“Uh, I don’t know the words to that one, man....”

[robchapman]

Brilliant! Yes I remember that one. I think I even cited it in a piece I wrote on Bolan where the common consensus among some of his school friends was that he was remedial at best, possibly educationally sub-normal.

[Tony Walshaw]

Aug 15, 2016 15:44:53 GMT 1 robchapman said:


(M)ost people are rarely die hard tribal in the way that docs portray them. This leads to a very reductive and causal history of music. This was the era of this, followed by the era of that....etc etc.

All very convenient for a narrative thread but all the quirks and idiosyncrasies get left out and you end up with a very predictable and repetitive view of pop history.

The music scene at a given time may not have been as it is portrayed now. Old radio shows (those that survive) can be evidence of this.

IIRC the practice of playing only the records that were, or would become, top 40 hits only really took hold in the 1990s. Prior to this records that failed chartwise could be quite well known to the listener, but are completely overlooked now.

Also, documentaries tend to focus on what was new at any given time. E.g. in 1967 this could be Pink Floyd, but also established artists like Billy J Kramer and Wayne Fontana continued to release singles, and got airplay and TV guest appearances.

Kramer and Fontana did not have any more hits, so the casual historian views their late 60s work as not part of the happenings. Though to the audience of the time they remained potent, and were always likely to have more hits, as e.g. Cat Stevens and The Fortunes did in the early 70s after a chart lull.  

[robchapman]

Good point Tony. I'm not sure it was as late as the 1990s. I suspect heavily formatted ILR stations enforced the practice much sooner than that, but yes I've always thought that the demarcation of records into chart and non chart has always given a skewed view of pop history. I'm always happy to trot out the records that people think were massive UK hits but weren't. Nights In White Satin barely denting the Top 20 first time round. The Doors Light My Fire barely making the Top 50 etc. When I first started buying Record Mirror in early 1968 I partly did so because it ran the Top 50 and soon got used to seeing all those records I really liked stuck in the 30-50 zone. I doubt if the difference in sales figures between a record reaching 25 and a record reaching number 50 was all that great anyway. In fact years later I used to make cassette tapes for mates with titles like 'peaking at 42'. They were some great tapes too. Days Of Pearly Spencer. Rainbow Chaser. By The Light of the Magical Moon. Marjorine. I rest my case.

[Tony Walshaw]

In that period sales totals were so indistinct - there could be two records in the same chart position. And IIRC wasn't there a week in 1967 when there was three number 9's?

Songs like 'Light My Fire' (no. 49 for just one week) have resonated over the years because they represent the 'new' from the time. But on the high streets at that time, head-scarfed women were ambling along to buy Vikki Carr and Anita Harris. Life was more Morecambe & Wise than Monterey.

Regarding strict playlists, in the early 90s my memory is that Radio One played records during daytime, that did not ultimately reach the top 40. I noticed the 'top 40 only' policy after Matthew Bannister took over in 1993. This included singles that were pre-release, but ultimately made the top 40. Possibly commercial stations like Atlantic 252 (which seemed very focused) influenced this shift?

Aug 15, 2016 15:44:53 GMT 1 robchapman said:

When did a doc last challenge your point of view? (W)hen did one last make you go “Oh, I’ve never thought of it like that before” or “that’s an interesting new perspective”.

What happens instead is that if someone says something preposterous or challengeable it’s usually left unchallenged. So let’s say, ooh for instance, Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane suggest in all seriousness, as he indeed did in a doc a while back, that Jefferson Airplane helped bring about the end of the Vietnam war. Instead of having another editorial voice say well that’s a load of old pony isn’t it and here’s the reason why, they just move on to the next sixties ‘icon’ who says something equally tenuous.

How many more times do we need to be told that the sixties was a time of great change? (What decade of the 20th Century wasn’t?) End of rant. Sorry it doesn’t have much to do with lost footage but it does have plenty to do with lost perspectives.

Good though the music was, and many Vietnam troops would have been aware of (at least some of) it, historians often tie-in 'cool' musical trends with the politics of a particular time, but distort the link out of all proportion.

'White Rabbits' did not end Vietnam, and Noddy bawling 'Merry Christmasssss' did not sideline the three-day week. These records were hits because they were.

