chapter eight
Teddy Boys, London.
(Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
The old cliché has jazz coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans and settling in Chicago, which is hardly what happened, but it’s an enduring myth. However, we can with some exactness pinpoint the moment when New Orleans jazz came to Britain, and even on which ship. Ken Colyer was a hard-drinking, reefer-smoking maniac with a Merchant Navy card and a blinding love of jazz that had caused him to buy the very best trumpet he could afford at the moment. Not that he could play it well, but he and his brother Bill hung around the pathetic postwar British jazz scene, watching its wannabe performers attempt to replicate what they’d been listening to on the records they’d been buying in specialty shops since the ’30s. Ken went off to sea, trying to work up to a ship that would head to New Orleans with some cargo. He knew it would take ten days before they sailed back, and that shore leave was what he was living for. Finally, late in 1952, he succeeded. He rushed onto shore in Mobile and headed to the Greyhound station, where he caught a bus to his dream destination. There, he lost no time in finding some of the old guys who were still playing around, most notably clarinetist George Lewis, who, noticing the young Brit with the trumpet in his hands, silently fingering notes, asked him to sit in. Colyer did, and found that all the listening he’d done had paid off; he could just about keep up with the band, and, on subsequent nights, found himself catching up, often with handy hints from his new bandmates. Just in time to get busted: New Orleans had a law prohibiting black musicians and white musicians from playing on the same stage, and that’s what alerted the cops, but they looked at his passport and realized he’d long overstayed his allowed time. He was thrown in jail to await deportation. During his thirty-eight days in the clink, Colyer sent letters detailing his adventures to his brother, who passed them on to the British jazz magazine Melody Maker, which printed them. Bail had been set at $500, which Colyer of course didn’t have, but somebody did, because he was released in mid-February 1953, just in time for Mardi Gras. He partied for twenty-four hours. “I stayed on my feet til daybreak,” he wrote to Melody Maker. George Lewis approached him about going on tour with the band, but Colyer was awaiting news from New York, which was where he was being deported from. Finally, word came down, and, in a nice twist of fate, he was assigned to the United States, the world’s fastest luxury ocean liner, to get him back home. There, as he got off the train from Southampton in London’s Waterloo Station, he was met by his brother and a young kid named Chris Barber, with whose band Bill Colyer had been playing.
There had been jazz fans in Britain going back to the 1930s, but the attempts they’d made to imitate what they heard were risible, which didn’t stop them from getting gigs or occasionally recording. They also had very little choice in the records they bought, largely imports ordered by specialty stores that didn’t really know who was on them. Thus, alongside the New Orleans and Chicago records of Louis Armstrong and Bunk Johnson (Colyer’s idol) were blues records by Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Lead Belly. There was nobody you could ask about this who had any knowledge at all; the British Musicians’ Union, in its wisdom, denied visas to most foreign performers, and this most especially meant black Americans. Sidney Bechet had snuck into Britain in 1949 after a series of gigs in Paris and, at a late show, played with the Humphrey Lyttelton Band, which had a residency at the 100 Club at 100 Oxford Street in London, but was playing the Winter Garden Theatre on this particular night. That was an anomaly, though; the British jazz scene was largely a case of the blind leading the blind. Chris Barber didn’t care. Somewhere along the way, the teenager had picked up a trombone and learned to play it, and was bouncing from band to band getting experience, while amassing one of Britain’s best jazz record collections.
Another young jazz fan, Tony Donegan, was obsessed with the blues records he heard. His favorites were by Lonnie Johnson, a virtuoso guitarist who straddled urban blues (“Racketeer Blues” on Okeh, risqué numbers with Victoria Spivey) and jazz (“The Mooche” by Duke Ellington). In 1948, after years in the shadows, Johnson emerged again with a smooth song, “Tomorrow Night,” on King, that did okay on the race charts and re-established his career. That was what inspired Donegan to buy a guitar and learn to play it as well as he could. Drafted into the Army in 1950, he was sent off to Vienna, where he heard Armed Forces Radio for the first time, with its rich helping of country and western and rhythm and blues. Donegan was transfixed. Upon his discharge the next year he returned to London and started looking for an opportunity to play. A pub called the Fishmongers Arms hired him to fill the interval between sets for their regular jazz band, but Tony had bigger plans. He hung out at the 100 Club, checking the talent, and finally got a job playing banjo in Bill Brunskill’s band, where he was good enough that soon the band was called Tony Donegan’s band. The only problem was when he took the spotlight and began to sing; people (including his then girlfriend, many say) would head to the bar to get away from the noise. Still, he had great faith in himself, and took any opportunity he could to play in front of an audience, and by 1952, he was billing himself as Lonnie Donegan, no doubt in homage to his idol Lonnie Johnson. Under that name, he played an eighteen-act extravaganza at the Royal Albert Hall, just him and his guitar one evening in June. By his own admission he was awful, but he was doing something nobody else onstage had done, and the audience, if not the critics, went wild. And at the end of the month, he found himself onstage again, at Festival Hall on a bill organized by the National Federation of Jazz Organisations, featuring British, Dutch, and Swedish jazz musicians and two Americans, ragtime pianist Ralph Sutton and none other than Lonnie Johnson! Of course, he only got the gig after some of the bigger names on the bill withdrew in protest over the Musicians’ Union’s ban on foreign musicians, including the Americans, but Donegan wasn’t in the union, so he went ahead. He was so nervous, though, that he didn’t speak a word to his idol, who put on a show of supper-club music. Then, news came down that Chris Barber’s band was falling apart. Donegan was onto him in a flash. As part of building a new band, they took on Bill Colyer as a manager, and, after meeting Ken Colyer at Waterloo Station, renamed the band Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen. A Danish tour happened almost immediately.
