British Rock: The First Wave (Archive Film Productions, BBC, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 28) at 8:45 I ran an interesting documentary from the BBC in 1985 called British Rock: The First Wave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htnD55VAbH4), about the so-called “British Invasion” that dominated first Britain’s and then the world’s popular music from 1962 to 1966. It was co-directed by Patrick Montgomery and Pamela Page, and narrated by Michael York. Of course it began with the Beatles – with a British TV clip of them performing “She Loves You” – though it deserves credit for acknowledging the importance of London-based as well as Liverpool-based groups. It’s basically a “print the legend” version of the history of rock ‘n’ roll in both Britain and the U.S., though I give Montgomery and Page a lot of credit for presenting the actual music, if not in note-complete performances of whole songs, at least in snippets long enough to give a good account of the overall flavor and quality of the music. After the opening with the Beatles, the show flashes back to the birth of rock in the U.S. with Bill Haley and His Comets coming to Britain and performing “Rock Around the Clock” in the context of a standard variety show. It then goes on to document the culture shock by which this new American music (actually invented by Black musicians and then adopted by whites) entered the U.K.’s musical marketplace and the hapless attempts of established British acts to adapt to it. It shows this through a montage sequence of three songs performed by British artists with little or no sense of rock, including a pair of blonde white women singers vainly trying to cover Little Richard’s “Rip It Up” and making Pat Boone sound like an icon of soul by comparison. The show then gives a potted version of the real origins of British rock via “skiffle,” the music adapted from U.S. jug bands.

Skiffle really started as an offshoot of the “trad” boom; “trad,” short for “traditional” and meaning Dixieland jazz, was a huge fad in Britain in the early 1950’s. During trad performances, the rhythm section would play a few numbers alone to give the horn players a chance to rest, and one of these songs, Lonnie Donegan’s cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” became a huge hit in the U.K. and enough of one in the U.S. that Stan Freberg recorded a parody of it in which a hapless record producer asks the singer during his interminable narrative at the start, “Are you going to sing this song, or read it, or what?” (U.S. comedians doing parodies of folk music often ridiculed the endless explanations folk singers routinely gave of the songs they were about to sing, including Andy Griffith’s marvelous introduction of himself as “not a song-singer but a song-explainer.”) There’s a marvelous clip of Donegan performing “Rock Island Line” and doing so far more infectiously than he did on his record, an album track on a release by his then-employer, Dixieland trombonist Chris Barber. Then there’s a montage of three different versions of the song “Twist and Shout”: the original American R&B hit by the Isley Brothers (though they weren’t the first group to play the song: another Black group, The Top Notes, were), an unnamed British group and The Beatles. The show gives a glancing reference to the difficulties Beatles manager Brian Epstein (who’s shown here in an archival clip) had in getting The Beatles a U.K. recording contract, but it doesn’t go into details – though later they include a clip of a cover of The Contours’ early-Motown hit “Do You Love Me?” by Brian Poole and The Tremeloes, which famously got the contract from Decca Records that the Beatles auditioned for and were turned down. (Dick Rowe, the executive in charge of pop music for Decca, said it was simply because the Tremeloes were a London band – actually from the suburb of Dagenham – and he thought they’d be easier to work with than a band from Liverpool.)

Following the Beatles’ success their manager, Brian Epstein, created a pipeline to “break” other Liverpool bands, though the only one that had enduring success besides the Beatles was Gerry and the Pacemakers. Epstein’s formula included getting them a record contract with the executive who’d finally signed The Beatles – George Martin at EMI’s low-prestige label, Parlophone – and often outfitting them with a song by John Lennon and/or Paul McCartney. But for Gerry’s first record he recorded “How Do You Do It?,” a pop song by professional songwriter Mitch Murray that George Martin had first given to The Beatles. George Martin had signed The Beatles even though, as he frankly admitted, “I didn’t think their songs were any good.” He figured he’d need to get them professionally written material to keep them successful – and he went on thinking that until The Beatles auditioned “Please Please Me,” which John Lennon had originally written as a Roy Orbison-style rock ballad. Martin had rejected that version, but when Lennon sped it up Martin was knocked out and thought maybe, just maybe, The Beatles could build long-term career success on their originals. (They did.) Gerry Marsden’s recording of “How Do You Do It?” was actually considerably better than The Beatles’ version; while The Beatles had played it as rather dull straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll, Gerry gave the song a ragtime and swing feel that put it over and made him and The Pacemakers the second Liverpool band to have a British number one hit. Gerry and the Pacemakers are actually represented here by a later record, “It’s Gonna Be All Right.” Then the show detailed groups that came from other parts of England, including The Hollies from Manchester (The Hollies named themselves after American rock legend Buddy Holly, and The Beatles also got their name from Holly; it was the name of Holly’s backup band, The Crickets, that gave John Lennon the idea of naming his own band after an insect.) The Hollies are represented here by a cover of “Just One Look” by African-American woman singer Doris Troy, and I joked that when she heard it she probably thought, “It was bad enough when we had to worry about white Americans stealing our songs, but white Brits?”

