Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Some of their peers remained unconvinced: Brian O’Hara, of the Merseybeat band the Fourmost, dismissed American blues as ‘bad guitar playing39, bad singing and bad lyrics’. But while his career foundered, blues was briefly the lingua franca of British pop. Then it passed: its mystique shattered by overfamiliarity, the mission of the blues evangelists achieved and lost in that same instant. Just as had happened in America, the Delta and country blues were superseded by urban R&B and soul. The blues became a cult once more, its disciples the likes of Clapton, Tony McPhee and Peter Green. In their hands, blues became a British phenomenon, with its own pantheon of divinities, each sporting an electric guitar. Their heroes, the ‘authentic’ American prophets of the blues, were swept aside by these new messiahs, whose destiny was to obscure the music they loved as they transmitted it around the world.

  Can anyone explain why40 modern jazz lovers must play their records full blast? My husband seems to have an acute attack of this disease which he shares with his jazz-loving friends.

  Letter to Melody Maker, February 1963

  Donald Zec’s [article]41 made the Beatles appear to be a lot of thick-headed Rockers, but all their fans know them to be Mods.

  Letter to Daily Mirror, September 1963

  At 15, future underground poet and teen pop star Marc Bolan was profiled by Town magazine as one of the ‘young men who live42 for clothes and pleasure’. More than either, Bolan (known then as Mark Feld) wanted to personify the present day: to be more contemporary, more alive, more perfectly styled for this moment than anyone else. It was an exhausting regime, Town suggested, and one doomed to end in failure. Easier, indeed, to follow trad-jazz fans or blues purists or aficionados of mid-1950s rock ’n’ roll, by selecting a golden age from the past and dedicating oneself to its survival. That would never satisfy Bolan’s generation of impeccably tailored young men: they had to be eternally modern,fn1 and so the only possible word to describe them was ‘modernist’, or in an age where every split second counted, ‘mod’.

  ‘Modernist’ had no connection with the aesthetic notion of modernism, the deconstruction of traditional artistic forms by the likes of Picasso, Joyce and Schönberg. It was, however, linked with ‘modern’ jazz, drawing on both its sense of ‘the cool’, and its stylish imagery and typography. Miles Davis was a modernists’ icon, although his credo of continuous reinvention ensured that anyone who wanted to frame his image at any particular moment would soon feel betrayed or bewildered. But the original mods loved or affected a love of modern jazz, alongside Italian suits and scooters, and French cigarettes.

  To become a national movement, mod required a more accessible soundtrack, and as contemporary jazz overlapped with American soul in the early 1960s, mods found new role models. They came from Motown, Atlantic and Stax, from Detroit, New York, Memphis and Los Angeles, even from London, where all these sounds (plus the ethnic exoticism of Jamaican ska, or ‘bluebeat’) could be heard at clubs such as the Flamingo. In residence there in 1964 were the Blue Flames, led by Georgie Fame – the one man in London capable of blending jazz, blues, soul, ska and even African highlife into a coherent sound. As the modernists’ soundtrack altered, so did their identity, until by summer 1964 Jazz Monthly reported that ‘the well-scrubbed youths43 with their ashen-faced and eye-shadowed partners have given way to a sartorially less conformist crowd that is at least 50% non-white’. At the end of the year, Georgie Fame released the exuberant ‘Yeh Yeh’: a Latin soul instrumental by a Cuban jazzman, augmented with lyrics by a black American beatnik, which topped the British charts to suggest that this was after all a mod country in a mod world.

  This cultural supremacy had not been won easily. ‘Youngsters beat up seaside town44: 97 Leather Jacket Arrests’, announced the Daily Express after an explosion of violence on Easter Saturday 1964, which spread from Clacton to Margate, and even involved weekend trippers waiting for the ferry home from Ostend. By the Whitsun bank holiday in May, there were skirmishes all along the south coast, with Brighton a focal point for vandalism and grievous bodily harm. The participants identified themselves as the warring tribes of mods, clad for motor-scooter-riding in baggy parkas, and rockers, the leather-clad hooligans of the Express story, whose machines were more potent than their opponents’ imported Vespas and Lambrettas.

