Gathered From Coincidence

A Singular history of Sixties' pop

Tony Dunsbee

• Publisher: M-Y Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781909908338
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Combining the personal memories and critical analysis of a self-confessed pop addict with a wealth of contemporary documentary evidence, Gathered From Coincidence reconstructs a truly momentous era to tell the story of the music of the Sixties year by year. By tracing in parallel the origins and development of the recording careers of major talents on both sides of the Atlantic – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Dusty Springfield and many more besides – this account shows how they traded creativity with one another. All the great Sixties' hits – as well as a host of less well-known gems – are described in the context of the charts of the day, tracking the ups and downs of different trends as they came and went, such as: rock'n'roll, rhythm & blues, psychedelia, modern folk, the concept album or supergroups. But beyond this, each chapter also places the music in a broader historical and cultural setting of landmark events at home and abroad – the space race, the Profumo affair, the Cold War, Vietnam, the growth of satire – to show how, as the decade unfolded, the paths of pop and current affairs drew ever closer together. If you thought the Sixties were just about the fleeting dreams of hippies in the Summer of Love, then think again! This book will open your eyes to a far-reaching imaginative legacy and how it came to shape pop music as a dazzling art form in its own right.

Chapter 1

The Intro …

This may or may not turn out to be the book in my head but I’m still driven, even now in retirement, to write it by my undimmed passion for the music of the Sixties and a desire to set – no pun intended – the record straight. The one and only record? Well, all right then, by no means, but informed by my ambition to set down my record of the interweaving of the events of those tumultuous years and the impact of the music made in parallel to them, as I lived through the decade then and as I recall it now. Make no mistake, then: this is unashamedly a highly selective rather than a comprehensive account, dictated wholly by my own personal tastes and interests as they were shaped and developed by the consecutive twists and turns of the era. Such omissions as there may be, therefore, are entirely of my choosing and for which, this being so, I am unrepentant.

Yet at first sight, it’s a journey not even worth attempting. Can there really be any cultural significance in critically appraising a leap of ten years that, judged by the first and last Number 1 records of the period at least, rewarded musical retrospection rather than evolution? Emile Ford and the Checkmates, in January 1960, did no more than put a rock-and-roll gloss on a vaudevillian song originally recorded in 19171, while in December 1969 the then still seemingly respectable Rolf Harris shamelessly plundered the style and content of rousing patriotic ballads from the Edwardian music hall, to rapturous popular acclaim. Did we all blink and miss the in-between bit?

Of course, if you remember the Sixties, so they yawningly keep saying, then you weren’t there. But as one who does and was, the sadness for me is that most of the popular myths circulating in Britain today about the Sixties are perpetuated by people who weren’t there; not least because many of them weren’t even born then. What’s worse is to find, as I have done in the course of my researches, that this state of affairs is compounded not just by false conjecture but by errors and omissions of objective fact across a range of supposedly reputable reference works. (To take a simple three at random, see how quickly you can find: a) the title of the Hollies’ second LP, b) the title of the Merseybeats’ third hit single, and c) Spencer Davis’s date of birth.)

For those of us who were there as the decade unfolded, the Sixties definitely were memorable but – disappointingly for the scandal-mongers – by no means for the sensational reasons attributed to my generation by the latter-day media. Increasingly irked, therefore, by the general acceptance of the distortions of this false memory as I have grown older, I’m making my own statement about the historical significance of the music of the Sixties by writing this book.

In his intensely personal memoir of how listening to music has enriched his life, Ian Clayton, the northern broadcaster and writer, captures, seemingly effortlessly and succinctly, the essence of the quest thus:

… we all collect records. The records then become a soundtrack to our lives. Records are about escaping, finding out, searching and planning routes. Of course for most of us the records we gather never bring us anywhere near the people who make them. Records are just ‘things’ that we end up hoarding. But records can be more than ‘things’.2

This, then, is the true burden of the mystery. Pop music, as a distinctive strand of entertainment, undeniably came of age in the Sixties, becoming an industry in its own right; and while it brought variable combinations of wealth, artistic fulfilment and hedonistic pleasure to those performing, it also offered enjoyment and escapism to those who became their fans and audiences. It was, however, only for a decadent minority that that escapism was ever transmuted into grosser excesses in the garden of earthly delights.

Dominic Sandbrook rates “teenage affluence” as “the single biggest factor in explaining the spectacular development of popular music between the mid-fifties and the early sixties”.3 Thanks, so he says, to the increasing availability of cheap radios and record-players, “music was more accessible than ever before, not only played in concert halls, pubs and restaurants, but enjoyed in the privacy of the office, the living room and the teenage bedroom”.4 That in itself, though, is implicit testimony to the power of the promoters of pop music in what must now seem almost the steam age of broadcasting media.

Throughout my early childhood in the 1950s, the radio was on all day long in our house. In the week, my mother relied on the BBC’s Light Programme as a constant source of mildly entertaining distraction from the tedium of her household chores; the pattern continuing through the weekends, when my father was home from work. This, then, interspersed with interludes selected by my parents from their modest collection of 78s and LPs on the radiogram, provided the musical wallpaper to my home life and from which, for me, as an only child, there was no escape. Looking back on it now, even nostalgia cannot compensate for the reality that this represented for me – as, I suspect, for many others of my post-war generation – a depressingly prematurely middle-aged introduction to so-called ‘popular’ music.