Then the show acknowledged the harder-edged more blues-based bands from London, notably The Rolling Stones, whom they said were graduates of art college and therefore higher on the British social pecking order than The Beatles and the other Liverpool bands (though John Lennon had gone to art college and had met the Beatles’ original bassist, Stu Suttcliffe, there). The show introduces the Stones via a sound clip of Muddy Waters playing “I Just Want to Make Love to You” followed by a TV version of the Stones covering it, and it mentions that the first time the Stones made it to the British charts was with a version of The Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man.” Actually the Stones recorded that song before the Beatles did; they got it via Andrew Loog Oldham, who’d been a member of Brian Epstein’s organization and still had contacts with The Beatles. He asked them if they had any songs that would be suitable for the Stones, and John Lennon replied, “Yes, we’ve got a few songs that are more like their image than ours.” Lennon in particular was notoriously bitter about the way the Rolling Stones built themselves up as the bad boys of British rock in comparison to the cute, cuddly and “safe” Beatles. In his 1970 Rolling Stone interview he said that in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany (where The Beatles served a grueling apprenticeship that turned them from a barely acceptable band into the greatest rock group of all time) they’d worn leather suits and duck’s-ass haircuts and had been at least as bad-ass as the Stones ever were. The show features a clip of the Stones doing “I Wanna Be Your Man” (and I still think their version is much better than the Beatles’, thanks largely due to Mick Jagger’s more impassioned vocal than Ringo Starr’s). After brief mentions of two more British bands, The Animals (doing their star-making hit “House of the Rising Sun”) and The Kinks (doing “All Day and All of the Night”), a London-based band originally called The Ravens, the show then shifted its attentions to the United States.

In 1964 American rock ‘n’ roll had largely lost its edge; a terrible combination of death (Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, Eddie Cochran), near-death (Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent), scandal (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis), religious conversion (Little Richard) and the draft (Elvis Presley) had depleted the ranks of the original American rockers and left the field open to wimps like Frankie Avalon and Fabian. About the only enduring artists making rock hits in the U.S. in the early 1960’s were Ricky Nelson, Del Shannon, The Four Seasons and The Beach Boys. This show features a TV clip of Chubby Checker doing a song I didn’t recognize but which sounded like it was called “Lose Your Inhibitions Twist” – oddly Checker was the only Black performer actually shown on this program, though The Isley Brothers and Muddy Waters are heard via sound clips of songs British Invasion bands covered – and argued that the British bands basically gave rock ‘n’ roll back to the country that had invented it. There’s a clip of some women fans of The Beatles singing “We Love You, Beatles” (a jingle adapted from the musical Bye, Bye, Birdie, about an Elvis-like rocker who gets drafted) before The Beatles themselves appear on American TV with “I Saw Her Standing There.” Then the show depicts other British bands that made it across the Atlantic: Gerry and the Pacemakers with “Ferry Cross the Mersey” (the Mersey River, the main one that runs through Liverpool); Freddie and the Dreamers with “I’m Telling You Now” (the lead singer of Freddie and the Dreamers so self-consciously modeled himself on Buddy Holly that he wore the exact same glasses frames); Manfred Mann with “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy”; the Rolling Stones with their cover of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around”; and The Animals with “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Manfred Mann was a white South African who emigrated to London with his friend and musical partner, drummer Mike Hugg – their first band was called the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers – and he was particularly upset at the assumption in the U.S. that all British rockers were from Liverpool. When his first U.S. tour was billed as The Mersey Sound of 1964 Show Mann protested, “I’ve been to Liverpool exactly once, and that was when we were asked to play there,” and when Mann was asked how things were in Liverpool, he said, “Well, there is a place called London, too!”

