks

‘The kind of garage band who should be speedily returned to their garage, preferably with the engine running, which would undoubtedly be more of a loss to their friends and families than to either rock or roll.’

The Clash, reviewed live by Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 1976 The band responded by writing ‘Garageland’, one of the highlights of their debut album. And resolutely refusing to return to said garage.

‘Few memorable compositions… use of the wah-wah pedal is taken to irritating lengths.’

Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland, reviewed in Melody Maker, 1968 ‘Mr. Presley has no discernable singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. For the ear he is an unutterable bore.’

Elvis Presley, profiled by Jack Gould, New York Times, 1956 ‘If you appreciate good singing, I don’t suppose you’ll manage to hear this disc all (the way) through.’

Elvis Presley, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (single), reviewed in New Musical Express, 1956 ‘Elvis Presley sounds a very mannered singer to me. His “Heartbreak Hotel” positively drips ersatz emotion…[his] diction is extremely poor.’

Elvis Presley, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (single) reviewed by Laurie Henshaw, Melody Maker, 1956 ‘Tuneless, heartless exercises in secondhand dancefloor dynamics and duff metal.’

Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, reviewed by Charlie Dick, Q, 1988

The First Draft of History

15

‘Their lumpy stew of speed metal, funk and street punk posturing doesn’t improve with age.’

Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Mother’s Milk, reviewed by Graeme Kay, Q, 1989 ‘Leisure is a quite engaging album… but it ain’t the future. Blur are merely the present of rock’n’roll.’

Blur, Leisure, reviewed by Andrew Collins, NME, 1991 ‘Blur are praised for being more “ambitious” than their peers. Possibly because there’s nothing much to them but ambition… Pampered, pilfered, piffle, Blur put the “C***” in “Pretty Vacant”.’

Blur, reviewed live in New York by Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 1991 ‘Rivers Cuomo takes a juvenile tack on personal relationships… Weezer over-rely on catchy tunes to heal all of Cuomo’s wounds. “Tired of Sex,” a look at a brooding stud’s empty sex life, is as aimless as the subject’s nightly routine.’

Weezer, Pinkerton, reviewed by Rob O’Connor, Rolling Stone, 1996.

The album was also voted second worst album of the year by the magazine’s readers.

Six years later, Rolling Stone readers had changed their tune somewhat – they voted it as the 16th greatest album of all time.

‘This man’s muse is dead… I think it’s time we left him to rest in peace.

Paul Weller doesn’t exist any more.’

Paul Weller, Paul Weller, reviewed by Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 1992 ‘A wasted opportunity if you’re being generous. A shot in the foot if you want to be more melodramatic.’

Oasis, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, reviewed by David Cavanagh, Q, 1995

16

mind the bollocks

‘It’s clear the group’s only asset is the ludicrously unphotogenic Boy George. God help ’em.’

Culture Club, ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ (single), reviewed by Robbie Millar, Sounds, 1982 The record duly went to number one and Boy George briefly became more famous than Jesus.

‘Their “A” level amateurism is hardly endearing.’

Human League, reviewed live by Ian Pye, Melody Maker, 1980 Pye roundly dismissed the Human League’s new direction with two new schoolgirl backing singers. Within a year they were at number one.

‘This album carries a sticker “Do Not Pay More Than £3.99 For This Album”. It should carry a sticker which says “Do Not Pay Anything For This Album”.’

Japan, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, reviewed by Patrick Humphries, Melody Maker, 1980 ‘If you’re trying to create your own personality cult it generally helps to have a personality. Adam and the Ants don’t… too much fuss about nothing.’

Adam and the Ants, Kings Of The Wild Frontier, reviewed by Adam Sweeting, Melody Maker, 1980 Within six months, naturally, they were superstars.

‘Greatness is never so boringly repetitive [referring to singer Ian McCulloch’s claims and the advert calling it “The Greatest album ever made”]… It accelerates the unseamly [sic] slide of a once witty and occasionally inventive pop rock group into the swamp of pomp… dragged under by a swagbag of artrock cliché.’

Echo & The Bunnymen, Ocean Rain, reviewed by Biba Kopf, NME, 1984 Ian McCulloch memorably responded in a rival publication with the comment: ‘It’s like the manager of Rotherham United saying Liverpool are shit.’

