MINE IS A privileged generation. Not only have we prospered from the postwar rise in living standards, the creation of the NHS, significant advances in science and technology, the virtual eradication of diseases such as polio and diphtheria and the absence of world wars, we have also witnessed a transformation in public attitudes away from the casual barbarity of previous decades towards ethnic minorities, the disabled, the mentally ill, homosexuals and single mothers. Ironically, as the country has become less Christian in its adherence to religion, it has become more Christian in its way of life.
I am one of those millions of baby-boomers who began their lives in the kind of bleak slum conditions that would have been entirely familiar to Charles Dickens and will end them in a society where the absence of a second indoor toilet is considered to be a form of deprivation.
In the musical sphere, too, I feel like an archaeologist with the good fortune not only to have been present at the dawn of a new age but to have experience of an era predating my own birth. For Linda and me, this unique insight was brought about completely by happenstance.
One Saturday in the mid-1950s, our father had come home carrying on his shoulder a huge cardboard box he’d lugged back from the Portobello Road market. It contained dozens of old 78rpm records, big heavy shellac discs, each as brittle as a biscuit. A stallholder had sold him the job lot for a pound.
These relics were mainly from the 1930s, although there were a few from the 1940s and even one or two from the 1920s. Having brought them into a home with no gramophone, Steve, unusually for him, seemed content to entrust this bonanza to his children to be properly cherished as silent artefacts in their own right, which they duly were.
Cherish was the only thing we could do with them until Lily’s pools win brought the Dansette into our lives. So at first, we took great delight in simply curating our collection. After we had carefully read all the labels, I was deputed by Linda to catalogue the records, noting title and artist in a ragged exercise book she’d purloined from school. She took charge of polishing them with an old rag and storing them neatly in the box in which they’d arrived. Most still had their original paper dust sleeves.
I remember the titles to this day. Our record library boasted, among other gems, ‘Isle of Capri’ by Ray Noble and his Orchestra, ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’ by Donald Peers and ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’ by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. The two I treasured the most (when I eventually got to hear them) were ‘Was It Tears That Fell or Was It Rain?’ by the Street Singer (Arthur Tracy), and ‘With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm’ by Cyril Smith.
Most of the older records had an orchestral introduction that went on for ages before an unacknowledged male vocalist with frightfully correct pronunciation came in near the end with a sprightly lyric. A good example was ‘Tap Your Feet’ by Jack Hylton and His Orchestra. There was no clue on the His Master’s Voice record label as to who was singing it. Just the famous HMV logo, the picture of a dog with its ear to a wind-up gramophone, and beneath that image the simple phrase ‘With Vocal Refrain’ in brackets after the title.
An exception was the 1931 recording of ‘All of Me’ by Paul Whiteman, on which the celebrated Native American jazz singer Mildred Bailey was extended the courtesy of a credit for her ‘Vocal Refrain’. Her name would have meant nothing to Linda and me, but it was at least preserved for posterity, unlike those of her fellow artists.
The acquisition of the record-player finally brought these relics to life, and for a good while after its arrival at Southam Street, this task was all that was asked of it. The last few years of the fifties were not an era of instant gratification for anybody, and for our mother they were particularly tough as she toiled to clothe and feed us. There was no money left for the 45rpm singles we so craved. Linda’s friend Marilyn Hughes lent us some on the odd occasion, but for most of our pre-vinyl days, the beautiful red and grey Dansette was ignominiously restricted to playing music created for its wind-up ancestors.
Thankfully it had the capability to do so. There was a dial next to the turntable with three revs-per-minute settings–33¹⁄3, 45 and 78. The first was for vinyl long-players, the second for vinyl singles and the 78 setting was offered for those sad strangers to modernity who still retained a stake in shellac.
One of our innocent sources of amusement was to play 45s, when we finally got them, at the lowest speed to turn them into sinister dirges, or at 78rpm so that every song sounded as if had been recorded by Pinky and Perky, two porcine string puppets who, improbable as it may seem, sang their high-pitched way to chart success in the late fifties and early sixties. As well as hosting their own TV show, they released a string of cover versions of hits of the day, including (unforgivably, as far as I was concerned) ‘Tom Dooley’. The similarity was hardly surprising, as apparently this was indeed the secret to Pinky and Perky’s winning formula: it was achieved by simply replaying original voice recordings, laid down on a half-speed backing track, at twice the normal speed. The only possible point of putting any of their dreadful records on the turntable would have been to listen to them at 33¹⁄3 to hear the real, non-piggy voices.
I always thought of that Dansette as ‘our’ record-player even though it actually belonged to Linda. Her lack of personal space at Southam Street prevented it from being perceived as anything other than a shared resource. It was originally placed in the gap between our beds, where the modesty screen went up at night-time, this being the only position from which it could be plugged in.
Electricity had come late to Southam Street. I lived my first five years by gaslight. When ‘electric’ was eventually installed, it was for lighting only. The cooker used gas and the radio had been hard-wired into its own electricity supply by Radio Rentals so that it wasn’t portable enough to be nicked. The romantic notion that we slum-dwellers were considered poor but honest was rather spoiled by the variety of anti-theft devices ranged against us – even the vinegar bottles in the fish-and-chip shops were chained to the counter.
Our rooms had no sockets for three-point plugs and no real need for them anyway, since none of us had washing machines, refrigerators or vacuum cleaners. So the record-player had to be connected to the electricity supply via the light fitting.
