Daily Mail, June 9, 2012
History can be studied in many ways. While last weekend’s Diamond Jubilee flotilla was a traditional Royal spectacle, another quite different way of looking at the recent past could be seen at Monday night’s Buckingham Palace concert. Then music drew hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets of London and seventeen million to their televisions.
And what did the performers, from Tom Jones at 72 to Ed Sheeren at 21, have in common? Basically huge popularity as shown in the record charts over the six decades of the Queen’s reign. And there lies a coincidence, because this year is also the sixtieth anniversary of the British pop charts.
Just five months after the Queen succeeded to the throne in 1952 the pop newspaper the New Musical Express began publishing a modest list of the twelve top selling, ten inch shellac records in the country.
At around five shillings each and easily broken, they were relatively expensive at the time, and the weekly codifying of their sales would, if considered at all, have been seen as quite the least of the foundation stones in the building of modern Britain.
But that weekly barometer of musical taste has mesmerised teenagers, radio and TV producers, and, not least, performers ever since, as the records have gone from being 78s to 45s, then CDs and are now downloads on iTunes.
Success in the charts can obviously make or break a star career. But looked at more broadly, we can see that fashions in popular music tell us quite a lot about ourselves, how we, as a people, are now, and how we used to be.
Consider the very first pop chart of November 1952. It contained Bing Crosby pining for the Isle of Innisfree and Guy Mitchell patting a baby’s bottom in the song Feet Up. Not exactly stuff that rapper Diddy or even Justin Bieber might record today. Then there was wartime stalwart Vera Lynn, tenor Mario Lanza and comedian Max Bygraves with his Cowpuncher’s Cantata.
Even with Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine listed, that first chart looks in pop terms not only totally white, as was most of the population then, but overwhelmingly middle aged. But that was an age of real austerity when middle age virtually began when you left school.
Change wasn’t far away and it came almost totally from America. By the mid-Fifties Madison Avenue had identified the hormonally turbulent years of adolescence as a rapidly developing market, and as young actors like James Dean played fashionably “misunderstood” youths on the cinema screen, rock and roll echoed, literally, from the radio stations.
Correspondingly by June 1956 the charts looked very different, with songs sung by and aimed at young people, led by Elvis Presley, then just 21, with Heartbreak Hotel and Blue Suede Shoes. And as songwriters struggled to get the words “teen” or “teenager” into as many lyrics as possible, the charts filled with American puppy love songs.
There was even a group called the Teenagers, who sang what is now the classic Why Do Fools Fall In Love? The lead singer, Frankie Lymon, was just 14. He was also black. Very quickly, apart from making it possible for any group of ambitious boys with a couple of electric guitars and a set of drums to become a band, rock and roll began helping puncture holes in ingrained racial attitudes – especially in America. Young people liked the music. They cared less about colour than their parents did.
Not that many British youths could have afforded electric guitars and amplifiers in the mid-Fifties. What they could buy were cheap acoustic ones, and everyone’s mum had an old washboard. So, as Lonnie Donegan prospered with Rock Island Line and Stewball, skiffle groups sprang up all over the country. John Lennon started one before he’d even taken his O’levels.
Those were the days of National Service, so, unsurprisingly, one of the most popular records of the Fifties was Pat Boone’s I’ll Be Home, a ballad in the form of a letter being written by a young soldier to his girl friend. In the charts for almost six months, it was a regular on radio’s Two Way Family Favourites (one of the few record programmes on the BBC) when requests would be played for British servicemen serving in Germany.
Of course, young love, also tends to include passion and, for some, a word rarely mentioned in the Fifties – sex. The message in the Elvis song, Don’t, which now sounds rather like an entreaty for a bit of light teenage petting (‘Baby, don’t say don’t”), passed unnoticed in 1958. But by 1961 the age old question, would a boy “respect” a girl if she went “all the way” was put to music by the Shirelles in Will You Love Me Tomorrow?
The very fact that anyone dared ask that question in song signalled that a change in attitudes was approaching. The Sixties had arrived. The permissive society wouldn’t be far behind.
But first something peculiarly British was on its way. As Cliff Richard reminded us on Monday, he had his first hits in the Fifties, along with Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. All three artists were good, but rock’s musical references as seen through them were all second hand American. Kids here didn’t meet at the drugstore, go to high school proms or fall asleep at drive-in movies. They went to the youth club, on their bikes, in the rain.
But then came the Beatles with their melding of British references and wit into rock, and the national musical backbone stiffened as almost overnight they and other groups led the world. A totally unanticipated result of the 1944 Education Act, which created so many art colleges and provided free grammar school and university education for the lucky, could be found in little bands forming all around the country. Here was successful social engineering being played out musically.
The Beatles bleak story of Eleanor Rigby with the surrealistic line “wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door” could never have been written a generation earlier by boys from the background of Lennon and McCartney; while Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale sounded as though the lyricist had swallowed his A-level Shelley and Keats texts. At the same time Ray Davies and the Kinks were producing a romantic vignette of a working class London teenage couple’s life in Waterloo Sunset.
From America the howl of anger over Civil Rights turned some music into a political weapon, as protest songs like We Shall Overcome and Bob Dylan’s Blowing In The Wind united young and well educated college students with the politically dispossessed. Then came the peace movement and anti-Vietnam war songs like Give Peace A Chance. It was an intense time.
Obviously not everything in the Sixties was good or even clever. A lot of what was espoused in hippy happy clouds of marijuana was nonsense, as a great many records of that time were totally banal – as they are at any other time. And the proselytising of drugs by some Sixties stars was almost suicidally stupid. I know. I wrote quite a few obituaries of the young and famous around that time.
