The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950-1967

From Dance Hall to the 100 Club

Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Emma Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317028864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

The social history of music in Britain since 1950 has long been the subject of nostalgic articles in newspapers and magazines, nostalgic programmes on radio and television and collective memories on music websites, but to date there has been no proper scholarly study. The three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain address this gap, and do so from the unique perspective of the music promoter: the key theme is the changing nature of the live music industry. The books are focused upon popular music but cover all musical genres and the authors offer new insights into a variety of issues, including changes in musical fashions and tastes; the impact of developing technologies; the balance of power between live and recorded music businesses; the role of the state as regulator and promoter; the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture; and the continuing importance of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Drawing on archival research, a wide range of academic and non-academic secondary sources, participant observation and industry interviews, the books are likely to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history.

Chapter 1
Getting Back to Business

Many forces combine to make the present an exciting and promising moment in the history of English music. The nation is now conscious of the need for music as part of daily life and education and, with English composition at a level unknown since the end of the seventeenth century, the opportunities for making and enjoying music are fuller and more varied than ever before. (Political and Economic Planning (PEP) 1949: 211)

Most people’s musical pleasures are of the simplest and relatively few can raise their level of musical understanding very much … most youngsters to-day like jazz and little else; their elders fancy the old music hall songs best and a few sentimental parlour ballads, while beyond that their musical horizon is a desert. Some of this music is fun, some of it has charm, some of it is moving, but most of it is pretty low-level stuff and many of the dance lyrics are of an enervating ‘wishing-will-make-it-so-kind’ that is not much use to anybody; but, like it or not, it is the popular music of our time. (Workers Music Association 1945: 13)

Introduction

British live music in 1950 was, in many ways, still adjusting to the impact of the Second World War, which had disrupted every aspect of British life. During wartime, the raw materials used to make musical commodities were in short supply: whether it was the shellac used in 78 rpm records (the dominant recording format of the era) or the brass used to make saxophones, resources that had previously been taken for granted were diverted to manufacture military and essential goods. And British nightlife had obviously been affected by the German air raids. Buildings where music was performed were damaged, whether landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral or specialist venues such as London’s Café Anglais, a popular nightspot for dancing and jazz bands. Buildings that were not damaged directly were affected regardless, as the chaos forced many venues to close temporarily and disrupted transport and the night-time economy. But the most severe impact was that a generation of professional and aspiring musicians, as well as concert promoters, agents and others involved in British musical culture, were forced to abandon their careers and serve their country in the armed and other services.

By the time the war was over, Britain was a devastated country. In the words of historian Geoffrey Macnab, ‘it was estimated that the country had lost a quarter of its national wealth, some £7 billion, and its export trade was in tatters: every last bit of energy had been depleted’ (1993: 162). Live music was, of course, deeply affected by these economic problems. State regulation continued to restrict musical activity. A special purchase tax was introduced: anyone buying a musical instrument was charged a hefty 66.6 per cent in tax because instruments were considered ‘luxury goods’. The dance band paper Melody Maker reported on the impact of the tax, lamenting its dire consequences for the fate of British music: ‘1) musical instruments are not luxuries, they are the tools of a man’s profession; 2) musical culture in Britain will die if youth cannot afford to buy instruments; 3) in war time, instruments were necessary for morale: must morale suffer now?’ (17 April 1948: 1). The government also directed British citizens working in essential industries to remain in their jobs and forbade these workers from taking musical employment through a new ‘Control of Engagement Order’. As the Melody Maker again reported, ‘the semi-pro [musician] whose daytime job is in essential industry will find it extremely difficult to obtain release from his present employment in order to become a full-time professional musician, should he wish to do so’ (11 October 1947: 1).

Despite this climate of austerity in certain aspects of musical life, there was still plenty of live music to be heard. Social historian Harry Hopkins claims that by the end of the 1940s, ‘in “unmusical” London alone four million seats were now sold each year for concerts, opera and ballet’ (Hopkins 1964: 236), and this statistic only covers classical music. This chapter will therefore provide a map of the live music business in Britain in 1950, as entrepreneurs tried to return to their 1930s ways of working. We will approach this mapping exercise from three different angles. First, we will examine live music culture in terms of musical discourses, while describing the kinds of live music being performed at this time. Second, we will explain how the live music business worked, outlining the differences between three kinds of promoter (enthusiast, state-funded and commercial) and their dealings with venue owners, agents and managers. Third, we will review how the rest of the British music industry – broadcasters, record companies, song publishers and royalty collectors – related to the live music industry and describe how musicians interacted with the industry at a collective level, through the Musicians’ Union. The chapter will thus introduce the main issues to be discussed throughout the rest of the book.