As the British rock scene evolved, it broke not only pop-style bands like Herman’s Hermits (represented here by “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” in a live clip in which their lead singer, Peter Noone, gets the audience to sing the song themselves in a ritual that’s since become standard) but also harder-edged bands like the Spencer Davis Group (not shown here but heard in their early record of “I’m a Man,” written by their singer and keyboard player, Stevie Winwood, but sounding very much like Muddy Waters’ song of the same name), The Who (shown here doing their first hit, “I Can’t Explain,” as well as a later clip from the 1967 film Monterey Pop doing their reputation-making song, “My Generation,” and ending with both guitarist Pete Townshend and drummer Keith Moon destroying their instruments on stage, a gimmick derided by folk-rock singer John Hiatt in his song “Perfectly Good Guitar”) and The Yardbirds (shown here doing “Heart Full of Soul”; they launched the careers of ace guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, but they’re not as well known as they should be mainly because of their lead singer, serviceable but not great Keith Relf – one of their last records was an early version of Page’s “Dazed and Confused,” which doesn’t come off because Relf’s voice just isn’t right for the song, whereas Robert Plant’s was when Page revived it for the first Led Zeppelin album). By 1966 rock was making a comeback in the United States and American bands were beginning to compete with the British ones. The show particularly emphasizes the San Francisco psychedelic scene, though it only represents it with a snatch of the Monterey Pop performance of the instrumental “Section 43” by the Berkeley-based band Country Joe and the Fish. Then the focus returns to Britain with an explosive clip of “Tales of Brave Ulysses” by Cream, and after the Monterey Pop clip of The Who’s “My Generation” the show closes with a non-visual outro of “She’s Not There” by The Zombies.

Of course the show also mentions the attempt by the Columbia movie studio to create their own imitation of The Beatles, The Monkees. They held open auditions for people responding to a classified ad called “Madness!” and got a surprisingly good group together for a band of professional actors who would play a rock band on TV. Though heavily indebted to The Beatles in general and their 1965 film Help! in particular, the TV show The Monkees had a sort of free-wheeling exuberance – John Lennon said he never missed an episode – and the albums they made, especially after the first two when The Monkees insisted they be allowed to play their own instruments on the records instead of just singing to pre-recorded backings by studio musicians produced by Don Kirschner, were quite capable and credible pop-rock for the late 1960’s. British Rock: The First Wave was a surprisingly well-done look at the British rock scene in the mid-1960’s and how it conquered the world, though it was made at a fraught time in the history of music as the punk-rock movement (which largely defined itself in opposition to the peace-and-love ideals professed by the 1960’s bands, even though The Beatles in general and John Lennon in particular recorded quite a few songs that anticipated punk: “Good Morning, Good Morning” from Sgt. Pepper and his solo songs “I Found Out,” “Well, Well, Well,” “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier” and “Gimme Some Truth”) had come and gone by 1985 and the British rock scene then was dominated by vaguely punk-ish synth-pop.

Much later in the evening Charles and I watched a British TV program from 1965 called Blackpool Night Out featuring The Beatles in a variety-show appearance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru4yNVr_ouA) where they’re introduced by two comedians showing the British “goon humor” tradition from which Monty Python emerged. The Beatles perform “I Feel Fine,” “I’m Down” (on which John Lennon plays mellotron, an early synthesizer the Beatles used extensively; it’s about the only song they ever played on stage where John, Paul or George played an instrument other than guitar or bass guitar), “Act Naturally” (their Buck Owens country cover in which Ringo introduces his own vocal, admits that he’s going to sing out of tune, and blessedly pronounces the “t” in “often” twice), “Ticket to Ride” (in a much tighter version than the one The Beatles played in their fourth and last Ed Sullivan Show appearance a month later), “Yesterday” (a real surprise because Paul played it solo, with just himself on vocal and acoustic guitar and the Blackpool Night Out studio orchestra supplying the string parts; in other performances The Beatles reworked “Yesterday” into a rock ballad and all four participated, and if you want to hear this version look up the 1966 concert films from the Circus Krone in Munich, Germany and the Budokan Arena in Tokyo, Japan), and a scorching version of “Help!” The sound mix on this clip blessedly gives us little of the insensate audience screaming that usually accompanied The Beatles’ live performances (which Paul McCartney later compared to trying to perform a rock show in front of a 747 being warmed up for takeoff), and the show closed with a gang of go-go dancers cavorting to the live band’s instrumental version of the Beatles’ song “Can’t Buy Me Love” (which The Beatles performed on British Rock: The First Wave). It’s a welcome reminder that The Beatles revolutionized the world of show business but did so from the old order’s own redoubts!