London Rock: Birth of an Edwardian

A chance encounter in a local record shop, the jacket so grubby it might almost have been a revenant from 1959. But what a great sleeve it is, a superb design that looks like the cover of some titillating true crime or confidential magazine pushed out by some back street Soho publisher.

The price asked for the beat up copy was too high so I skipped on it and went home and checked on-line. A tenner for the mint copy you see here.

I thought at first this white label boot on Velvet Touch Records might have been something that slipped out from behind the counter at Rock On around the same time as Ace and Charly were putting out all those rockabilly 10 inch discs, but this all feels a little too arch and artful for the early 1980s.

All, apart from the Bern Elliott and Tom Jones unknown to me, and those two tracks I’d always thought of as more Beat Merchant material than Rock n’ Roll even if they make perfect sense in the present company.

Most first generation British Rock ‘n’ Roll comes across as if it was conceived as a novelty recording backed by jobbing big band jazzers. That’s not hidden here, especially with the inclusion of The Basil Kirchin Band, who have that swing thing down, and Clay Morton’s ‘Tombstone No. 9’ which is delivered in an execrable cockney accent, or Tommy Bruce who is so burnt up by his girlfriend he has to call for a fire engine. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman telephoned in that composition.

Adam Faith’s reworking of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ as ‘I Vibrate’ has some fire in its groin and Dean Shannon’s ‘Ubangi Stomp’ drives the cool cats wild, but it still sounds like it was recorded in Teddington upon Thames and not anywhere near Memphis.

This is all clearly neither here nor there because the disc as a whole is a solid ‘Whoop Up’ as Johnny Keating and the Z-Men demonstrate. Brilliantly curated from the opening introduction from some Pathé newsreel warning of the latest folk devils to the last cut on side two.

I’d love to know who put this together and when, but if I live the rest of my life in ignorance I don’t much care as the sleeve is the real thing, pure 100% rock ‘n’ roll

Doo-Wop-Sha-Waddy-Waddy – the 1970s R 'n' R Revival Staggers on

Variations on a theme . . . Game magazine in June 1975 ran a seven page spread using four Teddy Boys and a beat-up 1952 Pontiac Chieftan as props. It’s all a little obvious in its hoodlum poses, but the model’s two outfits, what there is of them, look to have been borrowed from the racks of 430 King’s Road. Though I’m no expert, the string vest looks like a leftover from Let It Rock and the black top with asymetrical zips, rips and patches might be something worked up for Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die/SEX.

Bob Carlos Clarke directed the shoot, ‘ A wet dream from those rockin’ fifties’.

addenda: turns out I was part way right on the model’s shirts, the black top, Paul Gorman tells me, is a detourned Let It Rock shirt made for the London R n R Show at Wembley and then cut up for TFTL/SEX. He’ll be posting something on these images and others from Game at somepoint so we’ll know more . . . As for the string vest, who does really know . . . and, I should also add, the Teds, Ian, Pete, Andy and Len were all well-known figures on the London scene, but you can tell that can’t you?

GAME v.1 #3 (March 1974) ‘Teddy Boy Memories’. Why do ‘70s Teds always come from Tooting? Is this Max Needham? Let It Rock gets a mention: ‘pushing drainpipes and brothel creepers to the King’s Road trendies’.

Jiving at the 2i's with the Cosh Boys

Cosh Boy (1953) is among the new dual format sets from the celebrated BFI Flipside series and its another terrific addition. Like so many Flipsides, the attraction is as much with the extras as the main feature. Of especial interest for me was the 1956 8 minute report from ITV’s This Week programme on the Teddy Boy. Before R ’n’ R had corrupted Britain’s youth, working-class Mike Wood from Hounslow showed a fondness for jazz and a hair style called ‘be-bop’. The cut and perm made a nice set with his barely formed goatee.

With hair done just right, Mike takes his girl to the Flamingo where they dance to The Tony Kinsey Quartet.

Filmed 5 years later, the 22 minute short film by Robert Hartford-Davis, Stranger in the City tracks around London from morning to night. To modern eyes, the Big Smoke seems uncannily empty but as night falls the streets begin to fill up with cars and pedestrians. Outside the 2i’s coffee bar two teenagers jive to the new rock ‘n’ roll they hear in their heads.

