BEFORE TOMMY STEELE

Few people would quarrel with the proposition that British pop music in the true sense dates from the rise of Tommy Steele in the middle 50s. Nevertheless, immediately after the war there were two movements which shared enough in common with pop to justify some consideration here, however brief. They were revivalist jazz and modern jazz, and later there was yet a third, skiffle, which has an even stronger claim in this context.

Revivalist Jazz

It was inevitable that the spontaneous if mysterious enthusiasm which sprang up all over wartime Britain for an almost forgotten music, Negro jazz of the 20s, should lead eventually to an attempt to reconstruct the music and, by the end of the war, there was already one established band, the George Webb Dixielanders. Within a year or two the revivalist jazz movement had spread to every major city in the British Isles, and it was in the jazz clubs of the late 40s that what might be considered the dry-run for a pop explosion first took shape.

Yet I don’t think that the revivalist jazz movement qualifies as a pop movement proper. I have written elsewhere* and at length about those days but feel, that to justify my qualifications, I must at least make an inventory of my reasons for excluding it from the pop canon despite the many points of similarity. Revivalist jazz shared with the later pop movements its spontaneous generation with no initial commercial encouragement: the invention of a life-style through which it expressed not only its own identity but its contempt for outsiders; its eventual decline due to its success with a wider, less perceptive public and the resultant lowering of standards and over-exposure.

Where it differed was in the way it looked back towards an earlier culture for its inspiration, thus admitting that it believed in a ‘then’ which was superior to ‘now’—a very anti-pop concept. What’s more both its executants and their public were mostly into their twenties before the movement was even under way and, although this was the result of the war, it did tend to add a certain ballast, a potential respectability. This was further underlined by the fact that, although enthusiasm for the music cut right across the social spectrum, it contained a surprisingly large minority of middle-and upper-class adherents and even a few elderly and distinguished advocates who had formed a taste for the music before the war. In consequence, right from the off, the press treated it as an eccentric rather than a scandalous manifestation. There was none of that snobbism disguised as moral concern which was later to be levelled at the essentially working-class pop movements which replaced it This was partially because the sexual emphasis was absent. Jazz may have begun as brothel-music, may have provided the background to the prohibition years, but the atmosphere of the British revivalist clubs, while permissive enough by the standards of the time, was jolly and extrovert rather than orgiastic. It’s true that a musician of strong sexual appetites ‘did all right’ and that virgins were thin on the ground, but there was no moment when the sexual potency of a revivalist jazz hero made it necessary to isolate him from his over-stimulated fans.

On balance then I feel that the antiquarian, post-adolescent nature of the British revivalist jazz movement of the late 40s destroys its claim to being thought of as a pop movement.

Despite its large public it was never even fully exploited. A series of over-long, over-packed concerts, the defection of Humphrey Lyttleton, and the emergence of the ‘traditional’ purists† were enough to sink it.

Modern Jazz

Superficially ‘modern jazz’, or bebop in this country, bore even less relation to a pop explosion than its revivalist contemporary. It was less compromising, less popular, more esoteric, and it remained so. Yet in some rather central aspects it was closer, at any rate, to pop’s more recent developments.

For one thing it was based on a contemporary form and, while romantic enough, had none of the archaic romanticism of the revivalists. Bebop, or bop, or rebop, was the invention of a small group of American Negro musicians based in New York who, during the 40s, deliberately set out to extend the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of jazz.

Yet this was only partially on aesthetic grounds. It was also an attempt to disassociate themselves from what they felt to be the Uncle Tom image of the older jazz forms. They had no interest in using their music as an in to success in a white world; on the contrary they used it as a wall: its very inaccessibility an expression of their contempt for a society which offered them a living only in exchange for the mugging acknowledgement of racial inferiority. Cool, hip, ironic, they were prepared to go a long way to prove their detachment. Several of the most gifted, including Charlie Parker, the greatest of them all, destroyed themselves with hard drugs.

The early British modernists based their lives and art on the same premises. They too affected dark glasses and the hip stance of their heroes. In contrast to the beer-swilling revivalists, pot and pep-pills were their chosen stimulants and in a few cases, they too went on to hard drugs. Yet being both white and British, they were as far removed from their idols as the revivalist was from his. Their music was better, certainly; most of the early British modernists were professional musicians by training and had heard bop live in New York during their shore leaves while serving in Geraldo’s navy‚‡ but the pressure behind it was of necessity less powerful.

This is not to doubt their sincerity. They understood not only the musical complexity of bop but the spirit that created it and, within their emotional means, they tried to play it Yet they remained what Norman Mailer called ‘White Negroes’. They chose to reject society; it didn’t automatically reject them. It’s this voluntary choice that they share in common with the recent spirit in pop music.

Skiffle

Skiffle was much nearer to a pop movement proper than either revivalist or modern jazz, and although shorter lived than Rock ’n’ Roll, it not only predated it by several months, but its leading light, Lonnie Donegan, was for a long time as popular if not more popular than Steele himself.

Like many of the later pop movements, skiffle too was at first unaware of its potential commercial possibilities. Originally the word had been used, during the 20s, to describe a sort of jazz in which some or all the legitimate instruments were replaced by kazoos, washboards or broom-handle bass-fiddles. Later there was, in British skiffle, a resurrection of the music within the traditional meaning of the term, but at first the word was deliberately misapplied to mean a folk-spot within the context of an evening of New Orleans jazz.

Ken Colyer, the traditional band-leader, was the first to institute the ‘Skiffle Session’ in this sense. Apprehensive that even his loyal public might find a whole evening of ensemble jazz a little hard to take, he broke it up by allowing his banjo-player Lonnie Donegan to change over to guitar and sing a few folk-blues drawn mostly from the repertoire of the American Negro folk-hero Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter.

These sessions were so popular that when Chris Barber left Colyer to set up on his own, taking Donegan with him, he kept them in as part of the act.

‘Rock Island Line’ was originally issued as one of the tracks on a Barber LP but was requested so often on radio programmes that it was eventually reissued as a single and, by May 1956, was Number 1 in the charts.

Donegan received only the Musicians’ Union fee for ‘Rock Island Line’ but its success persuaded him to leave Barber and go single. Skiffle broke away at this point from its anchorage in traditional jazz and set sail on its own. Within a few months it was a national craze. All over the country skiffle groups sprang up, and several performers of varying merit followed Donegan into the big time. The first British near-pop movement was under way.

Not British in its source (which was almost entirely American Negro folk music), but as a movement for which there was, at the time, no precedent in the States. Donegan was indeed the first British artist who managed to sell musical coals to a transatlantic Newcastle; by 28 April ‘Rock Island Line’ was Number 6 in the American charts.

Yet for all its success it must be remembered that skiffle tended to appeal to a relatively restricted audience. It had nothing to say to the Teddy boys. It in no way touched those who were looking for a music rooted in either sex or violence. It seemed, from the off, a bit folksy and tended to attract gentle creatures of vaguely left-wing affiliations. It appealed immediately to very young children, a quality which, in other pop movements, took a certain time. Like revivalist jazz then, although being a vocal music it took less application to appreciate, it was in no way an anti-social...