On Brandon Hill Post-war culture and the day the music died
Bristolian-in-exile Nick Gilbert has just published a book tracing the history of the city’s culture – from highbrow to lowbrow – since 1945. This is no academic treatise though, but a lively and amusing account, as you’ll see from this extract. And if yo
NICK Gilbert claims that his new book is “the first ever comprehensive history of post-war Bristolian culture”.
On Brandon Hill: Popular Culture in Bristol since WWIItakes us from 1945 to the present and is a history of Bristol’s music, street art, animation, poetry and prose. It also looks at the city’s parts in wider national film, theatre, literary and art history over the last 75 years.
If you’re the sort of person who feels they won’t be interested a history of local “culture” that is meticulous in referencing all its very numerous sources as though it were an academic book, think again.
This isn’t just the story of the Arnolfini or Massive Attack and Banksy. It’s also about Teddy Boys and punks, Saturday nights at The Glen, Acker Bilk and Bristol’s thriving 1960s/70s jazz scene and all the rest. There’s something in here for everyone who ever caught the bus into town on a Saturday night.
The book’s publicity says, it “shows how ‘ordinary’ Bristolians have both enjoyed and contributed to the local arts scene over a period of seven decades, watching their city consistently punch below its weight before finally exploding into national (and international) consciousness at the tail end of the last century.”
And while it is clearly meticulously researched, this is no academic work. Nick Gilbert does not pretend his book is objective. He weaves his own family history into the story, as well as his own local band which was around for a while in the 1980s.
So it’s highbrow and lowbrow all mixed up. It’s opinionated, lively and quite irreverent. There are things here and there which will offend the easily offended, but there also passages which will raise knowing smiles and a few laughs. As Gilbert says, it has “a gurt big dollop of West Country humour.”
The best news of all, though, is that you can download it completely free of charge. Details below.
To give you a flavour of it, here is an extract from the chapter about Bristol in the 1960s:
The Sixties didn’t start well for music lovers. Eddie Cochran died after a car accident on the A4, and Acker Bilk released Summer Set (see what he did?) which entered the charts in January 1960 and stayed there for nineteen weeks, peaking at number five. Which of these two events was the greater tragedy, only history can judge. As
Zhou Enlai is alleged to have said to Richard Nixon, regarding the impact of the French Revolution, or – more likely – the events of May 1968, “it is too soon to tell.” But Acker Bilk’s inexplicable popularity – and the subsequent, related success of Adge Cutler – has probably left the deeper mental scars on Bristolians.
The Bilk bandwagon was rolling everywhere, and Acker needed people around him to do the donkey work, good old summer-set boys who could speak his language and keep him grounded. So it was in 1960 that Adge Cutler became Acker Bilk’s road manager, or roadie, depending on your interpretation. Bilk himself said that Adge “was with me as a roadie for four years, driving, setting up the gear and doing all the usual kind of things roadies do. As a roadie he was rotten but there was never a dull moment with him.”
The two men appeared to observers as “more of a comedy double act than boss and employee” and yet “despite all the camaraderie, the sometime surreal daftness,” Adge was growing impatient. He wanted to be as adored as Acker, and to “give full rein to the creative talents the laughter of small audiences had told him he had.” For now, he had to wait, but his time would come.
Eddie Cochran died in April, in hospital, following a car accident outside Chippenham. He was travelling by taxi from Bristol, where he had just played the Hippodrome. Little more than a year before, his good friends Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had died in a plane crash, a loss that would inspire Don Maclean to write his defining song, American Pie. The deaths of Holly and Valens, along with the Big Bopper, had badly shaken Cochran, and he became convinced that he would also die young. Shortly after the plane crash he recordedThree Stars, a tribute to the dead men. Cochran wanted to give up life on the road and spend more time in the studio. But his financial circumstances forced him to continue performing live, and he accepted the offer to tour the UK in 1960.
Around 11.50pm on the night of April 16th the taxi which was carrying Cochran, his fiancée Sharon Sheeley, tour manager Pat Thompkins and fellow singer Gene Vincent blew a tyre. The driver George Martin (not the Beatles producer) lost control, and the vehicle crashed into a lamppost. Cochran threw himself over Sheeley and was catapulted out of the car when the door flew open. Sheeley, Thompkins, and Vincent survived, although Vincent’s injuries would shorten his career and affect him for the rest of his life. The car and its contents were impounded at the local police station until an inquest could be held, and it is said that a police cadet by the name of David Harman – better known as Dave Dee of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich fame – taught himself to play guitar on Cochran’s Gretsch.
In Chris Petit’s film Radio On (1979) a London factory DJ, who playsSweet Gene Vincent for the workers on the production line, travels to Bristol to investigate the mysterious death of his brother. En route, he stops at a garage where the petrol pump attendant turns out to be Sting, in one of his occasional “acting” roles, as an Eddie Cochran enthusiast. Together they sing Three Steps to Heaven. It is the most affecting scene in the film. The death of Eddie Cochran was, and remains, Bristol’s American Pie moment, the day “the music died”, even if some – Mike Waterson, for example – might say that the music was already mortally wounded by the success of Summer Set, and that one could chart its long, slow demise against the resistible rise of Acker Bilk and Adge Cutler.
Musical stagnation seemed reflected in the all-too visible legacy of the war. Geoff Nichols’ daughter Tessa, known to readers of novels as Tessa Hadley, was born in 1956. She remembers playing among the ubiquitous World War II bomb craters: “The city was full of bombsites: the word in our childish usage was casual, interchangeable with playgrounds. Grown over with grass and purple buddleias, the
bombsites were more peaceful than screaming swings and seesaws.”