Like the images of the Soho strip clubs seen earlier in the film, juveniles loitering in caffeine joints are now firmly part of the city’s attractions. Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo had put both into mainstream cinema two years earlier.

Who are these jiving cats illuminated by the 2i’s window? One is instantly recognisable as Paul Raven, Decca recording star. He was born with the name Paul Gadd but we know him as Gary Glitter. He looks like Sid Vicious before the drugs hollowed out his cheeks.

Who’s the other, better looking lad? Vince Eager maybe? I dunno. Whatever, a great little film and a great find by Flipside.

Addendum

Rob Finnis got in touch and identified Paul Ravens’ mate: as the ‘one hit wonder Lance Fortune, who scored with 'Be Mine' in late 1959. His real name was Chris Morris and he hailed from Liverpool. Incidentally, Hartford-Davis discovered and managed Paul Raven and got him his first record deal in 1960 which, I guess, is why he makes an appearance in the short.’

Thanks Rob.

Jeff Nuttall on Teddy Boys & Elvis

The teddy boys were waiting for Elvis Presley. Everybody under twenty all over the world was waiting. He was the super-saleman of mass-distribution hip. Unfortunately he had to be white. Otherwise one of the Chicago blues singers, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf, would’ve done. He had to have the cowboy/Spanish element. He had to have the Adonis profile. He had to have the overtones of the queer boy’s pin-up, the packed jeans, the sullen long-lashed eyes, the rosebud mouth, the lavish greasy hair and gilded drag.

Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (1968)

Forget the Chicagoans he lists, over Elvis, Nuttall prefers Jelly Roll Morton as his choice of Romantic primitive American export to fire up his jaded post-war loins. His hipster subtext comes straight from the mouth of Norman Mailer’s White Negro, but I love that line about Elvis as ‘the super-saleman of mass-distribution hip.’

He later writes that Dylan was the ‘first sign popular music was transcending its commercial situation.’ His opinion being based on the broad acceptance of the ‘profound sourness’ found in the singer’s delivery. Capturing in two words what others have struggled, and failed, to achieve in the course of a book.

Budget label Teddy Boy R 'n' Revival

Two collections from the Contour label drawing on the Philips catalogue, mostly 60s recordings in reprocessed stereo.

The same three Teds are featured on both sleeves - jackets on and off. They have the look of the authentic. No photographer credit.

They are posing in front of a cinema for the Crazy Rock sleeve, Horror of Frankenstein is playing and Abbot & Costello’s In The Navy (1941) is also on the programme. The Hammer horror was released in November 1970, so I’d guess these two discs hit the shops in the following year.

Teddy Boys at The Black Raven (1972)

A James Gray photograph of the Black Raven pub that is described in the Rolling Stone piece from a previous posting. Below is one of his portraits from 1973, this one features the same geezer who was supping back a pint in Roger Perry’s pic that accompanied Jerry Hopkins observations. He’s got himself a new hair cut . .

The two photos are from this Evening Standard file

There’s a public Facebook page on the pub here which features lots of snaps. The guys in the banner photograph can all be seen in the 1970 BBC documentary of Gene Vincent’s last tour of the UK having a pop at skinheads, more of which anon.

By day . . . Melody Maker (May 6 1972)

'Awopbopaloobop: The Teds are back and greased for action' (Rolling Stone 1972)

Jerry Hopkins, ‘Beatle Loathers Return: Britain’s Teddy Boys’ Rolling Stone (March 2, 1972) gets in on the UK’s Rock’n’ Roil revival scene. Here’s my favorite observation by Elvis’ first rock biographer:

All you can see is hair.

Plumes and cascades and whirlpools of hair, all of it greased and obsidian-black, thumbing its nose at gravity as it stretches four inches from the brow, wobbling, glistening: the classic Elephant’s Trunk; sweeping back in shiny sheets past earringed ears to plunge into a perfect D.A. or splash over the velvet collars in hirsute waterfalls. Towers and arches and walls of hair. This isn’t just extraordinary styling—it’s architecture.

Unless you’ve got good eyesight you might want to check out the piece here, which for reasons known only to the magazine’s on-line editors uses a pic of Teds from 1954 rather than Roger Perry’s photographs