Pirate Radio Days

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In the beginning was the word. And the word was A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom! When Rock & Roll exploded on the world in the mid-fifties with the successive thunderclaps of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, it all seemed to come from nowhere. Rock & Roll started, like the universe itself, with a big bang – or perhaps a rapid succession of big bangs, followed by many smaller ones. Or so it seemed.

The Sixties started without a bang. If rock fans expected the new decade to bring fresh excitement, they were in for a big disappointment because we were waist-deep in the soggy middle ground between Rock & Roll and The Beatles, who at this point were about to visit Hamburg for the first time, having just completed a lacklustre tour of Scotland backing Johnny Gentle. In the company of Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power and his biggest acts Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde, Johnny Gentle was a transitory inmate of Larry Parnes‘ “Stable of Stars” – all of whose names were said to have been selected as an indication of their sexual characteristics! Gentle was destined to remain in obscurity.

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1955 saw the rise to prominence of several black vocal groups in the USA. Amongst them were The Orioles (their 1948 hit It’s Too Soon To Know is often cited as the first real doo-wop record), The Crows, The Clovers, The Penguins, The Harptones, The Chords (“Sh-boom, life is but a dream…”), The Spaniels, The Cadillacs, The Five Royales, The Moonglows and many others. Most of these groups relied on a single lead voice with three or four harmony singers providing occasional emphasis and background ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, which led to these groups being termed ‘doo wop’ groups (“doo-wop” was a favourite background chant in many of these songs). All of these groups saw varying degrees of chart activity, but their success was fleeting compared to the masters of the genre – The Drifters from New York and The Platters from Los Angeles.

The mid-90s was a golden era for British music, with several fine bands all coming good at the same time. There was, though, little camaraderie among the practitioners of what came to be called ‘Britpop’ – as evidenced by the 1995 chart war between the top two bands of the genre, the arty pop-oriented middle-class Londoners Blur, and the proletarian Northern rockers Oasis.  

In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites in the US. Hip-hop took over the world and seemed to change shape every few months. Whether the ‘90s was the greatest decade for music is mostly a generational debate, but as you’ll hear, one thing’s for sure: it was never boring.

The story of the ‘girl group’ sound, which reached its commercial and artistic peak in the early and mid-60s, is not just the story of the performers. More than any other style in rock & roll, it was the product of partnerships between the performers, songwriters, and producers. The result was one of the most vital links between the birth of Rock & Roll and the British Invasion, the arrival of which gradually eroded the presence of girl groups on the charts even as it acknowledged enormous debts to the genre. Girl groups were more polished than the early Rock & Roll pioneers, more innocent than the soul music that was originating at the same time, and as firmly planted in Tin Pan Alley as Rhythm & Blues. While it wasn’t the rawest or most artistically expressive pop music, few forms of rock were as affecting, romantic and tuneful.

British Invasion

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Casio keyboards, hairdresser bands, New Wave, New Romantics and New Order. Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid and Hearing Aid: In the eighties, when Thatcher was busy selling England by the pound and caring more about some sheep in the southern Atlantic than ‘her’ people, the youthful reaction was Blitz, Boy George and Marilyn.

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In the beginning was the word. And the word was A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom! When Rock & Roll exploded on the world in the mid-fifties with the successive thunderclaps of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, it all seemed to come from nowhere. Rock & Roll started, like the universe itself, with a big bang – or perhaps a rapid succession of big bangs, followed by many smaller ones. Or so it seemed.

The Sixties started without a bang. If rock fans expected the new decade to bring fresh excitement, they were in for a big disappointment because we were waist-deep in the soggy middle ground between Rock & Roll and The Beatles, who at this point were about to visit Hamburg for the first time, having just completed a lacklustre tour of Scotland backing Johnny Gentle. In the company of Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power and his biggest acts Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde, Johnny Gentle was a transitory inmate of Larry Parnes‘ “Stable of Stars” – all of whose names were said to have been selected as an indication of their sexual characteristics! Gentle was destined to remain in obscurity.

[...]

