Оценить:
 Рейтинг: 0

John Lennon: The Life

Автор
Год написания книги
2018
<< 1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 16 >>
На страницу:
7 из 16
Настройки чтения
Размер шрифта
Высота строк
Поля

As if there were not enough going on in 1955 already, the nation’s wankers were presented with a riveting alternative to ‘tit’ magazines like Spick and Razzle. Twenty-one-year-old Brigitte Bardot, already well known to French cinemagoers, made her first English-language film, Doctor at Sea, and changed every preconception of sexuality on the big screen. Whereas conventional Hollywood sirens like Ava Gardner or Lana Turner were remote, untouchable and curiously ageless, Bardot seemed hardly more than a schoolgirl with her startled-doe eyes and dimpled chin, as dewily innocent as she was knowingly voluptuous. Her very nickname, ‘the sex kitten’, was almost enough to bring her overheated young admirers to spontaneous orgasm. John became obsessed by her, cutting her picture from a magazine and pasting it to the ceiling above his bed.

He was by now intensely aware of the strong sexual atmosphere between his mother and ‘Twitchy’ Dykins at 1 Blomfield Road. Once, as he would always remember, he accidentally walked into their bedroom while Julia was fellating Dykins, half-covered by a sheet. As his hormones began to run riot, he also became increasingly conscious of Julia’s physical allure, the more so as she had always treated him in a jokey, flirtatious manner, more like a sportive young aunt. One afternoon when he was playing truant from Quarry Bank as usual, he lay on her bed next to her as she took an afternoon rest. He never forgot what she was wearing: ‘a black Angora short-sleeved round-necked sweater, not too fluffy, maybe it was that other stuff, Cashmere, soft wool anyway, and, I believe, that tight dark green and yellow mottled skirt’. As they lay there, he accidentally touched Julia’s breast, ‘and I was wondering if I should do anything else. It was a strange moment because at the time I had the hots, as they say, for a rather lower-class female who lived on the opposite side of the road. I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.’

Early that summer, Ivy Vaughan asked one of his classmates at Liverpool Institute, a lanky, humorous boy named Len Garry, to come and meet John and the Woolton gang. Len agreed but did not rush to take up the invitation: he had several more-pressing social commitments, among them cinema-going with another Institute classmate, Paul McCartney.

Finally Len made the trip from his Wavertree home on the bicycle he’d been given for passing his Eleven Plus. He met Ivy walking along Vale Road toward Menlove Avenue in a little group that also included John. He recalls: ‘John had a piece of paper in his hand that he was showing to the others. When Ivan introduced us, he didn’t say much, just gave me a look. I got the feeling I was being weighed up.’

The newcomer quickly proved himself made of the right stuff. He was an aficionado of William books and the Goons, he knew the words to Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine songs and, as a bonus, could reproduce the hideously drawn-out jungle cry of Tarzan the Ape Man as portrayed in films by Johnny Weissmuller. It wasn’t long before John felt sufficiently at ease with Len to show him the piece of paper that the others had been passing around and chortling over. This was not just a drawing but a miniature newspaper singlehandedly written and illustrated by John. Entitled ‘The Daily Howl’, it consisted of gossip-style paragraphs, single cartoons and comic strips, hand-lettered, ruled and coloured with all their creator’s usual extra-curricular care. There were running jokes about celebrities like Fred Emney, Stanley Unwin and the bald TV magician David Nixon; about John’s own middle name of Winston; and, inevitably, about black people and ‘cripples’, some phrases being phoneticised (‘Thik ik unk’, for instance, meaning ‘This is a’) to signify a speech impediment. Despite all the work that went into each edition, their author kept ‘Daily Howls’ coming at the rate of several per week.

Len Garry joined the group of bike riders that John led like a squadron of cavalry around the quiet Woolton lanes, looking for girls to chat up. Almost invariably, this feminine quarry would also be out with bikes and also dressed in school uniforms but, by the game’s unwritten rules, walking and pushing rather than riding. Between cavalry and giggling infantry, sooner or later, the right signal would be sent and answered, and the varicoloured school blazers and bikes would come together.

