Andrew Hickey
28 May 2020
Episode eighty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Shakin' All Over" by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and how the first great British R&B band interacted with the entertainment industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Under Your Spell Again" by Buck Owens. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Only one biography of Kidd has been written, and that's been out of print for nearly a quarter of a century and goes for ridiculous prices. Luckily Adie Barrett's site http://www.johnnykidd.co.uk/ is everything a fan-site should be, and has a detailed biographical section which I used for the broad-strokes outline. Clem Cattini: My Life, Through the Eye of a Tornado is somewhere between authorised biography and autobiography. It's not the best-written book ever, but it contains a lot of information about Clem's life. Spike & Co by Graham McCann gives a very full account of Associated London Scripts. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript As we get more into this story, we're going to see a lot more British acts becoming part of it. We've already looked at Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, and Vince Taylor, but without spoiling anything I think most of you can guess that over the next year or so we're going to see a few guitar bands from the UK enter the narrative. Today we're going to look at one of the most important British bands of the early sixties -- a band who are now mostly known for one hit and a gimmick, but who made a massive contribution to the sound of rock music. We're going to look at Johnny Kidd and the Pirates: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] Our story starts during the skiffle boom of 1957. If you don't remember the episodes we did on skiffle and early British rock and roll, it was a musical craze that swept Britain after Lonnie Donegan's surprise hit with "Rock Island Line". For about eighteen months, nearly every teenage boy in Britain was in a group playing a weird mix of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie songs, old folk tunes, and music-hall numbers, with a lineup usually consisting of guitar, banjo, someone using a washboard as percussion, and a homemade double bass made out of a teachest, a broom handle, and a single string. The skiffle craze died away as quickly as it started out, but it left a legacy -- thousands of young kids who'd learned at least three chords, who'd performed in public, and who knew that it was possible to make music without having gone through the homogenising star-making process. That would have repercussions throughout the length of this story, and to this day. But while almost everyone in a skiffle group was a kid, not everyone was. Obviously the big stars of the genre -- Lonnie Donegan, Chas McDevitt, the Vipers -- were all in their twenties when they became famous, and so were some of the amateurs who tried to jump on the bandwagon. In particular, there was Fred Heath. Heath was twenty-one when skiffle hit, and was already married -- while twenty-one might seem young now, at the time, it was an age when people were meant to have settled down and found a career. But Heath wasn't the career sort. There were rumours about him which attest to the kind of person he was perceived as being -- that he was a bookie's runner, that he'd not been drafted because he was thought to be completely impossible to discipline, that he had been working as a painter in a warehouse and urinated on the warehouse floor from the scaffolding he was on -- and he was clearly not someone who was *ever* going to settle down. The first skiffle band Heath formed was called Bats Heath and the Vampires, and featured Heath on vocals and rhythm guitar, Brian Englund on banjo, Frank Rouledge on lead guitar, and Clive Lazell on washboard. The group went through a variety of names, at one point naming themselves the Frantic Four in what seems to have been an attempt to confuse people into thinking they were seeing Don Lang's Frantic Five, the group who often appeared on Six-Five Special: [Excerpt: Don Lang and his Frantic Five, "Six-Five Hand Jivel"] The group went through the standard lineup and name changes that almost every amateur group went through, and they ended up as a five-piece group called the Five Nutters. And it was as the Five Nutters that they made their first attempts at becoming stars, when they auditioned for Carroll Levis. Levis was one of the most important people in showbusiness in the UK at this time. He'd just started a TV series, but for years before that his show had been on Radio Luxembourg, which was for many teenagers in the UK the most important radio station in the world. At the time, the BBC had a legal monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK, but they had a couple of problems when it came to attracting a teenage audience. The first was that they had to provide entertainment for *everyone*, and so they couldn't play much music that only appealed to teenagers but was detested by adults. But there was a much bigger problem for the BBC when it came to recorded music. In the 1950s, the BBC ran three national radio stations -- the Light Programme, the Home Service, and the Third Programme -- along with one national TV channel. The Musicians' Union were worried that playing recorded music on these would lead to their members losing work, and so there was an agreement called "needletime", which allowed the BBC to use recorded music for twenty-two hours a week, total, across all three radio stations, plus another three hours for the TV. That had to cover every style of music from Little Richard through to Doris Day through to Beethoven. The rest of the time, if they had music, it had to be performed by live musicians, and so you'd be more likely to hear "Rock Around the Clock" as performed by the Northern Dance Orchestra than Bill Haley's version, and much of the BBC's youth programming had middle-aged British session musicians trying to replicate the sound of American records and failing miserably. But Luxembourg didn't have a needle-time rule, and so a commercial English-language station had been set up there, using transmitters powerful enough to reach most of Britain and Ireland. The station was owned and run in Britain, and most of the shows were recorded in London by British DJs like Brian Matthew, Jimmy Savile, and Alan Freeman, although there were also recordings of Alan Freed's show broadcast on it. The shows were mostly sponsored by record companies, who would make the DJs play just half of the record, so they could promote more songs in their twenty-minute slot, and this was the main way that any teenager in Britain would actually be able to hear rock and roll music. Oddly, even though he spent many years on Radio Luxembourg, Levis' show, which had originally been on the BBC before the War, was not a music show, but a talent show. Whether on his original BBC radio show, the Radio Luxembourg one, or his new TV show, the format was the same. He would alternate weeks between broadcasting and talent scouting. In talent scouting weeks he would go to a different city each week, where for five nights in a row he would put on talent shows featuring up to twenty different local amateur acts doing their party pieces -- without payment, of course, just for the exposure. At the end of the show, the audience would get a chance to clap for each act, and the act that got the loudest applause would go through to a final on the Saturday night. This of course meant that acts that wanted to win would get a lot of their friends and family to come along and cheer for them. The Saturday night would then have the winning acts -- which is to say, those who brought along the most paying customers -- compete against each other. The most popular of *those* acts would then get to appear on Levis' TV show the next week. It was, as you can imagine, an extremely lucrative business. When the Five Nutters appeared on Levis' Discoveries show, they were fairly sure that the audience clapped loudest for them, but they came third. Being the type of person he was, Fred Heath didn't take this lying down, and remonstrated with Levis, who eventually promised to get the Nutters some better gigs, one suspects just to shut Heath up. As a result of Levis putting in a good word for them, they got a few appearances at places like the 2Is, and made an appearance on the BBC's one concession to youth culture on the radio -- a new show called Saturday Skiffle Club. Around this time, the Five Nutters also recorded a demo disc. The first side was a skiffled-up version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll", with some extremely good jazzy lead guitar: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five
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