Although initiated little more than two months after the end of the war in Europe in 1945, as a new beginning in mass-appeal radio broadcasting, the Light Programme remained reliant for what now seems an extraordinary length of time on stalwarts intended to boost production in wartime factories, the clue being in their titles. For example, I can recollect clearly the two daily doses – morning and afternoon – of the light orchestral medley Music While You Work (first broadcast in 1940) and the three lunchtime editions a week of the variety show Workers’ Playtime (first broadcast in 1941).

The theatre organ also featured prominently. There was Sandy MacPherson, resident organist at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, who had actually been one of the first performers when the Light Programme was launched on 29th July 1945. His theme tune was “Look For The Silver Lining” and his regular programme The Chapel in the Valley always struck me as a piously cheerless mix of requests and homilies, more often than not relating to distressed gentlefolk who had fallen on hard times. For light relief, by contrast, there was Reginald Dixon, resident organist at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, with his inescapable theme tune “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside”.

Then there was music from the bandstand and the ballroom, from the likes of Henry Hall (he of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”), Jack Payne, Joe Loss, Victor Sylvester and Edmundo Ros, not to mention the multiplicity of the BBC’s own resident orchestras. At the coarser end of this spectrum, complete with its opening cry of “Wakey, Wake-eye!” all set to ruin your digestion on Sunday afternoons, came The Billy Cotton Band Show, its oompah approach to anything vaguely musical leavened only fleetingly by resident singers Alan Breeze and Kathy Kay.

If this seems grim – and I’m not making any of this up – it’s because it was; and as the Fifties tried to accommodate to rock’n’roll, it didn’t get much better. The iron grip of ‘live’ music on the BBC at the time, reinforced through the negotiating strength of the Musicians’ Union representing the members of all those bands and orchestras employed directly by the Corporation, meant that air time for records – so-called ‘needle time’ – was at an absolute premium for years and years and years.

If you only wanted to hear records, you were pretty much restricted to the homely fare of request programmes such as Housewives’ Choice every weekday morning or Children’s Favourites (with ‘Uncle Mac’) every Saturday morning. Whilst the playlist of the former predominantly fell into what we know today as the ‘easy listening’ category, the latter, under Uncle Mac’s custodianship, was stuck in a timewarp of excruciating novelty records from years gone by. “Sparky’s Magic Piano”, for example, had originally been recorded in 1947, whilst “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” by Lita Roza and “Christopher Robin At Buckingham Palace” by Petula Clark had both been released in 1953.

Far and away the leader in the field of record requests, however, was Two-Way Family Favourites at Sunday lunchtime. Famous for romantically connecting its principal presenters Cliff Michelmore and Jean Metcalfe, its format was a simple exchange of family messages and dedications between the UK and British forces overseas. However, it was:

… one of the few BBC radio programmes devoted exclusively to records, so its audience was in consequence huge, going far beyond the audience at which it was aimed. It offered the ‘real thing’, the popular records themselves which by the late 1950s were what people wanted to hear, as against versions of the songs being played live in a studio in London.5

Even so, there were two obvious drawbacks to request programmes such as these. Firstly, their musical content was generally conservative, only to be expected given, as John Peel noted, that “there wasn’t much popular music at the time that wasn’t conservative”.6 Specifically, as he remembered:

Glenn Miller and his Orchestra featured an awful lot, as did Doris Day, Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray and Winifred Atwell. Selections from Oklahoma!, Carousel and other popular musicals were also on pretty heavy rotation … [They] also featured lots of light classical stuff …7

And secondly, half the airtime was, of course, taken up with reading out the requests. Hence, for example, what came eventually to be an apparently generous ninety minutes’ airtime for Two-Way Family Favourites equated to no more than forty-five minutes of actual music.

It was not until the late Fifties that anything seriously resembling a regular programme of contemporary popular music for a target audience below the age of forty struggled onto the Light Programme. Saturday Club, hosted by Brian Matthew, began in 1958 as the successor to Skiffle Club. It quickly became the listening highlight of the weekend, the radio programme on which up-and-coming solo artists and groups would not only perform live in the studio but also be interviewed about their current repertoire and future aspirations. In other words, it began to set the stamp of authority on the critical appreciation of pop music as a genre in its own right and to exercise its own influence on that genre. (It was, for example, the Saturday Club producer Jim Grant who had the vision to see the hit potential of the Shadows’ “Apache” as an A-side rather than the originally intended B-side and promoted it as such.8) In 1959, it was supplemented by its Sunday companion Easy Beat, again with Brian Matthew in charge, but this was much less to my taste, since initially it tended to be heavily dependent on trad jazz and standards performed live by resident musicians such as Kenny Ball, Monty Sunshine and George Melly.

The impetus for pop music programmes on television came with the breaking of the BBC’s broadcasting monopoly by the establishment of ITV in 1955. This said, however, it has to be acknowledged that from the very outset ITV sought to accommodate and contain a comfortable version of popular music within the variety show format of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Originally running from 1955 to 1967, it very much p...