John was not good-looking in any conventional sense, with his slanted eyes and plunging beak of a nose. Yet he invariably proved the most successful, both in the chatting-up ritual and the encounters that followed. When the riders compared notes later, it would be John who described feeling right inside a heavily engineered brassiere, or sniffed ostentatiously at the lingering aroma of what Liverpudlians call finger pie. Part of every almost adolescent boy’s experience is to see small girls he has hitherto ignored or taken for granted suddenly grow into desirable young women. For John this happened spectacularly with Barbara Baker, whom he had known since they were toddlers together, seated on the floor at Mrs Clark’s Sunday school. For years, he had regarded Barbara with the contempt that William Brown always showed to little girls, but at the age of 15, she’d suddenly metamorphosed into a curvaceous strawberry blonde who deliberately modelled her hair and clothes on cinema sex sirens—and even had the mystic initials BB. In Reynolds Park one day, she and a girlfriend found themselves being followed in a meaning way by John and Len Garry. On this occasion, it was Len who first made the running. ‘Len asked me to join him on a walk a few nights later, and I said “Yes,”‘ she remembers. ‘But I could see John watching me.’

She soon dropped Len and became John’s first ‘steady’ girlfriend, as the sedate fifties phrase had it. In many ways, theirs was a relationship straight out of Enid Blyton: they would go for bike rides together or ice-skating at the Silver Blades rink in central Liverpool. Barbara got to know John’s mother and Aunt Mimi, and was often taken home to tea at Mendips, joining Michael Fishwick, and any aunts and cousins who were visiting, around the lavishly spread gateleg table. She remembers John as a romantic, naturally chivalrous boy, who bombarded her with love notes and drawings, was definitely not a Teddy Boy, and, thanks to Mimi’s hard verbal schooling, still did not speak with a Scouse accent.

As a rule, the courtship rituals went on without adult interference. A line was crossed one day, however, when a group including John, Barbara and David Ashton went for a petting session into the field owned by St Peter’s Church—i.e., virtually hallowed ground. Because John and Ashton were still members of the 3rd Allerton Scout Troop, both were summoned to explain their sacrilege before an official Scouts board of inquiry. ‘My Dad had been a scoutmaster, so the court was held at my house,’ Ashton remembers. ‘As I was coming home beforehand, I met John. “Don’t you fuckin’ tell what you know,” he said, and then hit me over the eye. I had a black eye for days afterwards.’

Len Garry shared John’s fondness for music—the ‘pop’ aimed squarely at their parents’ generation—but for neither was it anything resembling a passion. As they cycled around, they would sing out loud, trying to outdo each other in the number of current hit songs they knew and in their skill as impersonators. ‘I was always better at ballads,’ Len says. ‘But John was better at the uptempo stuff. A song he particularly liked was Mitchell Torok’s “Caribbean.” I remember how, even when he was riding against the wind, standing up on his pedals, he always got the timing just right.’

They had little initial interest, therefore, in the Bill Haley phenomenon, which reached the first of several climaxes during that summer. Michigan-born Haley had been an obscure country-and-western singer until 1951, when he recorded a song called ‘Rock the Joint’, exchanging his usual cowboy yodel for the style and intonation of black rhythm and blues. America’s racial situation being what it was, the disc could be marketed only if no biographical details about Haley were given. His country music public would have been appalled by the idea of a white man singing a ‘negro tune’, while no black listener would have taken the performance seriously.

Three years later, by now fronting a group named the Comets, Haley recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an exuberant piece of horological nonsense that was already a year old, with one unsuccessful version by black vocalist Sunny Dae on the market. Haley’s reinter-pretation caused equally little stir until added to the soundtrack of The Blackboard Jungle, a film on the timely subject of delinquency in a New York high school. This change in context produced a devastating effect throughout America; wherever Haley’s voice rang out with ‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock RAHK…’ the gritty drama on the screen was totally eclipsed by mayhem among the audience. Boys and girls alike went literally berserk, shrieking like banshees, tearing at the fabric of their seats, lurching out to dance in the aisles or engage in mass brawls that required dozens of police to contain them.

