A 1960s Childhood: From Thunderbirds to Beatlemania (Childhood Memories)

by Feeney, Paul

  Sheet music books for songs by two of the 1960s’ best loved groups, The Beatles’ I Feel Fine (1964), and The Dave Clark Five’s Glad All Over (1963).

  Mary Quant in London’s Kings Road and John Stephen in Carnaby Street were already leading the fashion revolution with their clothes boutiques. And Vidal Sassoon was by then an established Bond Street hairdresser experimenting with new cuts and techniques in modern hairdressing. Meanwhile, Terence Conran was a successful designer and manufacturer of modern furniture, making plans to open a huge new concept furniture and home accessories shop that would epitomise his vision of the 1960s lifestyle. The first of his Habitat stores subsequently opened on Fulham Road in London on 11 May 1964.

  As well as being hugely successful recording artists, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard had already become film stars, and Joe Meek had successfully created his now famous Holloway Road Wall of Sound and produced his first number one hit record, Johnny Remember Me, sung by John Leyton. Helen Shapiro had recorded hits at the now famous Abbey Road Studios in London, and at the age of 14 was the youngest female chart topper in the UK. Bands like the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and the Yardbirds had all been going for a while and were building large followings of fans around the London area, while other soon-to-be-famous ‘Merseybeat’ bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers were also successfully developing their pop music careers in and around Liverpool. Yes, The Beatles were amazing. Their music was, and still is, great, but there were many other 1960s groundbreaking talents that also contributed to the massive changes in world culture that we saw happen during the decade that was dubbed ‘the swinging sixties’ – a time when the word ‘swinging’ still had an innocent meaning: to be lively and exciting. In 1960, all over the country, there were many new revolutionary talents bubbling under the surface and about to explode onto the wider cultural scene. These innovative and talented people would go on to create a myriad of fresh delights in the form of music, fashion and entertainment, which would prove to be long lasting and that we would all continue to enjoy for decades to come.

  Popular Music

  There were a lot of different styles in popular music around, many having been carried over from previous generations, like jazz, blues, big band, rock and roll, doo-wop, skiffle, gospel, country and western, and folk music, but there was also a lot of new music being produced, like the Mersey Sound or Merseybeat, Tamla Motown, soul, Bluebeat, surfin’, psychedelic and progressive rock, hard rock (heavy metal), bubblegum music and what was dubbed folk-pop, which was often the genre used by protest singers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Barry McGuire.

  Throughout the sixties, the British popular music charts displayed a hotchpotch of vastly different tastes, indicating that people of all ages were buying their favourite records in large numbers; from Winifred Atwell and Frankie Vaughan to the Animals and the Zombies, with a few surprises also thrown into the mix like, for instance, Benny Hill, Napoleon XIV, and The Singing Nun. Ballads and easy-listening records were ever-present in the top twenty, with artists like Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves, Roy Orbison, the Seekers, the Bachelors, Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones regularly selling huge numbers of such records. Much of what the charts contained didn’t actually reflect the tastes of the younger generation. There was an underground music scene that had emerged from the mod clubs, where rare and hard-to-get American soul and rhythm & blues dance music was all the rage, but because of their limited availability many of these popular records didn’t even get into the British top twenty. Lots of American artists, including Tommy Tucker, Dobie Gray, and P.P. Arnold were being added to the already long list of American mod favourites, like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. If you couldn’t find the American imports to buy legitimately in record shops then they were borrowed from friends and tape-recorded. There were several British bands and singers that were also considered to be part of the mod culture, like Steve Marriott and the Small Faces, and Chris Farlowe.

  The dance craze, ‘the twist’, took Britain by storm in late 1961 when Chubby Checker’s Let’s Twist Again became a UK chart hit. Soon, several twist records were released by a number of artists, including Sam Cooke with Twistin’ the Night Away in early 1962. And there was even this twist record released in 1962 by Victor Silvester, the old-time musician and dance orchestra leader.