  The first documented scuffles between the young men the press would dub ‘Scooter Groups’ and ‘Wild Ones’ (the latter after a Marlon Brando biker movie, which had not yet been screened in the UK) took place a year earlier, in the unlikely surroundings of the London Stock Exchange. In spring 1963, rival gangs of messengers engaged in petty acts of violence when they weren’t conveying vital bulletins about share prices. That May, the two tribes fought on the dance floor of the Lyceum Ballroom in London. By late summer, ‘The War of the Rockers and Mods45’ erupted into street battles in Basildon town centre. For the media, this was more glamorous than gang warfare: the rivalry between mods and rockers seemed to offer a rationale for violence that was fuelled as much by testosterone and social inferiority as tribal affiliation.

  ‘Purple hearts and beat music46’ were widely accused of exacerbating these incidents. ‘Every time something like this47 happens, they blame the music’, Stones guitarist Brian Jones complained. ‘Beat music does not build up tension. It allows young people to let off steam.’ For sociologist Stanley Cohen, the disputes were triggered by a minute distinction of social class: ‘The typical Rocker48 was an unskilled manual worker, the typical Mod a semi-skilled manual worker.’ Cohen also declared that ‘Music was much more important49 for the Mods than the Rockers – and also than for the Teds, who had not grown up as a generation through the whole Rock explosion.’ As a corrective: an anonymous mod interviewed in 1964 noted that ‘Rockers buy more records50. Mods knock theirs off at parties.’ Cohen’s view of Teddy boys – packs of whom continued to prowl through Britain’s streets well into the 1970s – may have been misguided. Teds’ loyalty to the rock ’n’ roll stars of the late 1950s expressed itself whenever Bill Haley or Jerry Lee Lewis came to Britain, Haley’s increasingly tame sound invariably provoking riots, almost as a badge of honour. But rockers’ aggression was fuelled by the power of their bikes, the borrowed machismo of their leather jackets, and (ironically, given the subsequent prevalence of gay biker porn) a sense of machismo that was offended by the close attention paid by mods to their appearance.

  Early reports claimed the Beatles as the exemplars of mod. Asked if he was a mod or a rocker, Ringo Starr quipped that he was a ‘mocker’. (Journalists also claimed to have identified ‘mids’, who for financial reasons could not perfect the image required by either tribe. As ever, there was a silent majority of young people, perhaps amounting to more than 90% of the total teenage population, for whom the mod vs rocker debate was irrelevant.) With their collarless suits, Cuban-heeled boots, exquisitely shiny hair and obvious passion for American soul, the Beatles certainly seemed to qualify as mods; yet vintage photographs identified all four of the group as ex-Teddy boys, even if none of them seemed sturdy enough to handle a 500 cc bike.

  In any case, the Beatles were too popular with adults and young children by the end of 1963 to act as heroes for a self-confessed league of elitists, and so mod adulation was transferred to the Rolling Stones, then to the Who and the Small Faces, each sacrificing some of their lustre when they achieved widespread popularity. (Hence the devotion shown by mods to the undeservedly ignored mid-1960s London band, the Action.) So rapid was the shift in collective taste through 1964 that even journalists contributing to magazines specifically aimed at mods could commit such faux pas as claiming that Cilla Black and Cliff Richard were mod icons, or that rocker idol Bill Haley was becoming the movement’s standard-bearer in summer 1964.

  A constant in mod affections that year was the style dubbed bluebeat, after a record company launched in London at the start of the decade. Its aim was to distribute Jamaican R&B and rock ’n’ roll (or ‘Jamaican boogie’) to Caribbean emigrants who had
settled in Britain. That community adopted bluebeat as their own, staging bluebeat balls in London and Birmingham. The phrase remained intact as the music changed, with what its Jamaican creators called ‘ska’ taking precedence in the early 1960s. For white British listeners, ska’s off-kilter rhythm proved disconcerting, and prompted some strange speculation. The pseudonymous ‘Terry’, writing for Boyfriend magazine’s 1965 annual, approached the sound of Jamaica as if it were a dangerous dog: ‘Ah yes, Blue Beat51. I wasn’t really sure about that at first. I couldn’t get used to the vocal being in a different key to the backing – sounded all wrong. But when some of the British groups started to play Blue Beat, it really started to swing. I suppose the original Blue Beat sounds great played on the sun-kissed beaches of Trinidad’ – which it probably did, even if it was recorded more than 1,000 miles away in Kingston.fn2