The separate terms rock and roll had always existed in black music as synonyms for rhythm-enhanced sex. Who exactly first joined them together to define the keening saxophone and hand-thwacked double-bass beat of Haley and his Comets can never be known for certain. The most likely contender was a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who billed his show on station WJW as The Moondog Rock ‘n’ Roll Party.

Britain’s press, to begin with, treated rock ‘n’ roll as merely another bizarre American novelty, like pie-eating contests, pole-squatting or wedding ceremonies at the bottom of swimming pools. The mood changed as it became clear that Teddy Boys—and their scarcely less bizarre and repugnant Teddy Girls—were Haley’s most fanatical converts, and seemingly intent on destroying just as many cinemas as had their American cousins. Screenings of The Blackboard Jungle were cancelled wholesale, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was banished both from radio and television, and dance halls banned the jitterbuggy dance that went with it. The result was as might have been expected: Haley’s record shot to number one in the Top 20 in May 1955, remaining on the chart for 22 weeks. The following October, it made number one again, and stayed on the chart a further 17 weeks.

With hindsight, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ looks like a kind of Phoney War—a warm-up for the cultural blitzkrieg soon to follow. Most of the excitement it generated was damped down by the sight of Bill Haley himself, a man already pushing 30, with a cherubic smile and query-shaped kiss curl on his too-high forehead, who looked little different from the parents who so condemned him.

To capitalize on sales of the ‘Rock Around the Clock’ recording, a film of the same name was rushed out, featuring Haley and the Comets with other emergent rock-’n’-roll celebrities like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, the Platters, and ‘Moondog’ Alan Freed. John went to see it expecting a life-changing experience but came away disappointed. ‘I was very surprised’. he would recall. ‘Nobody was screaming and nobody was dancing in the aisles like I’d read. I was all set to tear up the seats, too, but nobody joined in.’

As if to prove the fad had done no serious harm, John’s school report for the 1955 summer term was considerably less of a disaster than usual. English: ‘He is capable of good work and has done quite well…a good knowledge of the books.’ History: ‘He has tried hard and worked well.’ Art: ‘Very satisfactory.’ Handwork: ‘Satisfactory progress.’ Physical training: ‘(height 5, 6 and a half, weight 9 st, 4 lbs) F[airly] satisfactory.’ Geography: ‘Undoubtedly trying harder.’ General science: ‘An encouraging result. His work has been satisfactory but his behaviour in class is not always so.’ The only wholly negative entries were for French (’disappointing’ through fondness for ‘obtaining a cheap laugh in class’) and Religious Knowledge (‘His work has been of a low standard’).

‘The best report he has had for a long time,’ noted a surprised Ernie Taylor in the space reserved for headmaster’s comment. ‘I hope this means that he has turned over a new leaf.’

5 THE GALLOTONE CHAMPION (#ulink_f0341454-8b92-5f86-9404-4e79eb2518bd)

Please God, give me a guitar.

He first heard about Elvis Presley from a Quarry Bank classmate named Don Beatty, one of the participants in the Great Dinner Tickets Swindle. Don had a copy of the New Musical Express—at that time rather a rarity in the northwest—and pointed out a reference to America’s newest rock-’n’-roll sensation and his just-released new record, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

John reacted guardedly at first, remembering what a letdown Rock Around the Clock had been. ‘The music papers were saying Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra. “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded a corny title, and his name seemed strange in those days. But then when I heard it, it was the end for me…I remember rushing home with the record and saying “He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford.” ’

When Presley erupted into popular music and mythology that spring of 1956, he was by no means the first entertainer to cause mass hysteria. During the 1920s, the silent screen idol Rudolf Valentino and the prototype crooner Rudy Vallee had each driven female audiences to frenzy—Vallee earning the nickname of ‘the guy with the cock in his voice’, Valentino attracting a screaming crowd of 10,000 even to his funeral. Two decades later, the young Frank Sinatra inspired a whole new species of female worshipper, the ‘bobbysoxer’, whose demented reactions at concerts ultimately competed in newsworthiness with the singer himself. Nor was such incontinence purely emotional: after Sinatra’s legendary opening at the New York Paramount Theater in 1947, it was found that many bobby-soxers, unable to contain themselves, had urinated where they sat.