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1955 saw the rise to prominence of several black vocal groups in the USA. Amongst them were The Orioles (their 1948 hit It’s Too Soon To Know is often cited as the first real doo-wop record), The Crows, The Clovers, The Penguins, The Harptones, The Chords (“Sh-boom, life is but a dream…”), The Spaniels, The Cadillacs, The Five Royales, The Moonglows and many others. Most of these groups relied on a single lead voice with three or four harmony singers providing occasional emphasis and background ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, which led to these groups being termed ‘doo wop’ groups (“doo-wop” was a favourite background chant in many of these songs). All of these groups saw varying degrees of chart activity, but their success was fleeting compared to the masters of the genre – The Drifters from New York and The Platters from Los Angeles.

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In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites in the US. Hip-hop took over the world and seemed to change shape every few months. Whether the ‘90s was the greatest decade for music is mostly a generational debate, but as you’ll hear, one thing’s for sure: it was never boring.

British Invasion

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Casio keyboards, hairdresser bands, New Wave, New Romantics and New Order. Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid and Hearing Aid: In the eighties, when Thatcher was busy selling England by the pound and caring more about some sheep in the southern Atlantic than ‘her’ people, the youthful reaction was Blitz, Boy George and Marilyn.

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In the beginning was the word. And the word was A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom! When Rock & Roll exploded on the world in the mid-fifties with the successive thunderclaps of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, it all seemed to come from nowhere. Rock & Roll started, like the universe itself, with a big bang – or perhaps a rapid succession of big bangs, followed by many smaller ones. Or so it seemed.

The Sixties started without a bang. If rock fans expected the new decade to bring fresh excitement, they were in for a big disappointment because we were waist-deep in the soggy middle ground between Rock & Roll and The Beatles, who at this point were about to visit Hamburg for the first time, having just completed a lacklustre tour of Scotland backing Johnny Gentle. In the company of Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power and his biggest acts Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde, Johnny Gentle was a transitory inmate of Larry Parnes‘ “Stable of Stars” – all of whose names were said to have been selected as an indication of their sexual characteristics! Gentle was destined to remain in obscurity.

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1955 saw the rise to prominence of several black vocal groups in the USA. Amongst them were The Orioles (their 1948 hit It’s Too Soon To Know is often cited as the first real doo-wop record), The Crows, The Clovers, The Penguins, The Harptones, The Chords (“Sh-boom, life is but a dream…”), The Spaniels, The Cadillacs, The Five Royales, The Moonglows and many others. Most of these groups relied on a single lead voice with three or four harmony singers providing occasional emphasis and background ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, which led to these groups being termed ‘doo wop’ groups (“doo-wop” was a favourite background chant in many of these songs). All of these groups saw varying degrees of chart activity, but their success was fleeting compared to the masters of the genre – The Drifters from New York and The Platters from Los Angeles.

In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites in the US. Hip-hop took over the world and seemed to change shape every few months. Whether the ‘90s was the greatest decade for music is mostly a generational debate, but as you’ll hear, one thing’s for sure: it was never boring.

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British Invasion

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Casio keyboards, hairdresser bands, New Wave, New Romantics and New Order. Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid and Hearing Aid: In the eighties, when Thatcher was busy selling England by the pound and caring more about some sheep in the southern Atlantic than ‘her’ people, the youthful reaction was Blitz, Boy George and Marilyn.

Glam Rock laughed in the face of the pompous pseudo-intellectualism that was becoming prevalent in the music world in the early seventies. It declared war on seriousness. You want three day weeks? We want Can The Can. You want Tales From Topographic Oceans? We want Tiger Feet. It is, of course, the sweetest of all ironies that Marc Bolan – the man who it could be argued invented the Glam Rock genre, took himself more seriously than a hundred Topographic Oceans. He probably thought he was a Topographic Ocean . . . Glam picked up on the hippie ideal of showing off and took it to a new level. The hippies blew it when they started to take themselves seriously – always the death knell of any movement – and that was a trap that the Glamsters couldn’t fall into. After all, how could you take yourself seriously when you were wearing metallic blue and silver platform boots with a five-inch heel?

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In the beginning was the word. And the word was A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom! When Rock & Roll exploded on the world in the mid-fifties with the successive thunderclaps of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, it all seemed to come from nowhere. Rock & Roll started, like the universe itself, with a big bang – or perhaps a rapid succession of big bangs, followed by many smaller ones. Or so it seemed.