[robchapman]

Yes, good point about Noddy Holder and the cheery antidote to all that terrible Trade Union activity. That one has entered the myth domain in recent years hasn't it? Well spotted. I wonder when Noddy first started peddling it. I challenge anyone to find him referring to the role of Merry Christmas like that before, ooh, lets say the late 1990s. A lot of rock myths are like that aren't they? At some point 20/30 years after the event someone slips in a retrospective analysis and in no time at all its taken as a given and everyone repeats it unthinkingly. My favourite is, and has always been, the one about Liverpool taking off as a centre for beat music because of black american sailors bringing back R&B records. Its so set in stone now that I bet a fair view of you on this Forum believe it. I never heard it mentioned before the late 1970s/early 80s (which is when a lot of the sixties 'history' was written or should I say rewritten.) Now there's a task for William, or anyone of you with time on your hands and access to the music press archives. Find me one single Mersey beat group interview from the sixties that mentions sailors and R&B records. Go on I challenge you. It's one of pop musics most pernicious myths and its bollox.

(I believe this is called upping the ante!)

[williammcgregor]

I accept the task Rob. The furthest I can go back with my NME collection is 1962 so I'll start there. I'll be back (as someone says?)

[johnpoole]

Aug 23, 2016 15:47:55 GMT robchapman said:

My favourite is, and has always been, the one about Liverpool taking off as a centre for beat music because of black american sailors bringing back R&B records. Its so set in stone now that I bet a fair view of you on this Forum believe it. I never heard it mentioned before the late 1970s/early 80s (which is when a lot of the sixties 'history' was written or should I say rewritten.)

The usual theory was that Liverpool's own "Cunard Yanks" (not American sailors) had found the r&b records that the groups covered
www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/01/liverpool-merseybeat-cunard-yanks-sailors-taught-britain-to-rocknroll
but neither Spencer Leigh or Mark Lewisohn support this claim - all the records the groups covered had been released in the UK (and probably had been played by Bob Wooler at the Cavern Club)

[robchapman]

Bob Wooler didn't support the theory either John and poo-poo'd it in an interview, I think, in Record Collector not long before he died. As indeed did Ringo Starr who said that most of the American sailors who did trade at Liverpool port came from the southern US ports. If anything Ringo suggested they brought country records with them.

That's a mammoth undertaking you've set yourself there William but rock history, in one way or another, will thank you for your findings. Me, I'm just against lazy history. I went to a great academic conference in 2012 in Boston Mass and made a point of going to a few fashion panels. Why? Because fashion people are great custodians of their own history. On one panel I went to a woman had decided to research when people started using terms like retro and vintage. I think she traced retro back to an edition of Vogue in 1972. We could all learn a lot from the way fashion historians go about their business.

[williammcgregor]

Well that's 1962 and 1963 NME's trawled through and nothing. No surprise to me, so 1964 here I come.

[Richard Marple]

Another source of American records in the Liverpool area could have been from bases like Burtonwood near Warrington.

It wouldn't surprise me if some American servicemen found a market for their old records when on leave.

[robchapman]

Aug 23, 2016 19:57:28 GMT Richard Marple said:

Another source of American records in the Liverpool area could have been from bases like Burtonwood near Warrington.

It wouldn't surprise me if some American servicemen found a market for their old records when on leave.

Sure, don't doubt it for a minute. The roll of US bases in the UK has a rich (and underdocumented) cultural history going right back to the second world war. Where I grew up in Bedfordshire the local base was at Chicksands. In 1968/69 a schoolfriend of mine used to get into some of the discotheque nights there. I remember him coming into school raving about records like Harlem Shuffle and The Showstoppers Aint Nothing But A Houseparty weeks before they were in the charts. But it's a long way from that (and all the things Bill Harrison claims in that tenuous Guardian article, which again is more about country music) to sailors and Cunarders starting a whole pop culture!

People went into NEMS and ordered them, that's what they mostly did.

[Kev Hunter]

I agree with what Rob and others have said, and a similar bit of mythology always gets trotted out in documentaries about the Sex Pistols and punk; the UK's so-called 'Winter of discontent' is cited as one of the reasons why bands like those sprung up and flourished, when in fact it didn't happen until 1978/79, some two years after it was supposed to have.