All this was taken to uncharted new levels, however, by a 21-year-old former truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, with dyed black hair and the face of a supercilious baby. For Presley did more than touch the trigger of feminine mass fantasy; he also gave release to the tension that had built up in young men with no more global conflict to burn off their testosterone. Here, rolled into one person, was a Valentino with a voice, a Sinatra with still greater power over young girls’ bladders, a James Dean in close-up more mesmeric than even Hollywood could contrive—in short, a rock-’n’-roll hero who looked every bit as gloriously disruptive as he sounded. The Phoney War of tarten jackets, soppy smiles and kiss curls was over: all-out bombardment had finally begun.

For the vast majority of Britons, Presley could not have been more incomprehensible if freshly beamed down from Mars. Bill Haley at least had a name that was recognisably human (one he happened to share with the current editor of The Times). But ‘Elvis Presley’ was the strangest configuration of syllables yet to have crossed the Atlantic—more so than Joe DiMaggio, Efrem Zimbalist Jr or even Liberace, which some newspapers felt obliged to render phonetically (‘Lee-ber-arch-ee’). Commentators were also intrigued by the fact that Presley performed his gyrations while simultaneously playing—or appearing to play—a guitar slung around his neck. Americans were familiar with the guitar as a normal accessory for singers of both country and blues; in Britain it was perhaps the most anonymous of all musical instruments, glimpsed fleetingly in the back rows of dance bands or as shadowy silhouettes behind Spanish flamenco dancers.

When John first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the whole edifice of rumour and ridicule that the media had created around Presley instantly melted away. All he needed to know was in the song’s opening fanfare—that anguished, echoey cry of ‘Well, since my baby left me…’ answered by double stabs of high treble electric guitar. It was, in fact, not rock ‘n’ roll or even a ballad, but a blues shout in a traditional pattern that Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson would instantly have recognised. But while blues songs deal with adult themes, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ reached directly to the primary adolescent emotion, melodramatic self-pity. For the first time, any spotty youth dumped by his girlfriend, for whatever good reason, could now aspire to this metaphorical refuge for ‘broken-hearted lovers’, ‘down at the end of Lonely Street’.

Far from the mindless nonsense Presley’s critics accused him of peddling, the lyrics were neat and skilful enough to be dissected in a Quarry Bank literature test, the hotel metaphor sustained by a bellhop whose ‘tears keep flowing’ and a ‘desk clerk dressed in black’. The arrangement had the visceral simplicity of blues played live in the wee small hours, switching between foot-stomping bass, jangly whorehouse piano and jagged guitar half-chords suggesting the bottleneck style of Delta bluesmen. Those riffs are still potent today after 10,000 hearings; to an adolescent in 1956 who’d never heard a guitar played as an offensive weapon, they were stupefying. No sound ever had been, or ever would be, more perfectly tuned to hormones going berserk.

That May, a second Presley single, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, joined ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in the UK Top 20; in August came a third, ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’, and in September a fourth, ‘Hound Dog’. Each drew John still further into this intoxicating new world where guitars rang like carillons of victory bells, pianos pounded like jackhammers and drums spat like machine guns. Each announced more joyously than the last that life need not be the grey, humdrum vista he and his fellow war babies had always known. As he himself put it: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll was real. Everything else was unreal.’

Film clips of Presley’s American TV appearances now also began to filter through, revealing him to be almost ludicrously goodlooking, albeit in a baleful, smouldering style more usually associated with female glamour icons. Here, indeed, was history’s one and only male pin-up for straight men. In common with his other British converts, John obsessively read and re-read every newspaper story about Presley, cut out and saved every magazine picture of him, pored over every detail of his hair, clothes and sublimely sullen face for what it might reveal of his private character and lifestyle. At Mendips he chattered so endlessly about his new hero that an exasperated Mimi finally brought down the guillotine. ‘It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,’ she recalled. ‘In the end I said “Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.” ’

Like thousands of other boys who had never previously cared a button for their wardrobe or grooming, he began to model his hair, his dress, his whole being, on Presley’s. Like many Quarry Bank boys, he did what he could to Elvis-ise his school uniform, fastening only the bottom of his three blazer buttons to create a drape effect and stretching his gold-and-black school tie into the nearest possible semblance of a Slim Jim. The great problem was the trousers, which men and boys alike still wore in the baggy cut that had prevailed since the 1920s. Scarcely any men’s outfitters yet stocked ready-made ‘drainpipes’, so one’s only recourse was to take a conventional pair to an alterations tailor, sartorial equivalent of the back-street abortionist, and have their cuffs tapered from 24 to 16 or (in cases of ultimate daring) 14 inches.

