Britain's Early Pop Music
De BISAWiki
A new book has not too long ago been published in Britain recalling the world of pop music in the dawn in the Swinging Sixties. Truly written 50 years ago, and 1st published in 1961, it does not have the benefit of hindsight. It is a completely authentic in representing views that had been present in Britain in the end in the 1950s.
A number of the words (like gay which did not then imply homosexual) appear outdated -- or politically incorrect -- 50 years later. Because the author I have preserved them to provide the flavour in the dawn in the Swinging Sixties.
In Britain within the 1950s, a new generation was beginning to emerge a decade after the horrors and deprivation in the Second Globe War.
It might have already been since we had been kids born throughout the war that we felt distinct from our elder brothers and sisters. We currently had a new name that distinguished us from earlier young generations: we had been Teenagers.
Even though the word teen to describe a person aged in between 13 and 19 had been around because the 17th century, and teenhood because the late 19th century, teenager was extremely a lot a modern, post war word and most likely like the pop music, the large beat that drove us an import from the USA.
Pop music seemed to promise liberation and, in typical with the teenagers of my day, I was enthralled by the beat in the music of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Tommy Steele. The songs sparked a rebellion against the old ballroom music -- and also the old conventions.
The teenage rebellion that drove us then was a reaction against parents who had been remote and against those grey, post war years. Beat music was ours, and it fired us having a determination to yield to our desires and express ourselves.
If that sounds like the character played by James Dean within the movie Rebel Without a Trigger thats no surprise. James Dean was one of the first young idols in the teenage generation. We felt an affinity with him and also the character he portrayed. His spectacular death in a speeding Porsche in 1955 only added to the poignancy of getting him as a role model.
It was within the cinema that I and many of my generation came face to face with the future, and it was extremely disturbing indeed. The movie was Blackboard Jungle. It was the first time we had ever heard rock 'n' roll: the soundtrack was Bill Haley and also the Comets singing, Rock Around the Clock.
For a teenager in England within the mid-1950s, raised on radio programmes like the Sunday lunchtime Family Favourites and also the every day morning programme Music While you Function, the blast of Bill Haleys fundamental beat was an anthem of liberation from the conventions of post-war Britain.
The film showed what we had been supposed to complete to the new music. Youngsters had been seen bopping in their schoolroom to a background of a honking saxophone along with a reedy voice exhorting them to One oclock, two oclock, three oclock, rock! If school had been only like that!
Mine wasn't, and when finally the GCE O Level exams came and went, so did I. I left school, age 16, before term finished and celebrated my liberty in a pub having a girl, drinking rum-and-black (rum-and-blackcurrant -- the drink of choice for aspiring teenage beat rebels then). The next day, wracked with the remorse of my 1st hangover, I lay in bed and decided I wanted to be a poet.
Thats what I became, before I set out to record in print the dawn in the Swinging Sixties in my book The Large Beat Scene .