  As far as the British popular music charts were concerned, The Beatles had the most consecutive number one hit records of any artist during the 1960s, with eleven number ones in a row from 1963–66, From Me to You through to Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby. They then had six hits in a row from 1967–69 with All You Need is Love through to The Ballad of John and Yoko. Next came the Rolling Stones who managed five in a row from 1964–65 with It’s All Over Now through to Get Off of My Cloud. Equalling the Rolling Stones with five in a row was Elvis Presley with Little Sister/His Latest Flame through to Return to Sender in 1961–62.

  One hit wonders:

  1960 Tell Laura I Love Her – Ricky Valance

  1962 Nut Rocker – B. Bumble and the Stingers

  1966 Michelle – The Overlanders

  1968 Fire – Crazy World of Arthur Brown

  1969 In the Year 2525 – Zager and Evans

  1969 Je t’aime … moi non plus – Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg

  1969 Sugar Sugar – The Archies

  Straight into the charts at number one:

  3 Nov 1960 It’s Now or Never – Elvis Presley

  11 Jan 1962 The Young Ones – Cliff Richard

  23 Apr 1969 Get Back – The Beatles

  Big names that never had a UK number one hit single:

  Billy Fury

  Brenda Lee

  The Who

  The Temptations

  The Drifters

  Mr Acker Bilk (although Stranger on the Shore was the biggest selling single of 1962, it only reached number two in the UK charts)

  Instrumentals reaching number one in the charts:

  (It is interesting to note that there were none from 1963–68 when the groups dominated the charts.)

  1960 Apache – The Shadows

  1961 On the Rebound – Floyd Cramer

  1961 Kon-Tiki – The Shadows

  1962 Wonderful Land – The Shadows

  1962 Nut Rocker – B. Bumble and the Stingers

  1962 Telstar – The Tornados

  1963 Dance On – The Shadows

  1963 Diamonds – Jet Harris and Tony Meehan (both former members of the Shadows)

  1963 Foot Tapper – The Shadows

  1968 The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Hugo Montenegro Orchestra

  1969 Albatross – Fleetwood Mac

  Typical mid-sixties look that young girls would try to copy.

  British entries in the Eurovision Song Contest and position:

  1960 Looking High High High – Bryan Johnson 2nd

  1961 Are You Sure? – The Allisons 2nd

  1962 Ring-A-Ding Girl – Ronnie Carroll Joint 4th

  1963 Say Wonderful Things – Ronnie Carroll 4th

  1964 I Love the Little Things – Matt Monro 2nd

  1965 I Belong – Kathy Kirby 2nd

  1966 A Man Without Love – Kenneth McKellar 9th

  1967 Puppet on a String – Sandie Shaw 1st

  1968 Congratulations – Cliff Richard 2nd

  1969 Boom Bang-a-Bang – Lulu Joint 1st

  Mods and Rockers

  Whenever post-war baby boomers find themselves reminiscing about events of the sixties with friends, they are inevitably asked: ‘Were you a mod or a rocker?’ There is always an assumption that you were one or the other, even if only through your taste in music. The smartly dressed mods listened and danced to R&B, Motown, Bluebeat, pop and blues records, whereas the leather-jacketed rockers, as their name suggests, preferred rock and roll music. Of course, most kids growing up in the 1960s were too young at the time to actually be a mod or a rocker, but many still had their own pr
eferences when it came to fashion, style and music. Perhaps in your own childhood you aspired to become a mod when you got a bit older, but instead, as a 1970s teenager, you found yourself proudly sporting the latest fashion in platform shoes, loon pants and knitted tank tops. Where did it all go wrong?

  Girls of all ages attempted to make their own clothes to follow fashion. This was a typical dressmaking pattern book for a cotton lace stitch dress to make on a Knitmaster home knitting machine.