And then, when they returned, they’d changed the name again: they were now Ken Colyer’s Jazz and Skiffle Group. This was because the band had noticed that their between-sets music, with Barber on string bass, Donegan and Ken Colyer on guitar, and Bill Colyer playing washboard, performing acoustic blues tunes learned from American records, were just as popular as their New Orleans jazz. Bill reached into his record collection and found a group called Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys on a couple of American Exclusive 78s. Burley played piano, Pops Foster bass, and Stick and Brownie McGhee played everything else. They used suitcases with wire brushes for percussion, played jugs and harmonicas, and generally just had a good time. Heaven knows where Burley et al. got the term, but Colyer snagged the word skiffle and applied it to what they were doing. In no time, half the Jazzmen’s audience was people who came for the between-sets entertainment, and sang along with their favorite numbers, top among which was Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special.” But the Colyers were causing friction in the band—Ken’s drinking, in particular, made him unmanageable—so in the middle of 1954, they left and the band became the Chris Barber Band again. Barber made sure everyone knew that it was the same band without the two brothers, and especially wanted the folks at Decca, for whom they’d already made a ten-inch album, to know that. Decca thought that a new album would be a good idea, so in July they cut New Orleans Joys, eight tracks, two of which were skiffle: “Rock Island Line” and “John Henry.” Then Decca sat on the album for six months. When it finally came out in January 1955, it sold very well, considering that jazz was at best a minority interest in Britain. But wait: What were those two other tracks?
It hardly mattered; Decca was not interested in further product from the Barber band and let them go by the end of the year. They signed with another label, made another album, and there was no skiffle on it. That was because a Scottish fan with some technical expertise had made a whole album of the skiffle band, Back Stairs Session, and pressed up a bunch of copies. He had no distribution and no idea how to get the album into circulation, which is why it was such a shock for the band to learn in early January 1956 that something called the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group had a top-ten hit with “Rock Island Line.” Someone at Decca had taken the two skiffle tracks off New Orleans Joys and released them as a single! The musicians who’d played on it—Donegan, Barber on bass, and Beryl Briden (a longtime friend of Barber’s) on washboard—had gotten precisely three pounds, two shillings each as a recording fee. There would be no royalties of any sort. And just to make sure it hurt all the more, Decca put the record out in the United States, where it went into the pop top ten. Lonnie acquired an American manager, Manny Greenfield, who happened to be passing through London at the right moment, and then quit the Barber band and went on tour in the United States, appearing on the Perry Como show, as well as on package shows with Clyde McPhatter, Chuck Berry, the Cleftones, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and Pat Boone. He got back to England in July, and the entire music industry had changed. Skiffle had become the new thing.