No fiercer controversy raged in British families of the mid-1950s than this. No matter that the British Empire had been largely built by men in narrow trousers, nor that every palace, stately home and museum in the land thronged with portraits of narrow-trousered kings, dukes, prime ministers and generals. The style was now identified with lawless, low-class Teddy Boys and, by the more knowing, with gay men—although, paradoxically, it was deemed quite respectable in fawn cavalry twill, if worn by off-duty Guards officers together with riding jackets and tweed caps.

At Mendips, Mimi was predictably horrified and outraged by her nephew’s attempted metamorphosis into a ‘common’ Teddy Boy. She might be unable to stop John ruining the hang of his tailor-made blazer and leaving his top shirt button permanently agape above his mutilated school tie. She might not have prevented Signor Bioletti at Penny Lane from restyling his nice, wavy hair, as she put it, ‘like an overgrown lavatory brush’. But with trousers she dug her heels in: John was absolutely forbidden either to buy ‘drainies’ or have any of his existing pairs tapered. His response was to smuggle some to a compliant tailor and wear the finished product only outside Mimi’s field of vision. He would deposit them at Nigel Walley’s or Pete Shotton’s and change into them there, or leave Mendips wearing them underneath an ordinary pair of trousers, peeling off this outer layer once safely out of Mimi’s sight.

One grown-up, at least, could be relied on not to shudder at rock ‘n’ roll or pour scorn on its lip-curling godhead. John’s mother Julia adored Presley’s records, thought he was dishy to look at, and relished all the ways he was upsetting the generation whose values had always so oppressed her. It was Julia who, daring Mimi’s wrath, bought John his first real rock-’n’-roll clothes—a coloured (as opposed to plain grey or white) shirt, a pair of black drainpipe jeans, a ‘shortie’ raincoat with padded shoulders. When a kitten was given to John’s two small half-sisters, Julia and Jackie, their mother named it Elvis.

With every passing week of 1956, the heavenly noises from across the Atlantic multiplied and diversified. From New Orleans came Antoine ‘Fats’ Domino, a singer-pianist with the body of a whale and the face of a kindly Burmese cat, who had already been around and playing much this same stuff since 1949. From St Louis came Charles ‘Chuck’ Berry, a loose-limbed youth with a lounge-lizard mustache, who not only wrote and performed his witty anthems in the former Whites Only realm of expensive cars and high schools, but also simultaneously played cherry-red lead guitar, jack-knifing his skinny knees or loping across the stage in profile like a duck. From Macon, Georgia, came a former dishwasher named Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a shock-haired imp endowed with the dual gift of being able to roar like an erupting volcano and ululate like an entire Bedouin tribe in mourning.

If black rock-’n’-rollers, teetered on the edge of comedy (like Presley himself), Richard’s exultant gibberish (‘Tutti-frutti O-rooty…Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom!’) was a deep-South descendant of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’. ‘The most exciting thing…was when he screamed just before the solo,’ John later recalled. ‘It used to make your hair stand on end. When I heard it, it was so great, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life…I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind.’

As with almost every other new American idea, gauche and unconvincing British replicas quickly followed. In the wake of Presley’s onslaught, a young Londoner named Larry Parnes launched the United Kingdom’s first native rock-’n’-roller—a cockney merchant seaman named Tommy Hicks, now renamed Tommy Steele. Provided with the requisite exploding hair and Presley-style guitar, Steele drew crowds of screaming girls wherever he appeared and had several Top 10 hits. But his whole marketing exemplified the notion of rock ‘n’ roll as a passing fad or soon-to-be-unmasked confidence trick. One of Larry Parnes’ first acts was to move him into cabaret by booking him into London’s Café de Paris in the footsteps of Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward. In little more than a year, his career as a teenage idol would be metaphorically wound up by a film entitled The Tommy Steele Story.