  There has always been a lot of media emphasis put on the violence of mods and rockers, but in the scale of things it was only a relatively small number that took part in the fighting and rioting that made headline news. The mods played a big part in Britain’s fashion and music culture and the majority of them steered clear of any confrontation or violence. Some mods did have customised motor-scooters, but it was not an essential element of the mod lifestyle. Whereas motorbikes were a big part of the rockers’ daily life, for mods it was the clothes that were their main priority. The two groups were easily identifiable by their differing styles of dress. In simple terms, mods wore smart casual or formal clothes with clean and neatly cut hair, while rockers wore leather jackets and jeans with long, swept back hair. Many mods spent all their spare money on clothes, records and frequenting mod clubs and pubs. It was their passion, and some would even go without food so that they could buy some new items of mod clothing each week. There was no such thing as a credit card in Britain until the Barclaycard was introduced in 1966, and even then they weren’t available to young people, so they had to have the cash in their pocket before they could buy anything. Most mods didn’t have, or even want, a motor-scooter. Their clothes were far too valuable to risk ruining them by riding around in all weathers on a scooter. Most preferred to use other forms of covered transport – fashionable, if at all possible – like their own Mini Cooper S car.

  The Hippies

  The 1967 summer of love and the hippy fashion and lifestyle associated with it still gets a lot of publicity today. The hippy movement had been building up in Britain since the mid-sixties, but it was the San Francisco outdoor ‘Human Be-In’ or ‘Happening’ in January 1967 that sparked the San Francisco ‘Summer of Love’ that also hit Britain in the warm summer of that year. But, contrary to popular belief, in the late sixties not everyone dressed in kaftans and beads, nor did they wear flowers in their hair; most young people were still wearing Fred Perry polo shirts, faded Levi jeans and sneakers. We all loved those summer of 1967 ‘peace and love’ records, such as Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Flowers in Your Hair), The Flowerpot Men’s Let’s Go to San Francisco and The Beatles’ All You Need is Love, but the wearing of cowbells was strictly reserved for a few ‘far-out’ hippies, sitting cross-legged on some faraway cloud making daisy-chains. While all of that ‘peace and love’ business was going on, most people in Britain were still singing along to Petula Clark and Engelbert Humperdink songs, and listening to the Archers on the radio.

  Cinema

  Do you remember Pathé News and its wonderfully rousing theme music with the crowing cockerel? And those huge framed pictures of film stars that adorned the foyer walls and hung above the red-carpeted staircases in local cinemas everywhere? Do you remember standing for the National Anthem when the film ended and staying until it finished playing? Going to the pictures was everyone’s favourite outing. All those wonderful 1960s films: One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), Dr No (1962), The Great Escape (1963), Goldfinger (1964), The Pink Panther (1964), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Mary Poppins (1964), Help! (1965), The Sound of Music (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Born Free (1966), Bullet (1968), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Jungle Book (1967), Oliver! (1968) and Where Eagles Dare (1969). There were just too many to list them all. Then there were all the great actors, many of whom are sadly no longer with us; people like Richard Burton (d.1984), Cary Grant (d.1986), Audrey Hepburn (d.1993), Charlton Heston (d.2008), Lee Marvin (d.1987), Steve McQueen (d.1980), David Niven (d.1983), Gregory Peck (d.2003), Peter Sellers (d.1980), John Wayne (d.1979) and Natalie Wood (d.1981) – to name but a few.

