When British rock ’n’ roll came of age

Between Elvis and The Beatles, Britain thundered to new styles of music played by men and women captured in a wonderful series of photographs. David Charters reports

IT WAS the time when the world began again. Any- way, that’s how it seemed to the generation who could work miracles with powdered eggs, and had emerg- ed, blinking like moles, from the post-war rationing that had clung to the country like the eternal, bronchial fogs of the British winters.

Outside the factories, bicycle bells greeted the morning and wobbling, double-decked buses gasped and shuddered down the roads.

Sons wore sports jackets and short-sleeved, checked pullovers like their dads, who shaved at the steamed mirror with cut-throat razors, while the daughters kept a “bottom drawer”, into which they would slip items for their forthcoming marriage to Mr Right – almost certainly a pimpled local lad, who had been toughened, broad-ened and introduc- ed to unimagin- able pleasures and miseries during National Service.

Across the seas, the Rus- sians and the Americans played dip- lomatic games with their grow- ing collections of bombs.

And then the new world dawned on July 4, 1954 – American Independence Day, as it happens – but for us the day when rationing ended.

Obviously, it would be wrong to suggest that everything changed in a day, but all changes must have a beginning and that was it.

Young people stepped into the summer light, led by the competing styles of popular music – the tried and trusted crooners and balladeers, the jazzmen (tradit- ional and modern) and those new types with their skiffle and rock and roll.

Halfway to Paradise is a sumptuous book celebrating that era and its title is, of course, a reference to a popular song by Liverpool’s Billy Fury, one of its brightest stars.

The splendid text from Alwyn W Turner links the magnificent pictures of Harry Hammond, still going strong and one of the great photographers of the age – a man held in trust by numerous stars from Frank Sinatra, Dickie Valentine and Judy Garland to The Beatles, by way of Buddy Holly, Lonnie Donegan, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Cliff Richard, The Shadows, The Vipers, Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Helen Shapiro, Adam Faith and numerous others.

It was a rainbow age, breaking out of the grey that had envelop- ed life for so long. There were the pinks of candy-floss, New Bright- on rock and the more demure lipsticks, the fluorescence of teddy boys’ socks, the pastel and primary colours of the flashing advertisements, the jackets, skirts and shirts.

But Hammond’s wonderfully moody pictures show the world in the most sharply defined black and white, bringing forth the prominent players in Brit-ain’s first youth cults – the men and women whose music and id-eals have influenced every subs-equent generation. These photo- graphs are a delight, the offerings of an artist operating at his peak.

The fact that they are publish- ed by the Victorian and Albert Museum is in itself interesting – providing us with conclusive evi- dence that the teen idols of today make the history of tomorrow.

The day after rationing ended was another crucial date in the history of youth culture. Elvis Presley recorded the tracks for his first single at the Sun Studio, on Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. But, in England, the following week, Chris Barber’s Jazz Band filed into Decca’s London studio to record their album, New Orleans Joy. During an interval, the banjo player and a few others recorded their own track, Rock Island Line. The banjo player was Lonnie. The skiffle craze had begun.

“Some of these people are slipping away a bit and not given the attention they deserve,” says Alwyn. “They should be given the credit for laying down the groundwork for those who were celebrated afterwards. You need the foundations. The pre-Beatle stuff tends to get ignored, as if we leapt from Elvis to The Beatles with nothing in between.”

Alwyn, 46, is an author, who also writes board games, trivia questions, puzzles and the scenar- ios for those murder dinner-part- ies, the am-dram fad for Agatha Christie-style settings. He is, then, a little younger than most fans of that period, but loves it as the launch-pad for the stars. “There is a freshness to the early stuff because it has not been so overworked in recent years,” he says.

“There is the joy of rediscovering Gene Vincent and, from the way he’s posing, you can see a straight line through to David Bowie, Ian Drury and onwards. That is how you behave when you have a microphone in front of you, you hunch over it.

“There is a sudden leap from the crooner, who thought of themselves as the boy next door, to the rock and rollers, who saw themselves as stars.”

It is now generally assumed that skiffle was a soft option, wiped-out by leering rockers, but Alwyn quotes an American magazine, which said: “Crouch- ing before the mic, Donegan crooks his right knee, pumps his foot convulsively and whangs his guitar, occasionally wrenching his pelvis Elvis-fashion.”

Adam Faith said: “Lonnie singing live had a fire and anger in him that came right at you.”

All this was essential to the development of The Beatles and the other Merseybeat groups, but just before them came Billy Fury – not only the closest we came to Elvis, but a man who could write his own songs.

“His records stand up as well as anything from America,” says Alwyn. “He did the rock and roll stuff and the big ballads and he was absolutely brilliant at both.”

Recently, Alwyn spotted an old lady in an electric wheelchair, which she had altered so that it had Harley Davidson hog-handles at the front. “If you are a Ted, you can go on wearing the style, a draped jacket looks good whatever age you are. But, if you are a punk, it could be a bit different. There comes a point when you have to put the bondage trousers away,” he admits.

Rock and roll lives on, forever!

HALFWAY to Paradise: The Birth of British Rock, by Alwyn W Turner, with photographs by Harry Hammond, is published by V&A Publishing, at £24.99.

davidcharters