It had had a very modest beginning outside the Barber band; in September 1955, a club had started at the Roundhouse Pub in Soho at the corner of Brewer and Wardour Streets. (A “club,” in the British sense, is just that: a group of enthusiasts who gather for a given purpose on a regular basis in a regular location. Thus, the Roundhouse could also in theory have hosted a jazz club, a poetry club, and a folk club on other days of the week.) The Roundhouse skiffle club was run by Bob Watson, who had his own skiffle band that played there and had been introduced to the music by the Colyer/Barber band; Watson had even taken guitar lessons from Lonnie Donegan, but soon Donegan had no time, so Watson sought out a guy who was reputed to know a lot about black American music, Alexis Korner. Korner had been hanging around Soho since he was a teenager blowing off school, teaching himself guitar and eventually sitting in with Barber on occasion, but he was also looking for other opportunities to play. He fell in with a band led by Dickie Bishop, which featured a guitarist named Cyril Davies and a bassist, Adrian Brand. When Bob Watson broached the idea of a skiffle club at the Roundhouse, Davies and Brand became the rest of the Bob Watson Skiffle Group, and officers in the club. The club was a hit from the first night, at the end of which the landlord gave them a lecture on maximum capacities and fire laws. The “group” was pretty flexible, and drop-ins by Donegan and Korner happened all the time. So did visits by an American who was living in London and called himself Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Nobody at the Roundhouse knew that he was the son of a Jewish dentist in Brooklyn and that his real name was Elliott Charles Adnopoz, nor would the fact that he’d lived with Woody Guthrie for a spell have impressed anyone because Britain had no idea who he was, but one undeniable fact was that Ramblin’ Jack knew more songs than anyone. It didn’t hurt that he’d also starred in a Christmas musical, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, written by a new Londoner, folklorist Alan Lomax, whose father, John, had discovered Lead Belly and been the first to record him doing “Midnight Special” and “Rock Island Line.”
Soon there were two other skiffle clubs. The one at Richardson’s Rehearsal Rooms on Gerrard Street in what was not yet London’s Chinatown was called the 44 Skiffle Club, run by John Hasted, who taught atomic physics at University College, and who was also a communist. Again, the house band was kind of loose, and singers would include Shirley Collins and Margaret Barry. Then there was the one at the Princess Louise, a posh Victorian pub by Holborn Kingsway tube station, run by Russell Quaye and his girlfriend, Hylda Sims, an aspiring ballerina who’d taken up banjo and guitar. Quaye had a group called the City Ramblers who were the house band for his club, and they also had the usual numbers of droppers-in, including Cyril Davies and Jack Elliott and a dynamo of a young woman from Glasgow, Nancy Whiskey, whose real name was Anne Wilson and who’d taken her stage moniker from a Scottish folk song. When Quaye, Sims, and Jack Elliott and his wife, June, all took off at the end of the summer to see what opportunities might await in Europe, one of the City Ramblers, Johnny Pilgrim, was left without anything to do. He took a day job, and soon thereafter a guy he’d met one night at the 100 Club, Wally Whyton, asked him if he’d be interested in joining his skiffle group, the Vipers. “We’ve got a residency at the 2 I’s, a coffee bar in Old Compton Street, and the place is packed every night.” Welcome to Ground Zero of British rock & roll.
The 2 I’s wasn’t the first espresso bar in London, but they were springing up with regularity. A lot of the new Bohemians in London didn’t like the atmosphere in pubs, so they took to hanging out in places like the Gyre and Gimbel (known to its habitués as “the G”) or the Nucleus (“the Nuke,” of course), which were open late and had every manner of oddball hanging around. There was usually a guitar for people to use, and occasionally one guitarist teaching another so they could play together. The success of these two places (“success” being a relative term) led to more, but they tended to want a touch of respectability; one had a sign warning “Folk Songs, But No Skiffle.” The manager at the 2 I’s was happy to have it, though; the Vipers had accidentally walked in after playing on a flatbed truck during a street fair and continued playing, and as they were packing up to leave, the manager said, “Excuse me, lads, but I really enjoyed that.” He invited them to return, and they said they’d be in some evening next week. And, like every residency of every skiffle band in every situation so far, they started attracting drop-ins. The most aggressive one was a kid who’d sworn he was going to make it in showbiz someday, and determined that the first step on that ladder would be to become the first Englishman to play rock & roll. His name was Tommy Hicks.