  For children, it was Saturday Morning Pictures that provided the best fun. If you lived anywhere near a cinema you would have experienced the great joy of going along every Saturday morning to watch your screen heroes. Two or three hundred unruly children would descend upon anxious cinema commissionaires for two or three hours of film and live variety entertainment. There were no grownups, just kids up to the age of about 12 or 13, and it was the absolute highlight of any week. You will probably remember the cinema manager having to stop the film and threaten to send you all home if you didn’t behave, and all the kids booing when the screen went blank while the projectionist changed reels. The solitary usherette would run for cover! It was controlled mayhem, with the stalls and circle areas filled with kids cheering for the goodies and booing the baddies. There were lots of short films, mainly westerns, that seemed to consist of endless chases on horseback. The daring adventures of the Lone Ranger and Zorro, and the slapstick comedy of Mr Pastry would feature every week. Then there were the classic Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films that had everyone in fits of laughter. And who can forget those wonderful old Shirley Temple films they used to show? During the interval there would be all sorts of competitions, from yo-yo tricks, hula hoop and juggling contests, to singing and dancing, with knockout rounds each week that led to the grand final. Most cinemas had their own club, especially the big groups of cinemas, and you would have a club badge and be made to sing the club song each week. Whether you belonged to the ABC Minors, Empire Rangers or the Granadiers Club, you definitely will have enjoyed every minute you spent at Saturday Morning Pictures.

  Souvenir James Bond 007 ‘In Focus’ brochure from 1964, the year that the film Goldfinger was released in the UK.

  Six

  RADIO

  You’ve been in bed for over an hour and you’re still not sleepy. You managed to sneak your mum’s small transistor radio into bed with you and you’ve got your head tucked well down beneath the bedcovers listening to Radio Luxembourg. The reception is particularly bad tonight, it’s fading in and out more frequently than usual and you are missing all the best bits of the records. To top it all, the disc jockey has just faded out the Dave Clark Five’s latest record, Bits and Pieces, to make way for the advertisements. Oh no! It’s Horace Batchelor again, flogging the secret to his ‘Famous Infra-Draw Method’ of winning the football pools – ‘and remember, that’s Keynsham, spelt K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M, Bristol’. It’s hopeless! Having to contend with Radio Luxembourg’s irregular transmission signal is hard enough, but there are so many boring advertisements, and after suffering all of that, you only manage to catch snippets of your favourite records. The frustration eventually gets the better of you and you switch the radio off. You can now free your head from underneath the tangled bedclothes and come up for some air. Blimey, it was hot under there! In your annoyance, you slam the transistor radio down on top of the bedside cabinet and give your pillow a hefty thump with the palm of your hand to make a suitable dent for your head to rest in.

  When you wake up the next morning, Easter Sunday, 29 March 1964, you reach out for mum’s transistor radio and turn it on, but the Radio Luxembourg station closed down during the night and won’t be back on again until their evening broadcasts later in the day. You twiddle the tuning knob in the hope that you might find something other than solemn classical music, boring news or religious programmes. To your absolute astonishment and delight you manage to pick up a radio station on a waveband where there was previously only a hissing noise, and this radio station is playing pop music, and during the day! It’s the Rolling Stones’ new record, Not Fade Away. You can’t believe it, they actually let the record play right through to the very end, and when it does finally finish you discover that, at long last, your prayers have been answered. That very morning, a new commercial radio stat
ion, Radio Caroline, had started transmitting pop music from a ship off the coast of Felixstowe, south-east England. At last, there is a radio station playing pop music all day long, and they have lots of zany young disc jockeys to cheer you up; not at all like the old stuffed shirt presenters on the BBC.

  Radio (the 1960s Transformation)

  If you were around in the early 1960s, you will remember those boring times when you were stuck indoors on cold, wet winter days or when you were off school sick. There was very little daytime television back then and so the radio was usually left on in the background. During the week, apart from Listen with Mother, which was for little kids, most of the programmes were aimed at housewives and there was hardly anything on the radio to entertain the older kids and teenagers. You had to make do with programmes like Housewives’ Choice, Mrs Dale’s Diary, Music While You Work, Woman’s Hour, and Workers’ Playtime. The sixties had arrived and everything else around you was really beginning to liven up, but the radio programmes were still so old fashioned. There were a few good pop music and comedy programmes on BBC Radio at the weekends, and Radio Luxembourg would broadcast pop music in the evenings, but there was a big void in the middle. And, if you didn’t have a television licence, you had to buy a special licence to listen to the radio; it cost £1 until 1964 and then it was increased to £1 5s, and you needed a separate licence again if you had a car radio.