Teds, Rebels, Hepcats and Psychos: The Story of British Rockabilly 1966-1988 (Rockin’ 4 Life Publications 2021)

Running close to 750 pages (and no footnotes or index to pump up the count), Paul Wragg’s self-published volume on British Rockabilly (the only sort that counts) starts in 1966 when the first record collector heads to the States to bring back a casket of pirate treasure, colonial plunder, and ends in 1998 when Charlie Feathers slipped away. 32 years of listening, playing and dancing to the rockabilly beat. Wragg presents his long history of the music’s style and attitude through a series of step-changing fads and trends told in first-hand accounts that makes this monumental volume something akin to McNeil and McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996), only better.

I doubt many will read the book from start to finish, but whatever draws you to it you’ll not be disappointed. For myself, I wanted to know more about the collectors, fanzine writers, curators and reissue labels that first pulled the term ‘rockabilly’ out of the trash bin of history and invested it with the identity we know today, or think we know. So finding out more about Bill Millar, Martin Hawkins, Colin Escott and the like was my aim. I also wanted to know more about the Teddy Boy scene, the rock ‘n’ roll revivalists who had their moment in the sun at Wembley in the summer of 1972, and how they fed and then lost out to the rockabilly rebels who followed. I wasn’t disappointed.

You wanna know the story behind the 1970s bootlegs of rockabilly discs which are all but indistinguishable from the originals? Then you also need to know about Dan and Faye Coffey, who sold 45s bought back from trips to America and essentially created the market Henry Mariano and his exacto-repros then developed. And you absolutely have to know about the Bill Millar curated series of rockabilly compilations, each focusing on a label’s output, which are as seminal as Nuggets and any of the sets of sixties garage punk LPs that followed. The importance of Millar’s series in the scheme of things is nailed when Tim ‘Polecat’ Worman explains that the Stray Cats initially got their look from Levi Dexter and the Rockats and their set list from Imperial Rockabilly Volume 1, but then what rockabilly band didn’t mine that vein? The story of collectors providing the material on which three generations of young musicians will find their stimulus and inspiration is vividly captured by Wragg.

While Crazy Cavan is the ship’s figure head, loved by most, respected by all, for Wragg the core of the tale he really wants to tell begins as the great man’s strength starts to fail. Without selling any trend short, Wragg is most interested, I think, in the late-1970s and early 1980s when rockabilly became a significant element among Britain’s teenage tribes and momentarily goes mainstream with chart toppers and TOTPs exposure. While the bands that helped form and rode this wave are all given a generous amount of space to tell their part in things, the real story belongs to the adherents and scene makers, those who danced to the records and supported the bands, the young kids who took the music, style and attitude to heart and remade the world in their own image.

If I started to lose interest with all the rockin’ weekenders in Caister and Hemsby it doesn’t much matter because by then my pockets were already loaded with gold and others will find that final part as fascinating as I found the first half and a bit.

Because these tales have rarely had an audience outside of the social groups Wagg documents, the stories are as fresh as the day they were first told, presented without guile or perfidy. Given the scope of the project, Teds, Rebels, Hepcats and Psychos is an extraordinary achievement, a luminous oral history, superbly compiled, organised and edited by the author. If this book had been supported by an established publisher it would still have been an heroic achievement, to have done it independently is a true testament to the spirit of rockabilly that Wragg sets out to celebrate. You need this book, your friends and family deserve their own copies too.

£15 paperback and £25 hardback plus shipping. Contact: paulwragg68@btinternet.com

‘Come on, let’s drift.’

Despite being republished in 2003, Hoyle’s novel about a Rochdale bovver boy is still little known and even less written about. Originally published as a pulpy paperback by Futura, and though lacking the requisite exploitation imagery used by NEL on their Skinhead series, you would have thought it would have at least rated a mention in Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette’s estimable Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press, 2017). Fact is, Rule of Night is anything but an exploitation title. It is by far the most convincing portrait of disaffected youth I have read; its depiction of working-class school leavers who lurch from one unskilled job to another is nuanced and subtle. Hoyle plots their endless drift around the town and excursions to Manchester and Luton, watching them getting drunk and blocked between the chance encounters that give vent, in spasms of gratuitous violence, to their balled-up anger.

*Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980*

The central character, Kenny owes nothing whatsoever to the romantic renderings of teen life essayed in S. E. Hinton or J. D. Salinger novels, and Hoyle shows little interest in the pop sociology approach taken by the authors of Amboy Dukes or Blackboard Jungle. Rule of the Night is devoid of sentimentality, Hoyle never patronises, nor sensationalises, he doesn’t explain motives; he just shows how it is. His teenagers are barely formed, grasping for a maturity that constantly outflanks them, and so search for it in beer, fags, obscenity strewn language and violence:

He says sneeringly into the face of the man, ‘Did you get a good look or do you want a photograph?’ And then says, ‘Cunt’, and goes on repeating, Cunt. Cunt.’
Fucking Jesus, he wants to hit the man. Fucking Cunting Christ, the man’s pale frightened face sickens him so much that nothing would feel better than kneeing him in the bollocks and seeing that awful fear he loves and despises turn into pain.

And that search for maturity is also there in the kids’ desperate longing:

Skush is the quiet one; he drinks his pint slow and calm and waits for the others to make up their minds. He’s never been out with a girl, never had it . . . and now wonders if it’s possible to get his end away without the acute pain and torture of having to approach a girl, talk to her, make easy conversation while all the time his lips are numb and his throat squeezed tight and dry.

Beyond the rich and varied characterisation, Hoyle makes a number of sharp observations on youth cultures; a small gang of Bury yobbos dressed as figures from Clockwork Orange infiltrate a Rochdale v Blackburn game; away from the terraces greasers and bike boys take their turn to fight with Kenny and his gang. On a trip into Manchester to sell stolen prescription drugs they encounter a motley crew of Teds at the Bier Keller on Charlotte Street, behind the Piccadilly Plaza Hotel:

Down the green steps and into the dark smoky warmth where the Teds are gathered in sullen groups listening to Gene Vincent and Fats Domino and Elvis. . . The three lads don’t respond to this kind of music: to them it seems crude and obvious . . . But there’s a market and a good sale to be had here for blues and black bombers; the Teds won’t touch acid or grass but rely on lager and pills to give them a charge.

A page earlier they are trying to off load their pills at a northern soul night. The momentarily empty dance space is described as ‘a sacred patch of territory which can only be invaded when the time and circumstances are judged right . . :

Almost precisely on the stroke of nine, a boy with short back and sides and dressed in an open-necked shirt, blue and yellow striped pullover, a pair of baggy trousers with turn-ups, and brown leather shoes with hard soles begins to dance alone . . . looking down at his feet, intent on the movements and rhythms, as though what comes next is as much a surprise to him as to the people watching.

That image of the lad in a state of surprise is unsurpassed in writings on northern soul dancing.