This involved Linda standing on a chair and stretching up to remove the light bulb, handing it carefully to me, and then connecting the plug on the Dansette to an adaptor that could be accommodated by the light socket. So our access to the music we craved was available only in daylight hours and therefore severely limited during the winter.
Happily, electricity sockets were provided in the four rooms at Walmer Road that the Rowe Housing Trust had found for us. By 1960 the three of us, Lily, Linda and I, had settled into our new home, where Linda and the Dansette initially had their own room, until my sister announced that she wanted us to have a ‘front room’ like her friends at Fulham County Grammar School. She would convert her front downstairs bedroom to this purpose and share the big double bed upstairs with our mother. As was the case with all my sister’s proclamations, compliance was compulsory.
This was only part of the reason for Linda’s sacrifice. Nights were an ordeal for Lily. All her worries, including her anxiety about the serious heart condition from which she suffered, came looming out of the shadows as the lights went out, and for us the sound of her sobbing had become as much a feature of the hours of darkness as the passage of the moon. Linda knew her presence would be a comfort.
Lily’s token protests failed to mask her delight at this new arrangement. Furnished with Steve’s battered piano and a second-hand three-piece suite upholstered in brown plastic, acquired by Lily from the Salvation Army, the ‘parlour’, as she took to calling it, became home to the Dansette. Freed from its dependence on the light fitting, it took pride of place, dominating the room from its perch on a built-in cupboard. Not long afterwards it was joined by our first television, hired, like the radio, from Radio Rentals.
With Linda adding a second evening job, at a chemist’s in Ladbroke Grove, to the two evenings and weekends she already worked at Berriman’s, the corner shop at the end of our terrace in Walmer Road, at some point in 1960 she managed to save enough to buy our first records. It took a while: the kindly Mr Berriman had initially agreed to employ Linda to enable her to pay off the bill Lily had built up by purchasing items ‘on tick’, so that debt had to be taken care of first. It’s astonishing to think now that my redoubtable sister was still only twelve years old.
Oh, the raw excitement of the day we finally headed for the record shop ‘down the Lane’ (the Portobello Road). We had ten shillings, enough for two singles. Lily had topped up Linda’s kitty with a couple of bob from the fluctuating maintenance payments she’d begun to receive from Steve – after she finally managed to find out where he was living and get a maintenance order made against him.
There was one unfortunate consequence to this largesse. It gave Lily a legitimate say in what we bought. That, surely, can be the only feasible explanation for how two music-savvy kids – kids who could sing ‘Cathy’s Clown’ a cappella in perfect two-part harmony, who loved the big guitar instrumentals of the Ventures and Duane Eddy, who had looked forward for so long to owning records by Neil Sedaka and Johnny Burnette and the other US pop stars we admired – how two such cool, hip kids, with a whole record shop to choose from, could have made the selections we did. Namely ‘Fings Ain’t What They Used T’Be’ by Max Bygraves and ‘Theme from a Summer Place’ by the Percy Faith Orchestra, two recordings that wouldn’t have been out of place in our box of dusty 78s.
I can only hold my hand up to it, blame my mother and move on swiftly to the records that followed, as Linda scraped together enough to cough up for a single every three or four weeks. Wonderful songs by Fats Domino, Freddy Cannon, Connie Francis, Emile Ford and the Checkmates, Jimmy Jones … All were stored in a cardboard shoebox and revered as if they were goblets of gold.
The record that thrilled me above all in 1960 didn’t have the same effect on Linda – regrettably, as she naturally had a veto over our purchases. However, I had a stroke of luck one Saturday afternoon when Lily came home from lunchtime bingo in Shepherd’s Bush having marked off a rare full house. She donated the cash I needed to buy the most exciting record I had heard to date: ‘Shakin’ All Over’ by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. As soon as the necessary 4s 6d (22½p in today’s money) was in my hand I ran as fast as I could to get to Portobello Road before the record shop closed. I knew it was possible for me to cover the distance in ten minutes because that was my personal best for getting to Bevington School, which was about the same distance away.
Having equalled my personal best and acquired my prize, I returned triumphant to play it over and over again. The echo on the vocals, thumping bass and spine-tingling guitar solo were like nothing I’d ever heard before. It quite literally sent ‘shivers down the backbone’. I was amazed to learn that Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were a British band (in fact Johnny Kidd hailed from Willesden, about three miles away, though in those days the world beyond the borders of North Kensington might as well not have existed for all I knew of it). Surely stuff this good only came from across the Atlantic?
My prejudice was evidently shared by the Americans, because while Johnny Kidd and the Pirates are still considered England’s top rock ’n’ roll band before the advent of the Beatles, despite being remembered for just this one song, their UK Number 1 wasn’t a hit outside Europe. Many versions by other artists, however, were. Perhaps their evolving stage act, featuring full pirate costumes, was ahead of its time. Or maybe it was some of the dire material their record company made them commit to vinyl afterwards, unsure, in those early days, of how to capitalise on a rock ’n’ roll hit. Whatever the case, the success of ‘Shakin’ All Over’ was not to be repeated. The seminal influence of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, though, lives on.
If I’d been aware, at ten years old, of the evolution of popular music, I might have appreciated the interesting detail that ‘Shakin’ All Over’ was on HMV, the same label as ‘Tap Your Feet’, recorded ‘With Vocal Refrain’ thirty years earlier. Had I but realised it, I had at my fingertips the means to follow the trail from shellac to vinyl, from 78 to 45 and from Jack Hylton and His Orchestra to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Like a scientist observing a shift in the earth’s formation, I was bearing witness to the birth of a new musical era while still having access to the one before last.