Even Steele’s patent harmlessness could not mitigate adult hatred and terror of rock ‘n’ roll and the resolve to stamp it out, if not by frontal attack and ridicule, then by attrition. The BBC carried no news items about even its most famous performers and mentioned its very name only with lip-curled distaste. Apart from records, its main public outlets were jukeboxes in the newfangled espresso coffee bars, which explained why such places were always packed with teenagers and also why adults viewed them rather like speakeasies in Prohibition America. At travelling fairs, rock ‘n’ roll would blare out over carousels and bumper cars, so strengthening its perceived links with the grubby, the dishonest and the violent.

The steadiest source of supply was Radio Luxembourg, out in mysterious mainland Europe, which operated a daily English-language music service playing all the latest rock-’n’-roll hits with Americanstyle disc jockeys, advertisements and station IDs. But Luxembourg did not come on the air until 8.00 p.m., and reception on British wirelesses was always erratic. Like all teenagers up and down the land, John listened in late at night with a portable radio at low volume under the bedclothes so that Mimi would not hear it.

With rock fizzing in his veins around the clock, even things he had once regarded as treats now seemed irksomely unreal. During the school summer holidays of 1956, he paid his usual long visit to his Aunt Mater, Uncle Bert and cousin Stanley in Edinburgh, accompanied by Aunt Nanny, her nine-year-old son, Michael, and Harrie’s nine-year-old son, David. (Husbands seldom featured in these intersister excursions.) Part of the time was spent at Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, Sutherland, near Cape Wrath, the furthermost northwesterly tip of Scotland. This was a working farm, set in vast, unspoiled tracts of sheep-dotted moorland and peat bogs. The family party roughed it in a primitive farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles, and noisy with the screeches of Mater’s pet parrot, Harry Parry.

As well as running the croft, Uncle Bert was carrying out extensive improvements, and John and young Michael and David found themselves allotted a punishing schedule of heavy manual work. ‘We were scything hay, building dry stone walls, carting wheelbarrowloads of sand,’ Michael Cadwallader remembers. ‘John soon got fed up with that, and wasn’t thrilled by the company of two nine-year-old boys. He obviously couldn’t wait to leave.’

Rock ‘n’ roll had no fiercer enemy in Britain than followers of traditional jazz, who either did not know or preferred to forget that the two were actually first cousins. Jazz had always overlapped with blues and country, the twin streams that produced Elvis Presley. The more enlightened traditional jazz bandleaders, like Humphrey Lyttelton, acknowledged this by incorporating both into their repertoire, even occasionally bringing over American bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy to make guest appearances at their concerts. However, in music, as everywhere else, the class system held firm. Rock-’n’-rollers were firmly bracketed at the most unsavoury end of the lower working class, while jazzers were middle-class student types who wore striped college scarves and drank half-pints of cider.

The most archivally minded trad bandleader of pre-rock-’n’-roll times was the trombonist Chris Barber. Since well before Presley hit Britain, Barber’s shows had featured his foxy-faced banjo player, Tony, aka ‘Lonnie’, Donegan, on guitar with a small rhythm section, performing in an otherwise forgotten American folk style known as skiffle. The word (like jazz itself) was onomatopoeic, harking back to the bleak Depression era of the thirties, when poor whites, unable to afford conventional instruments, would beat out a shuffly rhythm on makeshift ones like kitchen washboards, empty boxes and dustbin lids.

In January 1956, Donegan and a three-strong skiffle group scored a surprise hit with ‘Rock Island Line’, a train song associated with the thirties’ blues giant Huddie (‘Leadbelly’) Ledbetter. Undoubtedly helped by the word rock in its title (though the reference was purely geological) it reached number eight in Britain, was accepted for US release on the London label, and by April stood at tenth place in the American charts. For any British-made record to catch on in America was rare enough; for one to do so by reinterpreting such a uniquely American idiom was unprecedented.