  Mods quickly adopted bluebeat as an addition to the ‘one-new-dance-a-week’ cult, alongside the likes of the slope, the shake and the nitty gritty. Bluebeat clubs opened across the country, slowly conquering Britain from south to north. The style was briefly propelled to mass popularity by the sales of ‘My Boy Lollipop’, an imitation by 17-year-old Millie Small of a 1950s R&B tune, and a No. 2 hit in Britain and America. Effervescent and joyous as it was, ‘My Boy Lollipop’ was regarded as a novelty by most white listeners. Rather than spreading the gospel of ska, it effectively quashed the music at birth, and for the next few years only Jamaicans (and mods) remained loyal to its rhythmic vivacity. Many Caribbean immigrants opted to attend London soul clubs in the mid-1960s after persistent outbreaks of violence at such ska venues as the Ram Jam, the 007 and the Ska Bar.

  The furore over the mods and the rockers faded during 1965, although the English summer bank holidays continued to entice scooter crocodiles to Brighton in search of tribal solidarity and perhaps some therapeutic violence. By June 1965, being modern appeared so old-fashioned that Pete Townshend of the Who, regarded as a mouthpiece for the movement, could declare: ‘We think the Mod thing is dying52. We don’t plan to go down with it, which is why we’ve become individualists.’ For the next decade, indeed, mod seemed to surface only in Townshend’s frequent interviews about the philosophy of the Who, acting as a touchstone for his own lost youth and his idealistic conception of rock’s potential. In 1968, he saw it as ‘an army, a powerful aggressive53 army of teenagers with transport’, within which ‘You could be a bank clerk, man, it was acceptable.’ Two years later, he had assimilated himself back into the pack, claiming of mods that ‘We made the establishment54 uptight, we made the rockers uptight, we made our parents uptight and our employers uptight.’ By 1973, he had fashioned the Who’s Quadrophenia double album as an exploration of what mod had meant to him (and, by his logical extension, the whole of British youth). But as he recalled, back in 1965, ‘kids would reach the age of 2255 and lose all interest in music because they had to concentrate on the factory’; so the mod impulse of the early 1960s was destined to die – a victim of pop’s apparently inevitable struggle to speak to adults with the same intensity it offered to the young.

  Interlude: The Screamagers

  Q: I am 15 and madly in love56 with a pop star. I know if I could meet him he would fall in love with me.

  A: My dear, hundreds of girls your age imagine they are in love with a film or pop star. Don’t brood about this star, he probably gets hundreds of letters like yours every day.

  Problem-page enquiry, Honey magazine, March 1963

  I’ve never seen a mob57 mind working so beautifully. Note how they’re all writhing in unison. Their screams are like the noise of excited goats. Most of the audiences are young, and are maturing sexually with no outlet for their emotional urges. Music has broken down their inhibitory checks … played in this atmosphere it is just as powerful in its effect on the nervous system as whisky.

  Sociologist’s verdict on the audience at a swing concert by Benny Goodman, 1938

  The other day I turned on58 a Frank Sinatra program and I noted the shrill whistling sound, created supposedly by a bunch of girls cheering. I thought: how easy it would be for certain-minded manufacturers to create another Hitler here in America through the influence of mass hysteria! They intend to get a Hitler in, by first planting in the minds of the people that men like Frank Sinatra are OK, therefore this future Hitler will be OK.

  Letter to the FBI, 1943

  I keep wondering if it’s really me59 they are screaming at. I keep wondering who is behind me that is causing all the excitement. I say to myself, ‘Elvis, this is you that is doing it.’ And then I think it can’t be me. I don’t like them pulling my clothes and writing on my cheeks in lipstick and wanting me to kiss them. I don’t see any sense for them to dance rock ’n’ roll on the hood of my car or drive a knife into the upholstery. But some of them do it and look at me with the queerest look in their eyes while they’re doing it. That part kind of frightens me.

