Andrew Hickey
17 February 2020
Episode seventy of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at "Move It" by Cliff Richard, and the beginning of rock and roll TV in the UK. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson, another artist whose career was made by TV, and one who influenced Cliff Richard hugely. ERRATUM: I say Cliff Richard was sixteen when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel”. He was fifteen. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll. Much of the music is not very good, but I can't imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. 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 Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've looked a little bit at the start of rock and roll in Britain, which was so different from the American music that it feels absurd to talk of the two in the same breath. But today we're going to have a look at the first really massive star of British rock and roll -- someone who is still going strong today, more than sixty years after he released his first record: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Move It"] When we've looked at British rock and roll to this point, it's been rather lifeless, and there's a reason for that. There were, in the mid-fifties, two different streams of music in Britain that were aiming to appeal to young people. One was skiffle, and that's the branch of music that eventually led to all British rock and roll from the sixties onwards -- we looked at that with Lonnie Donegan, but the skiffle craze was a big, big thing for about two years, and when it finally died down it splintered into three different, overlapping, groups -- there were the folk revivalists, who we'll talk about when we get to Bob Dylan; the British blues people, who we'll look at when we get to the Rolling Stones; and the rock and rollers. Skiffle had everything that people found exciting and interesting about American rock and roll -- at least, it had much of the excitement of the rockabilly music. But it wasn't marketed as rock and roll, and it tended to aim at a slightly more bohemian audience. Meanwhile, British rock and roll proper -- the stuff that was being marketed as rock and roll -- was mostly being made by longtime professional musicians who had switched from playing anaemic copies of swing music to anaemic copies of Bill Haley and the Comets. Groups like Tony Crombie and the Rockets were making records like "Let's You and I Rock", which copied the formula of Haley's less good records: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, "Let's You and I Rock"] The idea of rock and roll in the British music business in those early years came entirely from the film Rock Around the Clock, which had featured Haley, the Platters, and Freddie Bell and His Bellboys -- who were a second-rate clone of Haley's band. As we discussed in the episodes on Haley, his particular style of music had few imitators in American rock and roll, so while British groups were copying things like Freddie Bell's one hit, "Giddy-Up A Ding-Dong", British teenagers were instead listening to American records by Buddy Holly or Little Richard, the Everly Brothers or Elvis, none of whose recordings had anything to do with anything that was being made by the British commercial rock and roll industry. For British rock and roll to matter, it had to at least catch up to what the American records were doing. It needed its own Elvis -- and that Elvis would ideally be someone who came from the skiffle scene, but was more oriented towards rock and roll than most of the skifflers, who were very happy playing Lead Belly songs rather than "Blue Suede Shoes". Tommy Steele had been a good start, but he'd jumped the gun a little bit. He was essentially still a pre-Elvis performer, although he was one who followed the rockabilly pattern of a young man with a guitar. His records were still novelty songs with the word "rock" thrown in, like "Rock With the Caveman", and when he tried to copy Elvis' vocal mannerisms, while it brought him a number one hit, it didn't really sound particularly credible: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Singing the Blues"] In the wake of Steele came a whole host of other teen idols along the same lines, most of them managed by Larry Parnes -- Adam Faith, Mary Wilde, Terry Dene, Vince Taylor, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, and many more. Some of these went on to have interesting careers, and a few made records that we'll be looking at in future episodes, but one of them -- one of the few not managed by Parnes -- managed to have a career that would outlast almost all of his American contemporaries, and outsell many of them. [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Move It"] One of the things that will be a recurring theme in this podcast as Britain becomes a bigger part of rock history is the end of the British Empire. It is literally impossible to understand anything about Britain for the last eighty years without understanding that at the start of the 1940s the British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire that had ever been seen in human history, while by the early 1970s Britain was a tiny island that was desperately begging to be allowed into the EEC -- the precursor of the EU -- because it had no economic or political power at all on its own. The psychic shock this change in status gave to multiple generations of British people cannot be overstated, and almost all British history since at least 1945 can be explained in terms of Britain trying and failing to convince itself and the world that it was still important and still mattered. And one of the people whom that change in status hit most dramatically was a young boy named Harry Webb, who was born in India in 1940, to a family who were of British descent, but who had been in India for a couple of generations. Like most white people in India at the time they benefited hugely from the Empire -- although they were only moderately well off by white British standards in India, they lived in what for most people would seem absolute luxury, with servants looking after them, and the people of India being deferential to them. But then, after World War II came Indian independence and partition, and the Webb family found themselves in Britain, a country they'd never lived in, homeless and jobless. Harry, his parents, and his three sisters had to live in one room of a three-bedroom house, with the other rooms of the house occupied by another family of eight. Not only that, but while Harry had been a beneficiary of racism in India, in Britain he was a victim of it -- while he was white, he had a dark complexion, an Anglo-Indian accent, and came from India, so everyone assumed he was Indian -- except that the only Indians that his schoolmates knew anything about were the ones in cowboy films, so he kept getting asked where his wigwam was. Eventually the Webb family managed to get a house to themselves, and young Harry managed to get rid of his accent, ending up with an accent that reflected neither his Indian origins nor his London upbringing, but rather a generic regionless middle-class accent with a trace of the mid-Atlantic behind it. Webb's accent would later become almost the default for people in the media, edging out the received pronunciation that had dominated in previous decades, but at the time it gave him a distinct advantage when he finally became a pop star, because he didn't sound like he was from a particular place. When he was sixteen, he heard the record that would change his life: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Young Harry became obsessed with Elvis Presley, and tried to make himself look as much like Elvis as possible. His first public performance was with a vocal group he formed at school, and he took a solo on "Heartbreak Hotel". On leaving school, having failed almost all his exams, he decided that he wanted to become a rock and roll star. He had no idea how he was going to go about it until one day his bike broke, and he had to get the bus into work. On the same bus was an old schoolfriend, Terry Smart, who was the drummer in a skiffle group. Their singer had recently been drafted, and they needed a new one. He remembered that Harry could sing, and invited him to join the group. Harry's musical tastes didn't really run to skiffle, which by this time had become a very formalised genre, with the instruments almost always consisting of acoustic guitar, teachest bass, and washboard, and a repertoire that was made up primarily of songs by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Big Bill Broonzy (who was the one blues musician that even the least knowledgable skiffler could name, despite his relative lack of commercial success in the US). There would also be a good chunk of traditional folk and sea shanties thrown in. A typical example of the style wo
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