Aidan Smith is delighted by signs of recognition for Lonnie Donegan
Scotland’s skiffle king is being rescued from the footnotes of musical history and Aidan Smith is delighted
The contenders for Scotland’s Album of the Year were announced the other day and it was a chilling moment when your correspondent was forced to concede: “Not only do I not own any of these records, if they’re still called records, but I’ve never heard of half the bands, if indeed they’re still called bands.” Ah, but I know a bit about the man who made it all possible.
Teenage Fanclub are on the list. They wouldn’t be here without the jingle-jangle of the Byrds, who in turn wouldn’t have flown eight miles high if The Beatles hadn’t soared into marmalade skies. And you’ve got to wonder how minimal would have been the impact on the world made by the Fab Four if Lonnie Donegan hadn’t been around to inspire.
First of all, it was Lonnie’s world. He more or less invented pop music in grey, drab, old Britain, as it was then. In the 1950s everyone was still brushing chunks of exploded brickwork from Luftwaffe raids off their dreary clothes and waiting for the Swinging Sixties to happen and for sex to be invented. If the beat boom, and then the rock boom, were the musical equivalents of sex then Donegan provided the foreplay and it was called skiffle.
And get this, kids, Donegan was Scottish. We make a big fuss of the “Scottishness” of JK Rowling who’s really English and the “Scottishness” of Rod Stewart who was born in London and we cheer for all the footballers and rugby players who sing O Flower of Scotland in cockney, Cape Town and Christchurch accents before playing for the land of their great-grannies. But we don’t really call Donegan one of our own even though he hailed from Bridgeton in Glasgow.
Partly this is because skiffle has fallen right off the map and maybe it’s also because Donegan would go on to traduce his image as a pioneer and revolutionary with My Old Man’s a Dustman. The record, although his biggest hit, suggested he wished music-hall was still all the rage and after that it was into the dustbin for him.
But maybe Lonnie’s long period of obscurity and neglect is over. Billy Bragg has written a wonderful social history called Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World and Donegan is the central character. It paints such a vivid picture of duffel-coated youth, waiting on the Gaggia coffee machines to bubble while simultaneously waiting on an idol, that suddenly Lonnie appears as cool as he must have been in 1955 when everyone first heard him yelping Rock Island Line. You’re persuaded that he didn’t just invent pop music but pretty much the teenager, too.
And you think: why did we ever reckon the punk-rockers to be so dangerous and daring and do-ityourself? Our man did all of that first. And he was our man. Maybe in his own way as important as our great Scottish inventors and the chart-toppers of the Enlightenment. If his birthplace is still standing, shouldn’t it be adorned with a blue plaque? Indeed, Bragg’s reappraisal makes you wonder if other Scots entertainers struggling for credibility have been harshly treated by history. Imagine if Gilbert & George, those strange, suited living sculptures, were to announce that they owed it all to Fran and Anna!
Donegan was born in 1931, the son of a Scottish National Orchestra violinist. In London, the 17-yearold Lonnie became a devotee of the 100 Club – future epicentre of the punk insurgence, but at that time a good place to study the chords of the
jazz guitarists – only for National Service to despatch him to Austria. Conscription, writes Bragg, seemed designed to “make you behave just like your parents”. Donovan, though, decided to learn about rootsy American folk and blues through friendships with GIS and returning with a nasal singing style with which he’d blow the crooners away.
For a while he still had to perform under a jazz banner but these guys weren’t squares. As a schoolboy The Who’s future guitarist Pete Townshend witnessed a combo featuring Donegan who attracted a wild following: men so epicly drunk they’d wet themselves and – very protopunk, this – their duffel-coats were accessorised with alarm clocks hung round necks. It was high time that music changed, though, and during the intervals of these gigs, when the boys on brass had a rest, Donegan and his guitar took centrestage for revved-up spirituals. Suddenly the kids had their idol. “I could see the end of my father’s world,” recalled Townshend. “I was going to get this guitar and it was going to be: ‘Bye-bye old timer.’”
Sales of guitars went through the roof, and washboards, the cheap percussion option, went missing from kitchen sinks as 50,000 little skiffle bands mimicked Donegan in church halls. John Lennon had a band, Paul Mccartney was in the Donegan fan club, George Harrison begged money from his parents to see him perform, six nights in a row. The Rolling Stones, the aforementioned Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, David Bowie – they were skifflers, too. Americans were astonished that the lad from Bridgeton could sell their music back to them, with future president Ronald Reagan inquiring: “What is a Lonnie Donegan?”
Skiffle didn’t last, the Rock Island Line choo-choo hit the buffers, and an express carrying Donegan’s disciples with their long hair and the talent to write their own songs sped right past. He’d been directly responsible for the 1960s explosion that would kill his own career. That sounds like a classic Scottish demise but at least he made his decade fun for some.