The Nichols family lived on Kingsdown Parade, “in a skinny tall Georgian house” which “had an attic, with exhilarating views over the city, which we let to an art student; he absconded, leaving enormous abstract paintings, grey and pink, in lieu of rent.” Tessa was developing her own artistic sensibility: “on my bedside table I kept a postcard of Tissot’s Les Adieux from the city art gallery, and I tried to care about the fountains outside the Victoria Rooms, spouting Tritons and naked nymphs. The city taught me to love its showy beauty, and to be suspicious of it too.”
She describes Bristol in the fifties and sixties as “a more segregated city, in terms of race and class, and not the activist, politicised place it seems to be now. It felt sluggish, prosperous, conservative,” an impression that confirms what Derek Robinson said about Bristol in the 1950s.
Writing about (fictional) university life in Bristol in The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes says that most people “didn’t experience the Sixties until the Seventies, which meant, logically, that most people in the Sixties were still experiencing
the Fifties – or in my case, bits of both decades side by side.”
So, the Sixties – as we want to remember them – hadn’t really got going. And yet the first stirrings of something new were there. A harbinger of things to come could be detected in the play A Man Dies, a collaboration between the Reverend Ernest Marvin, minister of St James’ Presbyterian Church in Lockleaze, and Ewan Hooper, a newly arrived actor at the Old Vic.
They had been “reflecting on how the faith could be communicated in the Swinging Sixties to the teenagers of that era, ones who lived in a typical post-war monochrome housing estate on the edge of Bristol. The one thing that they were caught up in was, of course, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll. We wondered if this medium could be used to communicate something of what the faith was about.”
The two came up with the idea of a modern passion play in which actors would wear “normal” clothes and play contemporary music, “years before the term rock opera was even coined and before either Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell had been written.”
Marvin is quoted as saying, somewhat un-Christianly, that he has “reason to believe Lloyd Web
ber got his idea from reading about our more modest effort – think of the royalties we might have been entitled to!” He and Hooper wrote the script and lyrics for A Man Dies, the music being composed by members of two bands from the youth club. The first production played to capacity audiences at St James’ for a week and became a minor cause celebre, with calls from MPs to ban it.
At the time, it was illegal to portray Jesus on stage in a public performance but “we got round this issue by forming ourselves into a private company. If people wished to see the play they had to join the company first and then buy their tickets. The logistics of this added enormously to our problems, but we coped.”
After that, Marvin and Hooper “would have been only too pleased to have forgotten about it all together but we were not allowed to do so.” They were “surprised and overwhelmed by the insistence on the part of the youngsters themselves, as well as by those who had seen it, that it should be repeated.” Accordingly, they booked the Colston Hall for three nights the following Easter. For this production, and all subsequent productions, local singer Valerie Mountain joined the cast. She had been a member of The Cliff Adams Singers, and her powerful, expressive voice is one of the highlights of the accompanying LP, recorded prior to the play’s Albert Hall production in 1964.
Representatives from ABC Television who were at the Colston Hall liked what they saw, and asked Marvin and Hooper to come up with a forty-five-minute adaptation they could broadcast on Easter Sunday. The play was debated in the House of Commons, but despite the objections of five MPs, finally got the go-ahead one hour before broadcast.
Cambridge graduate Anthony “A.C.H.” Smith moved to Bristol to work on The Evening Post when a job with the publisher William Collins fell through. “I was probably the only sub(editor) with a degree,” says Smith, somewhat apologetically, in his engaging memoir, Wordsmith.
He was sent to review the filmBattle Inferno. “The only other reviewer at the press view was a greasy-haired, loose-lipped lout in a brown suit from the Evening World, called Tom Stoppard. We’d never met, and over a glass of sweetish sherry in the Embassy Cinema’s office I formed no desire to meet him again. I went back and wrote that the film wasn’t much cop, then waited to see what the World review would say. Just as I thought: he rated it. Provincial jerk.”
Stoppard had been born Tomáš Straussler in Czechoslovakia, the son of non-observant Jews. When the Nazis invaded, the family fled first to Singapore and then to Australia, although Stoppard’s father remained behind and died under Japanese occupation. Australia was soon on the Japanese radar, so Tomas and family were evacuated again, to India, where their mother married an army major, Kenneth
Stoppard. Tom went to school in England and began work as a journalist at the age of seventeen. In 1958 the Bristol Evening World offered him the job of feature writer, columnist and drama critic.
In December 1960, the Editorial Director of the Bristol United Press, Richard Hawkins, decided to introduce a weekly arts page in the Western Daily Press, and invited A.C.H. Smith to edit it. The bad news was that he wanted Smith to give plenty of work to Stoppard. When Stoppard’s first piece, about the French New Wave, arrived it was “knowledgeable, perceptive and beautifully written. I didn’t change a word. I told him that I’d had him down as a greasy-haired lout, and he replied that he’d figured me as a poncey graduate” Smith and Stoppard ran the arts page together until February ’63, when the bullish editor Eric Price, who had never liked the arts page or Smith, finally killed it off.
Smith and Stoppard were aggressive propagandists for the arts and art funding. One of Smith and Stoppard’s preoccupations – pace Richard Hoggart and The Uses of Literacy – was the very meaning of the word culture, while “another, linked to that, was a desire, perhaps quixotic, to democratize the enjoyment of art, to use a popular newspaper to spread the idea that the arts offered imaginative pleasure to anybody who refused to be cowed by the philistine sneer.”
In one issue, the two young idealists “surveyed the city’s meagre provision for the arts (which entailed less outlay than was spent on the upkeep of the Lord Mayor’s ceremonial horses) and proposed the formation of a Bristol Arts Trust. It was referred to the finance committee for implementation. They dug a hole and buried it.”
Nick Gilbert is available for free download at https://tinyurl.com/ y7c94wqe
If this link fails, go to www. smashwords.com and search for “On Brandon Hill”