Rock & roll wasn’t exactly a new thing in Britain. Decca, after all, was a British-owned record company, and so Bill Haley’s records were made available, although the BBC didn’t give them any needle time. They had something of an underground cachet until The Blackboard Jungleopened on October 17, 1955. That not only revived sales of “Rock Around the Clock” as it had done in America, it also gave teenagers an excuse to hang out. Ian Dury, a rowdy young Cockney who would find unexpected fame twenty years later, remembered, “It was the films that gave everybody a chance to congregate. Before there were many concerts, Sunday afternoon was when we used to sit round the big screen, telling jokes, singing songs, and spoiling the film.” Rebels without a cause, they were the new audience. Now, if only there was some rock & roll for them. Tommy Hicks was ready; a school dropout who’d been to sea crewing on transatlantic liners, he’d heard rock & roll in America, and was hitting the skiffle scene, trying to get those musicians to back him on tunes like “Blue Suede Shoes” that nobody was familiar with. It hardly mattered; one night in the 2 I’s, Hicks was playing a short set when a New Zealander named John Kennedy, a showbiz photographer who’d worked in Hollywood, where he’d shot Marilyn Monroe, among others, walked into the place and was transfixed. “I think I could make you a star very quickly,” he told the lad, who replied, “What do you know about show business?” Kennedy had to admit that he didn’t know much and asked Hicks what he knew about singing. “Nothing,” he admitted. So they joined forces. First off was to change Tommy’s name, since Hicks didn’t sound like star quality. Steel, however, was his grandfather’s name, and steel is hard and shiny, so they went with that. (Not long after, when Tommy made his first record, he was dismayed to see Decca had printed his name as Steele, no doubt adding the e that their American affiliate had dropped from Buddy Holley’s name.) Next, Kennedy pulled the first of his publicity stunts; on Sunday, September 16, 1956, The People, a bestselling tabloid, had a picture of Tommy performing and driving a bunch of girls wild. ROCK AND ROLL HAS GOT THE DEBS, TOO! read the headline, although Kennedy later revealed that they were models he’d hired, and told them to give posh names when reporters asked, as “Patricia Scott-Brown” and “Valerie Thornton-Smith” did. The pictures were supposedly at the nation’s “first society rock and roll party,” with the evening’s star declaring, “Gee, you cats have rocked me to a standstill,” as he collapsed into a chair at party’s end. In order to keep the hype rolling, Kennedy needed money, and he approached Larry Parnes, who’d been working in his family’s fashion business but was trying to buy his way into show business, having invested in a flop play a year earlier. Parnes dropped in at the Stork Club, a semi-posh nightclub that had given Steele a three-week contract on the basis of the newspaper article, and when Kennedy introduced him to Parnes, Steele said, “Hello, guv. I understand you’re to be my new manager.” He already had three: two guys who’d introduced him to Kennedy and now Parnes. And a couple of weeks later, he was auditioning for Decca (in a bathroom; they’d mistakenly booked him into a studio that was being used) and getting ready to cut “Rock with the Caveman,” written by Steele, a member of the Vipers named Mike Pratt, and a young student who hung around a sort of commune where the Vipers and others lived, Lionel Bart. On the other side was a song by Steele alone, “Rock Around the Town.” It sounds sort of like a rock & roll record someone who’d never heard rock & roll would write, which isn’t far from the truth. The record was released on October 12, and although Melody Maker disdained to notice it—it wasn’t jazz, after all—its feisty young competitor, New Musical Express, said, “Decca’s British rock ’n’ roll record by Tommy Steele lacks the essential authentic flavour. Best thing on the disc is Ronnie Scott’s driving tenor sax playing.” Nor did they like his first television appearance, asking, “Does Tommy Steele expect to gain more popularity by appearing with untidy hair?” Untidy hair! Would today’s youth stop at nothing? But twenty-year-old Tommy was energetic, jumped around a lot while playing, and, best of all, looked perfectly harmless.
Steele’s creative team could have been forgiven their rock & roll ignorance; in fact, until RCA started releasing Elvis’s records on their British label late in 1956 and EMI, which had bought Capitol, inexplicably loosed “Be-Bop-A-Lula” on the unsuspecting country (“a straightforward idiot chant”: New Musical Express) the only thing they’d had to go by was what Bill Haley was putting out, and after a couple of decent records, he was losing the thread, as witness “Mambo Rock.” But the worst thing Haley did was sign up for a quickie film, Rock Around the Clock, thrown together with Alan Freed, the Platters, the Ernie Freeman Combo, Tony Martinez and His Band, and Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, Las Vegas’s lounge rock attraction, who got to eat up far more celluloid than they deserved. This dire piece of cinema landed in Britain and teenagers got to see Haley, corpulent and with that ridiculous spit curl in the middle of his forehead, churn out a few numbers. In America, the film was the beginning of the end for Haley, whereas British youth were just confused. Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” got released (“It seems a great shame that a delightful song like ‘Blueberry Hill’ must be massacred by a weapon like the voice of Fats Domino”: NME again), but the perfect indignity was “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” for which Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers took abuse in the British press for being young and black, and anyway, when a professional singing group (white and British) called the Stargazers performed it on a BBC television show, anyone could see that people who knew music could make something fairly respectable out of the song. As for Little Richard, who unaccountably had “Tutti Frutti” picked up by a British label, there was no chance that anyone would hear him. A newspaper compared him to “an animated golliwog.”
Skiffle it was, then, as the Vipers were signed to Parlophone, where producer George Martin recorded their first single, “Aren’t You Glad” b/w “Pick a Bale of Cotton.” Novelty fare. Teenagers would eventually learn what quality was. Nobody in America had a thing to worry about; Britain was never going to compete in the rock & roll sweepstakes.