Britain's Early Pop Music
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A new book has recently been published in Britain recalling the world of pop music at the dawn of the Swinging Sixties. Actually written 50 years ago, and first published in 1961, it does not have the benefit of hindsight. It is a totally authentic in representing views that were current in Britain at the end of the 1950s.
Some of the words (like gay which did not then mean homosexual) seem outdated -- or politically incorrect -- 50 years later. As the author I have preserved them to give the flavour of the dawn of the Swinging Sixties.
In Britain in the 1950s, a new generation was beginning to emerge a decade after the horrors and deprivation of the Second World War.
It may have been because we were children born during the war that we felt different from our elder brothers and sisters. We already had a new name that distinguished us from earlier young generations: we were Teenagers.
Although the word teen to describe someone aged between 13 and 19 had been around since the 17th century, and teenhood since the late 19th century, teenager was very much a modern, post war word and probably like the pop music, the big beat that drove us an import from the USA.
Pop music seemed to promise liberation and, in common with the teenagers of my day, I was enthralled by the beat of the music of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Tommy Steele. The songs sparked a rebellion against the old ballroom music -- and the old conventions.
The teenage rebellion that drove us then was a reaction against parents who were remote and against those grey, post war years. Beat music was ours, and it fired us with a determination to yield to our desires and express ourselves.
If that sounds like the character played by James Dean in the movie Rebel Without a Cause thats no surprise. James Dean was one of the first young idols of the teenage generation. We felt an affinity with him and the character he portrayed. His spectacular death in a speeding Porsche in 1955 only added to the poignancy of having him as a role model.
It was in the cinema that I and many of my generation came face to face with the future, and it was very disturbing indeed. The movie was Blackboard Jungle. It was the first time we had ever heard rock 'n' roll: the soundtrack was Bill Haley and the Comets singing, Rock Around the Clock.
For a teenager in England in the mid-1950s, raised on radio programmes like the Sunday lunchtime Family Favourites and the daily morning programme Music While you Work, the blast of Bill Haleys basic beat was an anthem of liberation from the conventions of post-war Britain.
The film showed what we were supposed to do to the new music. Youngsters were seen bopping in their schoolroom to a background of a honking saxophone and a reedy voice exhorting them to One oclock, two oclock, three oclock, rock! If school were only like that!
Mine wasn't, and when finally the GCE O Level exams came and went, so did I. I left school, age 16, before term finished and celebrated my liberty in a pub with a girl, drinking rum-and-black (rum-and-blackcurrant -- the drink of choice for aspiring teenage beat rebels then). The next day, wracked with the remorse of my first hangover, I lay in bed and decided I wanted to be a poet.
Thats what I became, before I set out to record in print the dawn of the Swinging Sixties in my book The Big Beat Scene .