British skiffle was essentially boys’ music, a gift out of the blue to boys like John who had been just too young for rock ‘n’ roll’s first uprising and felt excluded from the tough Teddy Boy culture that now monopolised it. Skiffle was rock ‘n’ roll in a milder, more socially acceptable form, also intoxicatingly American but without the taint of sexuality or violence. In its Anglicised version, it drew on every ethnic source—blues, country, folk and jazz—though its young British performers seldom knew one genre from another, let alone understood what social conditions had inspired the songs or what pain or anger or sense of social injustice had gone into their creation. All that mattered was the frantic, pattering beat and those magic references to railroads, penitentiaries and chain gangs.

Elvis Presley had made the guitar an unreachable symbol of glamour and sexual allure to young British males; now Lonnie Donegan made it a reachable one. For skiffle followed the traditional 12-bar blues pattern of four chords, in their simplest versions requiring only one or two fingers. Anyone could play them, pretty much instantaneously.

Skiffle became the British pop sensation of 1956-57, relegating even Presley and rock ‘n’ roll to the sidelines. Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group began a run of Top 10 hits that would not be surpassed until the next decade, with genuine or ersatz folk titles such as ‘Lost John’, ‘Bring a Little Water, Sylvie’, ‘Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O’ and ‘Cumberland Gap’. Record companies began a frantic hunt for alternative skiffle stars, concentrating their efforts on London’s Soho district, specifically the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, where Tommy Steele had made some early live appearances. A fledgling record producer, the Parlophone label’s George Martin, advanced his career just a little by finding his way to the 2 I’s and signing up a skiffle quintet named the Vipers.

Most important, skiffle electrified ordinary youths, far away from London, who had never considered themselves musical and once would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up and sing in public. All over the country, youthful skiffle groups were formed with names hopefully evoking the great American open road—the Ramblers, the Nomads, the Streamliners, the Cottonpickers. Kitchens were stripped of washboards and brooms; guitars that had gathered dust for years in music-shop windows disappeared overnight. In an echo of not-so-distant Austerity years, the newspapers were soon reporting a national guitar shortage.

A few would-be boy skifflers did not start as absolute beginners, thanks to fathers, older brothers or uncles who were pro or semipro musicians. But only a very few can have owed their head start to their mothers, as John did. For Julia could play the banjo, an instrument even more unexpectedly catapulted into fashion than the guitar. Well before skiffle arrived, she had begun teaching John to pick out single-string versions of ‘Little White Lies’ or ‘Girl of My Dreams’ on the sound principle that if he could play an instrument, he’d always be popular. But now the banjo was forgotten. ‘I used to read the ads for guitars,’ he would recall, ‘and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted: “Please God, give me a guitar.”’

His Aunt Mimi has gone down in history as the person who bought John his first guitar, launching him on his roundabout path to immortality. Many times would she later recount how, weary of his endless pleas and nagging, she took him by bus down into central Liverpool and paid out £17 she could ill afford at Hessy’s music store in Whitechapel. Mimi certainly did buy John a guitar, and at some financial sacrifice, but that was a step or two further along the path. The first one he owned, and used until long after his skills had outgrown it, was given to him by Julia.

Whether that was the first guitar he played is another matter. John himself was to recall initially borrowing one from another boy and experimenting rather inconclusively with it before he got his own. This may well have been in the interval between being promised his heart’s desire by his mother and actually holding the wondrous object in his hands. After several weeks’ unsuccessful search around Liverpool, Julia finally obtained one by mail order on the instalment plan. No record of the vendor has survived; the likeliest one seems to have been a mail-order firm named Headquarters and General Supplies of Coldharbour Lane, London SE5. At around the moment John got lucky, H & G announced their acquisition of ‘1,000 only’ Gallotone Champion guitars, a mass-produced make imported from South Africa. The cost was £10 19s 6d (£10.95) each, or 10 shillings (50p) deposit and 18 fortnightly payments of 18s 11d (90p). The guitar was an acoustic Spanish flamenco-style model but with steel rather than gut strings, strummed not with the fingers but with a tortoiseshell plectrum. Inside the sound hole was a label saying GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT.
<< 1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 16 >>
На страницу:
7 из 16

Другие электронные книги автора Philip Norman