A roly-poly rocker and the invention of teenagers
HISTORY 1956: THE YEAR THAT CHANGED BRITAIN by Francis Beckett and Tony Russell (Biteback £20)
AS A 13-year-old schoolboy on the Isle of Wight in 1956, everything in Britain seemed to happen in dreary black-and-white slow-motion.
The whole country was wrapped in a stupefying dullness seemingly without end. My parents’ generation, who’d recently fought in World War II, had experienced enough excitement to last a lifetime. Now all they wanted was peace and quiet to enjoy the unrationed meat, sugar and butter which were their rewards.
Here, unlike in America, young people had no identity or culture of their own. At around 16, they changed from children into facsimiles of their fathers and mothers, wearing the same clothes and hairstyles and listening to the same music: either big bands like Ted Heath’s or drippy crooners like Dickie Valentine and Dennis Lotis.
Then came Blackboard Jungle, an American film about delinquent high school children. The soundtrack was a song called Rock Around The Clock, played by Bill Haley & His Comets in a new, bass-slapping beat called rock ’n’ roll. It was aural rocket fuel that launched those formerly undemonstrative boys and girls from their seats to cavort crazily in the aisles.
Francis Beckett and Tony Russell make an indisputable case for 1956 as ‘the year that changed Britain’. For it saw the birth of a new species, the teenager, as a simultaneous social problem and economic force. Largely, but not wholly, through rock ’n’ roll it also ended the deference to all forms of authority that had held sway for centuries.
Despite a string of massive hit singles, Bill Haley was too chubby and avuncular to become the teenagers’ first icon.
That didn’t materialise until the release of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, a melodramatic ballad sung by a gorgeous, glossy young hunk instantly and unanimously dubbed The King.
As Beckett and Russell point out, rock ’n’ roll first took root largely among the working class. Its most visible disciples were not young women but Teddy Boys, a familiar party costume nowadays, but in 1956 associated with gangs wielding razors, brass knuckles and bicycle-chains.
The authors recall the virulent hatred and mockery heaped on rock ’n’ roll music by politicians, head teachers, the clergy and the media, who viewed it solely as a trigger to juvenile delinquency and promiscuity.
They also give proper weight to the parallel craze for skiffle — souped-up American folk music that middleclass teenagers were allowed to like because it had roots in respectable jazz and blues.
Inspired by its biggest star, Lonnie Donegan, boys all over the country became infatuated with guitars and formed skiffle groups of their own.
Among them were John Lennon and Paul McCartney in Liverpool, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in Dartford, Kent, and many other pop legends of the next decade.
Although the mid- Fifties are remembered as an era of peace and security, they felt nothing like it at the time. Europe lived in constant dread of a third World War, this time with Communist Russia using the hydrogen bomb and so inevitably reducing both sides to ruins. Britain’s self-esteem was at a nadir, having, it was said, ‘lost an empire but failed to find a role’.
In the arts, the socalled Angry Young Men, l ed by actor- t urned playwright John Osborne, railed against the rottenness and stagnation of everything. Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back In Anger created a new era of ‘kitchensink’ drama, played out in bedsits rather than drawing-rooms, which revolutionised the theatre every bit as much as rock ’n’ roll did music.
The autumn’s Suez Crisis saw Britain invade Egypt in cahoots with Israel and France in an operation as ill thought-out as our recent adventures in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
At the end of Ryde Pier, I watched the troopships leave Portsmouth, certain that World War III had finally come and wondering if I’d survive it.
No one dreamed then that in the approaching Sixties, stale, threadbare old Britain would burst into vivid colour and creativity, its teenagers would become omnipotent and its name resound triumphantly around the world once more, thanks to those boy skifflers from Liverpool.
0 The number of medals won by Great Britain at the 1956 Winter Olympics