Discourses, Genres and Artists

It is not easy to provide a comprehensive overview of the diversity of live music performed in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. One way to begin is with a framework of different social worlds with music at their centre, each with its own set of practices and values. The idea of musical ‘art worlds’, proposed by sociologist Howard Becker (1984), is developed by Simon Frith in his book Performing Rites. Frith argues that, as well as interacting in different kinds of social world, musical actors also make sense of their practice discursively, sharing values and language that endow a musical experience with social meaning (1996: 26). A ‘discourse’ in this sense is productive; it does not simply name a pre-existing social world, but produces that world and its social institutions, professions and genres. Frith argues, in particular, that ‘music is heard through three overlapping and contradictory grids’ which he calls folk discourse, art discourse, and pop discourse (ibid.). These discourses represent ideal sets of values that are derived from the folk, art and pop music genres that share their names. However, when applied to practical examples, these ideal discourses quickly become complicated, compromised and conflicting. In his study of English class and culture, for example, Ross McKibbin concludes that by 1951 there were three musical publics: a small public for ‘serious’ music (as broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme); a larger public for ‘middlebrow’ music (made up of many strands including the classical music canon); and a much larger one for popular music (predominantly American popular music) (McKibbin 1998: 416). Such a listening map (which is obviously also a simplification of musical tastes) is useful in drawing attention to the confusing ways in which musical discourses are applied in practice (in BBC or Arts Council policy, for example).

For Frith, folk discourse is a set of anti-modernist values that understands the commercialisation of music as corruptive and suggests that the appreciation of music should be linked to the appreciation of its social function in creating community. Drawing on the work of folk scholar Niall MacKinnon (1993), Frith agues that the embodiment of these values can be found in British folk clubs, which ‘attempt to minimise the distance between performer and audience, to provide a “different form of socialising in which active musical performance and participation [are] integrated”’ (Frith 1996: 41). The folk festival is another event ‘within which folk values – the integration of art and life – can be lived … the folk festival seeks to solve the problem of musical “authenticity”: it offers the experience of the folk ideal, the experience of collective, participatory music making, the chance to judge music by its direct contribution to sociability’ (ibid.).

In Britain in 1950, folk discourse was certainly being applied to the various folk music and dance traditions of the country’s different nations and regions, though it would be a mistake to think of any of these traditions as ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’, despite the ideological values attached to them. In his book Fakesong, Dave Harker (1985) explains how British folk traditions were as artificially constructed as any other genre: prominent folk song collectors, such as Francis Child in the nineteenth century and Cecil Sharp in the twentieth century, had great influence over the selection and shaping of a canon of British folk music, just as music conservatories were influential in constructing the canon of classical music repertoire. In fact, by the second half of the 1940s, the process of determining what British folk music meant was still taking place, through a revival led by organisations like the English Folk Dance and Song Society and individuals like Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl.

Neither was it only music that labelled itself as ‘folk’ that was socially organised around the values of folk discourse. In their own ways, both the British brass band movement and amateur choral societies operated by integrating musical practice with lived experience and building a sense of community (and ‘Britishness’). Even musical genres that might have been understood as primarily commercial, such as jazz, could be (and frequently were) interpreted using the language of folk discourse. The New Orleans revivalist movement of the late 1940s, for example, explicitly defined itself against commercial jazz, against swing, and sought to embody in its return to ‘traditional’ instruments and playing practices an understanding of ‘real’ jazz as the celebration of community. In the words of Charles Fox, writing in The PL Yearbook of Jazz in 1946 (in which ‘real’ jazz is described as a form of folk music throughout):

The jazz of New Orleans was a natural growth, springing out of the life and needs of a comparatively limited community. Swing is a premeditated music, run as a business, with its control in the hands of cultural illiterates who virtually dictate the forms which popular music shall take. (McCarthy 1946: 41)

Folk discourse may have manifested itself most clearly in genres that define themselves with the ‘folk’ word, but as a set of aesthetic and social values, it can be found in varying degrees across many musical worlds. The same can be said of art and pop discourses too.

According to Frith, the source of art discourse lies in the history of the bourgeois art world and the development of the nineteenth-century high/low cultural divide found in classical music aesthetics (Frith 1996: 36). Frith argues that the organising institution of art discourse is the academy, ‘the music departments of universities, conservatories, [and] the whole panoply of formal arrangements and practices in which classical music in its various forms is taught and handed down the generations’ (ibid.: 36). With respect to live music, the central bourgeois music event is the concert, where ‘music’s essential value is its provision of a transcendent experience that is, on the one hand, ineffable and uplifting but, on the other, only available to those with the right sort of knowledge … only the right people with the right training can, in short, experience the real meaning of “great” music’ (ibid.: 39).