The First Draft of History

17

‘Purple Rain is flawed throughout with a muso’s megalomania – so keen to seem flash that any potential drama is turned to melodrama… soul’s most sensual monarch jerkin’ off to a soundtrack of faked orgasms.’

Prince, Purple Rain, reviewed by Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 1984 ‘Christ, so this is what John Leckie dumped the Roses for. Radiohead serve up yet another “anthemic” chunk of fey verse riffola and big Marshall-stack chorus action which will no doubt surf to the top of every college radio station in the US of A. But since we now have Oasis and they’ve been lumbered with Pearl Jam, we don’t really care what they think any more, do we?’

Radiohead, ‘Just’ (fourth single from The Bends), reviewed by Rupert Howe, NME, 1995 ‘Monotonous… flat, predictable… (‘Superstition’) lacks textural variety.’

Stevie Wonder, Talking Book, reviewed in NME, 1973 ‘They never pick the right tracks for 45 release… it seems destined to follow “Red Frame White Light” and “Messages” into chartless oblivion.’

OMD, ‘Enola Gay’ (single), reviewed by Adrian Thrills, NME, 1980 It went to number eight in the charts and was OMD’s first hit.

‘It’s all over, isn’t it? You can’t base a career on one pair of lips.’

The Charlatans, ‘Over Rising’ (single), reviewed by Paul Lester, Melody Maker, 1991 As of 2012, The Charlatans are working on their 12th studio album.

‘In musical terms they have a strong desire to emulate the ’76-’79 bands… but the sound, while elusive and difficult to put a label on, is still fairly dull. The live evidence of the Happy Mondays is little more than uninspiring.’

Happy Mondays, reviewed live by Dave Sexton, Record Mirror,1987

18

mind the bollocks

‘In an obvious attempt to wrestle hip-hop away from the West, East Coast critics have been gushing over Long Island’s Nas as if he were rap’s second coming. Don’t believe the hype. Too much of the album is mired with tired attitudes and posturing.’

Nas, Illmatic, reviewed by Heidi Siegmund, Los Angeles Times, 1994 The album is now considered one of the greatest ever hip-hop albums.

‘The majority of young bands are unsure of what they truly want their band to be, aside from famous. At least Muse also know they want to be Radiohead… perhaps Radiohead can start charitable donations of scrapped songs to creatively-starved bands like Muse… once that record [Radiohead’s next album] takes flight, all the Muses of the world will become studio musicians and schoolteachers.’

Muse, Showbiz, reviewed by Brent DiCrescenzo, Pitchfork website, 1999 In 2009 MSN voted the album one of the 20 greatest of the past 20 years.

‘The gel’s stream of consciousness is running a little dry… Harry tarried as she opens her trap, talkin’ rubbish you could call it (c)rap.’

Blondie, ‘Rapture’ (single), reviewed (in rhyme) by Ronnie Gurr, Smash Hits, 1981 ‘It’s quite difficult to convey how bad this is. A slow, tortured strangling of some ancient Stones riff? Parodying yourself is about as low as you can get.’

The Rolling Stones, ‘Start Me Up’ (single), reviewed by Pete Silverton, Smash Hits, 1981 ‘The title track… ends up sounding like Shakin’ Stevens on a good day.

“Everything She Wants”, “Wham! Rap”, “The Edge of Heaven” and “Last Christmas” are all better than anything on Faith. Maybe he should have stuck with Andrew Ridgeley after all.’

George Michael, Faith, reviewed by Chris Heath, Q, 1987 The First Draft of History

19

‘Talk about fop music. This isn’t just dull, it’s an old kind of dull.’

Duran Duran, ‘Planet Earth’ (single), reviewed by David Hepworth, Smash Hits, 1981 It proved to be their first hit.

‘Could have done with a more distinctive lead vocal.’

Dexy’s Midnight Runners, ‘Dance Stance’ (single), reviewed by David Hepworth, Smash Hits, 1979 ‘The vocalist has a bad attack of hiccoughs and it doesn’t match up to the promise of “Dance Stance”…. Vaguely disappointing.’