But there were so many good things, too. During those years rock music at its best grew up, as Joni Mitchell showed when she backed the nascent ecology movement. “They paved Paradise, put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot…” she sang sweetly but bitingly in Big Yellow Taxi. No future historian studying the period will find a pithier condemnation of the destruction of nature than those lines, which reached the charts in 1969.
This was the great age of space exploration, too, and while the world was staring at the moon, David Bowie was turning our fascination into Space Oddity and the most original of songs, “This is Major Tom to Ground Control…”
Since the arrival of the Pill in the early Sixties attitudes to pre-marital sex had been quickly changing – and for sure the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have dared release Let’s Spend The Night Together before 1967 – but in 1969 came the first mock orgasm on record with Jane Birkin’s Je T’Aime.
Naturally it wasn’t played on the BBC, but it still went to number one, opening the way for Donna Summer and the eventual overt sexualisation of the performances of so many women singers. Think only of Madonna, Kylie Minogue and now Rihanna.
George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, once told me that he expected the quality of popular music to go on getting better after the Sixties, and had been disappointed when progress stopped and punk became the fashion.
But perhaps punk wasn’t as popular as he feared. What seems to have happened in the Seventies is that music began to divide. On one hand was the much written about but, I suspect, less listened to punk, with the purposely obnoxious Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK, and the left wing Clash, who sang about social issues.
And for those who can remember the strike-ridden late Seventies, it’s easy to see that both groups would have touched a bare nerve, although I always thought the Sex Pistols were more self-publicists that nihilists.
At the very same time, however, the eccentrically glamorous Abba were producing tailor made songs for families watching Top Of the Pops – not least among their hits being Dancing Queen. Then by summer 1978 the nation was in love with dancing as the Bee Gees brought us Saturday Night Fever and threw in John Travolta to show us how to do it.
Obviously dance has always been with us, and some of us choose to forget Let’s Twist Again and Chubby Checker from 1961. But since disco in the late Seventies it’s just kept on getting bigger and bigger.
Feminism had been a growing movement since the late Sixties, but in the male dominated record industry it wasn’t until Gloria Gaynor sang I Will Survive in 1979 that it really found an anthem. Now no karaoke hen night is enjoyed without it, as no flight on one of the expanding Seventies package holidays was complete back then without a sly smile to Lorraine Chase and the Cats UK hit Luton Airport.
Ever since the Fifties, electronics had been improving our lives in all kinds of many ways, one of which was the recording of music to the point where the computer keyboard had become an additional instrument. Then something happened which changed the way we listened to records completely.
Short films had been shot to promote records since the Beatles, but Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is now considered the first real pop video. Since its release in 1975, the pop video has become almost compulsory for any new release, leading to TV channels devoted to nothing else, and with hundreds of thousands available to watch on YouTube.
From that Bohemian Rhapsody moment it has been said that fans began to listen as much with their eyes as with their ears. That may be unfair, but, what Eighties songs do we remember mostly? Yes, those with the best videos, the coiffured Duran Duran on that beach and yacht singing Rio, Wham! in their little two-tone, pastel shorts with Wake Me Up Before You Go Go and Bananarama in what looked like a flame licking hell as they sang Venus? Before the Eighties, MTV and YouTube, we put our own images to songs. They are now imposed upon us. I think that’s a pity.
For decades, many gay stars worried that their homosexuality would, if publicly known, ruin their careers and often put up elaborate smokescreens to disguise the fact.
By 1984, however, the gay rights movement had been around long enough for Frankie Goes To Hollywood to top the charts with Relax, a song about gay sex, despite being banned by the BBC.
And in 1985 music addressed the Aids issue when Dionne Warwick
joined with Gladys Knight, Elton John and Stevie Wonder to sing That’s What Friends Are For to raise money for research into the disease — just one of many charitable causes supported through music.
Rock music has always gone in cycles, so when Oasis put guitar-led bands back to the top of the charts in 1995, they were tapping into the lad culture of the time. Macho was becoming fashionable again, with the boom in lad magazines, leaving a space for an all-girl group. This the pushy and jokey Spice Girls filled for the rest of the decade with their ‘girl power’, as a generation of young women found themselves outstripping their male counterparts at school and in the job market.
And that, perhaps, is how it has largely been since then, as the country is awash with TV channels and radio stations and music, and image has relentlessly come to govern our lives – from politics to sport and current affairs, and even, to the TV celeb reporting of the Jubilee river pageant.
There is always musical talent around. Despite their detractors Gary Barlow and Take That are really good, as are Coldplay in their postgraduate coolness. The waste of talent was why the tragic Amy Winehouse was grieved so much, the celebration of it why so many love the no-nonsense Adele, with that extraordinary voice.
But as the past emperors of rock tour the world, performing in vast stadiums for ever more millions, the current most popular music shows in the country are little more than television pantomimes of lighting effects, dry ice and audience manipulation.
Music isn’t about winners and losers, but dancing to the tune of the Pied Piper of TV pop-trash, Simon Cowell, Saturday nights are about little else, as tears and phoney tension are ratcheted up week in, week out.
Don’t blame the artists, they are as manipulated as the audiences of Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor and The Voice, and its uplifting to see how colour blind music has now become in Britain.
But, looking again at the broader picture of what Noel Coward once jokingly referred to as the potency of “cheap music”, perhaps popular music is now telling us something deeper about ourselves that we should worry about.
That is, in today’s world image and presentation matter most of all.