  Elvis Presley, 1956

  They made it clear60 they had come along to hear themselves scream. In Manchester, they only want to hear themselves.

  Cliff Richard, 1963

  [P. J. Proby] seems to exploit sex61, unaware that many of the girls screaming in the stalls are only just in their teens.

  The Sun, 1965

  You come out of a council flat62, and you’ve been struggling to make it with the bird in the pub who works behind the bar. Suddenly you’re in a theatre with four or five thousand birds screaming at you, to take your choice of.

  Adam Faith, 1973

  Peter and Marty63 were almost pushed off stage; girls fainted in the traditional fashion, floodlights and coppers’ helmets were knocked over – and you could hardly hear the New Seekers singing for the fans’ frenzied screaming.

  Music Week, 1973

  Don’t you think, in this day64 and age, when we have so much trouble and terrorism and blowing-ups and things like that, that the kids do want to be entertained and be happy and go along to a concert where they can scream, wet their knickers and have a great time? Isn’t that what music’s really about?

  Bay City Rollers manager Tam Paton, 1974

  After a while I realised65 there was no music being made. The instrument was 20,000 screaming females – pure unadulterated noise. It didn’t matter what I did up there.

  David Cassidy, 1976

  You get some really wild old women66 at James Last concerts. They go mad … nearly as bad as the Beatles. There’s all these old grannies screaming for him.

  Security man for James Last, 1988

  With the advent of the Beatles and their peers, pop reached unimagined heights of audience hysteria. An admirer from their pre-fame days in Liverpool was shocked to witness a Beatles performance in 1963, at which every note of their music was buried beneath the screams of young girls. Why didn’t they listen to their idols? she asked. ‘We came to see the Beatles67’, a fan replied. ‘We can hear them on records. Anyway, we might be disappointed if we heard them in real life.’

  ‘The raucous sound68’, reported Time magazine before the group arrived in America, ‘makes a Beatles performance slightly orgiastic.’ That was an understatement. Such was the level of excitement at their concerts that the seating was soaked in urine and other bodily fluids. Sociologists noted that witnessing a pop group provoked orgasms amongst girls too young to understand what they were feeling. In the New Statesman, Dr David Holbrook confirmed that it was ‘painfully clear that the Beatles69 are a masturbation fantasy, such as a girl presumably has during the onanistic act – the genial smiling young male images, the music like a buzzing of the blood in the head, the rhythm, the cries, the shouted names, the climaxes.’

  The same political journal printed a prurient letter from a teacher at a boys’ secondary school. ‘Since Beatlemania became70 the craze,’ he wrote, ‘I have detected a somewhat disturbing change in a few of my 13-year-old boys. I was recently shocked to find that two of my most promising boys, both of whom sported Beatle mops, had taken to walking tog
ether hand in hand.’ He added: ‘During a recent “wet day”, when pupils were confined to the classroom over the lunch break, I came into my room to find a dozen boys congressed round transistor radios, with a terrifying blankness on their faces, moving their pelvises rhythmically in time with each other. When they noticed me, the same furtive, shameful glances as I have sometimes noticed in the school lavatories were turned towards me.’

  The observer may have imposed his own agenda upon the boys in these stories, just as political commentator Paul Johnson revealed his prejudice when he described Beatles fans as ‘the least fortunate of their generation71, the dull, the idle, the failures’. The audience on TV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars pop show, meanwhile, aroused an even more vitriolic response from the 35-year-old Johnson: ‘What a bottomless chasm72 of vacuity they reveal! The huge faces bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain store make-up, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the hands mindlessly drumming in time to the music, the broken stiletto heels, the shoddy, stereotyped “with-it” clothes … How pathetic and listless they seemed: young girls, hardly any more than sixteen, dressed as adults and already lined up as fodder for exploitation.’ This was not so much sociology as middle-aged panic disguised as contempt.