In mid-twentieth-century Britain, various institutions, including universities, conservatories, the BBC and the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain (established in 1946). supported the view that certain kinds of music and music-related performing arts – symphonies, opera, ballet and chamber music – were to be privileged above other genres (particularly folk and pop). Due in no small part to the Arts Council (to be discussed further in the next chapter), British classical live music performance indeed found itself in a period of remarkably good health by the end of the 1940s, despite the fact that such key venues as the Queen’s Hall in London and the Free Trade Hall in Manchester had been bombed and forced to close during the war (PEP’s 1949 Enquiry into Music identified ‘the general shortage and the many inadequacies of halls’ as the major problem facing live classical music after the war (1949: 33–5)). Pre-war London-based ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic had been joined by major new orchestras such as the Philharmonia in 1945 and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946. Important ensembles had been established in other areas of Britain as well, such as the City of Birmingham Orchestra (founded in 1920, it became a full-time orchestra in 1944, changing its name to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1948) and the Scottish National Orchestra (founded in 1891, it became a full-time orchestra as the SNO in 1950). The annual Edinburgh International Festival had been launched in 1947 in collaboration with Glyndebourne, which slowly came back to operatic life in the late 1940s, staging the premieres of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 and Albert Herring in 1947.

The Arts Council itself had been formed as a consequence of wartime efforts to encourage the arts, which included through the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) a policy of providing funding not only for London-based musical activity, but also for music – both locally produced and touring concerts – in smaller provincial towns. But if, by 1950, Arts Council support meant that London now ‘had the chance of becoming the musical centre of Europe’ (PEP 1949: 14), funding for art music outside of London had declined to the extent that the first Arts Council-commissioned report on opera and ballet stressed the need for more support to allow national ensembles to tour the country (Witts 1998: 229).

Frith’s third musical discourse is pop, the discourse rooted in the commercial music world. As Frith argues, ‘its values are created by and organised around the music industry, around the means and possibilities of turning sounds into commodities – musical value and monetary value are therefore equated, and the sales charts become the measure and symbol of “good” pop music’ (1996: 41). In the logic of pop discourse, live music events sell ‘fun’ and ‘escape from the daily grind’ (ibid.: 41–2). The supply of commercial music available in 1950s Britain was wide-ranging, despite the privations of post-war austerity, with the influence of American popular music being particularly prevalent. Popular music from the USA made its impact via star performers on major record labels as well as in featured songs from hit Hollywood films and Broadway musicals (Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun opened in London’s West End in 1948 and were both still running in 1950) and through dance-floor fads. Other forms of popular music were particular to Britain, such as songs from the music-hall and variety tradition and from British film and theatre.

It is difficult to measure the popularity of different kinds of popular music in Britain during this period, as there were few sales figures available to chart the industry and, as business economist Terry Gourvish (2009) has demonstrated, those that existed were unreliable. There was no systematic information about ticket sales in the UK at this time, for example, just the occasional news story about shows that had (usually according to their promoters) done exceptionally well (or poorly).1 It is no easier to extrapolate the relative popularity of live performers from their record sales since no vaguely reliable British record sales chart existed until November 1952, when one was compiled by Percy Dickens for the first time in the New Musical Express. It is, however, possible to say something about the popular success of songs (as against performers or records): Radio Luxembourg, the BBC’s main continental rival, broadcast a ‘Hit Parade’ show of songs from 1948 onwards.2 This was based on the sales of sheet music rather than discs, a reminder that at this time it could still be assumed that it was songs (performed by numerous recording artists) that were popular rather than specific recorded performances made by specific artists. If Frank Sinatra did well with ‘Goodnight Irene’ on Columbia Records, for instance, then other recording companies would quickly release their own versions of the song recorded by one of their own contracted artists, and it was still unusual for one version to prove vastly more popular than another.3 To give an indication of what kinds of song were popular in 1950, the table below (Table 1.1) lists all of the number one songs for that year according to Radio Luxembourg.

The most striking feature of this chart is how clearly it demonstrates the dominance of American popular songs in Britain. With the exception of ‘The Harry Lime Theme’ from the British film The Third Man, all of the number one hit songs of 1950 were first popularised by Americans (and, apart from the Italian song ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’ and ‘Hop Scotch Polka’, originally a British music-hall song by Billy Whitlock, written by Americans too). Some songs became popular via Hollywood films (‘My Foolish Heart’) or musicals (‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’); others were popularised by star American performers and then covered by British artists: for example, ‘Dear Hearts and Gentle People’, sung by Bing Crosby, but covered in Britain by Billy Cotton, and ‘Music! Music! Music!’, sung by Teresa Brewer and covered by Petula Clark.

The most popular stage acts in 1950 were also a mix of American and British musicians. In the live setting, however, a crucial distinction was made between instrumental musicians and singers. The vast majority of professional instrumental musicians in both the USA and the UK were members of their respective musicians’ unions and, following a long-standing dispute between the US union (the American Federation of Musicians (AFM)) and its British counterpart, American instrumental musicians were not allowed to perform in the UK and vice versa. By contrast, singers had historically been denied membership in musicians’ unions on both sides of the Atlantic, and instead belonged to unions for variety artists and entertaine...