Dexy’s Midnight Runners, ‘Geno’ (single), reviewed by Kelly Pike, Smash Hits, 1980 Naturally, It went to number one. And the album that followed it?

‘A series of interesting ideas misfire… potentially good songs are dragged down by mannered vocals and would-be epic arrangements.’ (5/10) Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, reviewed by David Hepworth, Smash Hits, 1980 Hepworth’s future home, Q magazine, later ranked this among its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums.

‘I do wonder how long the Cure can continue to prop their songs against the same chord progression, with its clambering bass and deadpan drums.’

The Cure, ‘Primary’ (single), reviewed by David Hepworth, Smash Hits, 1981 Oooh, about 30-odd years long, at a guess…

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mind the bollocks

‘Dismal, muddy thuggish trad-rock that adds further weight to the notion that Sub Pop is the hype of ’89. These warhorse riffs are only fit for the knacker’s yard.’

Nirvana, ‘Blew’ (single), reviewed by Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 1989 ‘This is quite good. Just.’ (7 out of 10) The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses, reviewed by Jack Barron, NME, 1989 ‘What could have been great instead merely bulges with promise.’

(3 stars) The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses, reviewed by Peter Kane, Q, 1989 ‘Now we don’t get it wrong at NME that often, but this was a clanger.

Rated 6/10 in 1989, but 17 years later in 2006 we rectified that early mistake by declaring it the greatest indie album of all time.’

2010, reviewing The Stone Roses’ debut album in a feature about records that were underrated at the time … and getting it wrong again – the original rating had in fact been 7/10.

‘If the Pistols really were the Monkees of their generation, as the Swindle movie suggests, then the Dead Kennedys are certainly the Archies, cynically concocting cartoon anarchy for the punk-starved States.’

Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, reviewed by Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 1980 Punk-starved States? Didn’t the Americans invent the bloody genre?

‘The music is a fusion of funk and rock and is about as enjoyable as a stomach ulcer. His feeble attempt at becoming a male Grace Jones falls embarrassingly short...the sooner Prince is dethroned, the better. (4/10)’ Prince, Controversy, reviewed by Beverly Hillier, Smash Hits, 1981

The First Draft of History

21

A S T H Y I M G E M O S me, me, me

‘I think my album is the greatest album ever made… it’s even better than Sgt Pepper by The Beatles’.

Terence Trent D’Arby on Neither Fish Nor Flesh, 1989 … as opposed to Sgt Pepper by Living In A Box, presumably…

‘Musically, we’re more talented than any Bob Dylan.

Musically, we are more talented than Paul McCartney.

Mick Jagger, his lines are not clear. He don’t know how he should produce a sound. I’m the new modern rock’n’roll.

I’m the new Elvis. A friend of mine went to Africa. There was no soap and no Coke. But there was Milli Vanilli.’

Milli Vanilli ‘singer’ Rob Pilatus, 1990 The band were later stripped of their Grammy award after it was revealed that they hadn’t actually sung on their records.

‘Of course we’re more important artistically than U2. And that’s not an attention-grabbing soundbite. It’s an obvious fact. And I’d rather die than deny it.’

Gene’s Martin Rossiter, 1993 Well, Martin, we wish you no ill, so we’ll just have to deny it for you.

mind the bollocks

‘I didn’t jack in Sainsbury’s and sing with Shed Seven for job security. I did it so I could be in the best group in the world.’

Shed Seven’s Rick Witter, 1994

‘Once, it was windy outside and I didn’t like it, so I phoned the front desk and asked them to stop the wind.

I really was a f***ing c***.’

Elton John, 1995

‘I met The Queen the other week at that cultural thing at Windsor Castle but she didn’t know who I was. You’d have thought one of her equerries would have briefed her. She comes up to me and says “And what do you do?” “I just happen to have sold 40 million albums for your country, ma’am,” I told her. My family was furious but I thought it was kind of fun.’

Mick Hucknall, 1998

‘Firstly, I’m a genius. Musically, culturally, everything.

Compared to the Razorlight album, Dylan is making the chips. I’m drinking champagne.’

Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell, 2004

‘It is like spreading my legs and taking a photograph of my vagina and putting it on the internet and asking people what they think.’

Lady Gaga on what it’s like to put out a new record, 2010