[robchapman]

This is turning out to be a fascinating thread. So much ground covered. So many myths debunked by alert respondents. The Mersey one has always been of interest to me because when it emerged (and I maintain that it was in the late 1970s) it was the first time I recognised a pop myth being born. As a kid I was that typical sixties obsessive, school absconder, spent far more time reading my pop papers than my school books. I’d been paying attention in pop class and had done my pop homework so in my mid-twenties when I first started reading about this causal link between the development of the Mersey sound and sailors and servicemen laying a little exotic black music on the scousers I went ‘oh really’. I asked a scouser of a certain age about this at the time and he’d never heard of it either and he was there in the thick of it during the Merseybeat boom. The only thing he did concede, having moved down to London a few years later was that, as he put it ‘I noticed London mods had different R&B records to Northern mods’. Those regional differences always apply with dance music of course. It was the same with northern soul. It was the same with rave.

Down the years I saw the Mersey myth develop and thrive. One variant I particularly treasure was that apparently they used to line the holds of ships with vinyl for ballast. Oh yes! In the ludicrous stakes that one is right up there with that time Robert Elms swore blind on a pop doc that early mods used to walk along the streets with sketch pads so that they could draw the cut of an Italians trousers. That’s right Robert. That’s just what they did. I mean they wouldn’t have had these things called cameras would they? (In my lifetime I hope to see this myth expanded so that the mod was carrying heavy 19th century photographic equipment and asked the cool Italian to stand still sufficiently long enough for him to create an authentic daguerreotype.)

Here’s a few more reasons why the Mersey myth doesn’t stand up.

I. If there is such a connection between UK port towns and their pop culture then why did Bristol (still active as a port then, with similar trade routes to Liverpool not to mention the same slave legacy) not develop a similar vibrant beat group scene?

2. How did such a massive R&B scene develop in Newcastle, given that its trade routes were mostly with northern Europe and Scandanavia.

3.) How do you explain the massive beat group scene that developed in Birmingham. Britain’s most landlocked large city. At its peak there were as many Brum beat groups as Mersey beat groups as any Brum beat historian will tell you.

Black GI’s and sailors hanging round the ports going ‘psst wanna score some early Motown?’ No the reality is far more mundane. You went into a record shop and ordered them. They were called Imports. Its how Jagger and Richards first bonded on Dartford station. Its how Ronnie Lane and Stevie Marriot first started talking to each other when they were ordering the same records over the same counter. Its how Julie Driscoll and Rod Stewart first hooked up and there wasn’t a Cunard Liner in sight.

[Richard Marple]

I've heard about American comic books coming over as ballast & being sold on, but Vinyl is stretching things a bit!

It's interesting that Bristol didn't have much of a music scene at the time but almost every other decent sized town & city did.

[Tony Walshaw]

IIRC Eric Burdon has said that R&B records were brought into Newcastle by merchant seamen from the USA. But as you mention Rob, the River Tyne ports mainly had shipping routes to Europe.

I think the siting of military bases has had a major bearing on musical success. The Beatles and other UK acts playing in Hamburg was influenced by our service personnel being based in West Germany surely? 

Later acts became huge for the same reasons. They came from the commonwealth countries to perform as forces entertainment. The most talented were put together into hit-making acts like Boney M. They made very catchy, invigorating singles. Maybe this is whitewashed because Euro-disco is seen as cheesy? Yet Donna Summer and The Three Degrees also had huge success on the back of this.

A reason why certain cities (Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham) had 'beat booms' could be that they had a hinterland of many other towns feeding into them? 

E.g. 'Liverpool' was also Bootle, Birkenhead, Bebington, Wallasey, Warrington....
   &   'Birmingham' was Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Walsall.... 

There was a large catchment, just a bus ride away, to support smaller venues that could take a chance on something new, with little to lose. And so they played soul records, or put The Beatles on at lunchtime.

By comparison, Bristol was like Norwich or Carlisle - surrounded mainly by rural villages. Also, Kingston-upon-Hull was another port as per Liverpool and Newcastle, but beyond its boundaries it was mostly countryside.

P.S. Bristol had Cook & Greenaway labouring away unheralded - 70s songwriting would have been poorer without them.