The Sixties started without a bang. If rock fans expected the new decade to bring fresh excitement, they were in for a big disappointment because we were waist-deep in the soggy middle ground between Rock & Roll and The Beatles, who at this point were about to visit Hamburg for the first time, having just completed a lacklustre tour of Scotland backing Johnny Gentle. In the company of Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power and his biggest acts Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde, Johnny Gentle was a transitory inmate of Larry Parnes‘ “Stable of Stars” – all of whose names were said to have been selected as an indication of their sexual characteristics! Gentle was destined to remain in obscurity.

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Classic Ozploitation and other overlooked Australian cult films from the '70s, '80s and beyond.

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In 1977, merely suggesting that the Queen was a moron (or a potential H Bomb) would get you banned from the charts. By 1999, The Sex Pistols could have performed a duet with Eminem, three strippers and a donkey, and rolled Her Majesty around Trafalgar Square in a barrel, and nobody would have given a damn. Times certainly changed quickly.

1955 saw the rise to prominence of several black vocal groups in the USA. Amongst them were The Orioles (their 1948 hit It’s Too Soon To Know is often cited as the first real doo-wop record), The Crows, The Clovers, The Penguins, The Harptones, The Chords (“Sh-boom, life is but a dream…”), The Spaniels, The Cadillacs, The Five Royales, The Moonglows and many others. Most of these groups relied on a single lead voice with three or four harmony singers providing occasional emphasis and background ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, which led to these groups being termed ‘doo wop’ groups (“doo-wop” was a favourite background chant in many of these songs). All of these groups saw varying degrees of chart activity, but their success was fleeting compared to the masters of the genre – The Drifters from New York and The Platters from Los Angeles.

The mid-90s was a golden era for British music, with several fine bands all coming good at the same time. There was, though, little camaraderie among the practitioners of what came to be called ‘Britpop’ – as evidenced by the 1995 chart war between the top two bands of the genre, the arty pop-oriented middle-class Londoners Blur, and the proletarian Northern rockers Oasis.  

In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites in the US. Hip-hop took over the world and seemed to change shape every few months. Whether the ‘90s was the greatest decade for music is mostly a generational debate, but as you’ll hear, one thing’s for sure: it was never boring.

[...]

Casio keyboards, hairdresser bands, New Wave, New Romantics and New Order. Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid and Hearing Aid: In the eighties, when Thatcher was busy selling England by the pound and caring more about some sheep in the southern Atlantic than ‘her’ people, the youthful reaction was Blitz, Boy George and Marilyn.

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The “New Romantic” movement was a new and distinctive music and fashion genre that sprang up in Britain in the early 80s as a reaction to the anti-fashion of punk. After all, anyone could slap on a T-shirt, write “Destroy” across the front and rip their jeans with a razor. But to look like a New Romantic, you had to really try hard - and spend a lot of time with a hairdresser (most of whom were New Romantics themselves anyway).

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In 1976, there were an estimated 10,000 discos in the US, as opposed to only 1,500 in 1974. Before Saturday Night Fever (1977), disco was very underground and particularly big in both the black and the gay scenes. Disco began to develop its own music and style, incorporating lots of funk (and a little bit of glitter). Most (if not all) of the big disco songs were about sex. The Hustle, a combination of Mambo and Jitterbug steps, was the favoured dance of the day, although The Bump was almost as popular. Cheaper than going to a rock concert and less hassle than a singles bar, the disco was a combination of both – one which also allowed gays, straights, blacks and whites to party together as one under the mirror ball.  

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The Best of British!

A musical movement born in the industrial North of England, the Northern Soul phenomenon grew out of club-goers' passion for black American dance music. It eventually morphed into a craze for rare (and, by extension, very expensive) records and even lionised some quirky artists and even quirkier records.

The Best of British!

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In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites in the US. Hip-hop took over the world and seemed to change shape every few months. Whether the ‘90s was the greatest decade for music is mostly a generational debate, but as you’ll hear, one thing’s for sure: it was never boring.

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The Best of British!

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In 1977, merely suggesting that the Queen was a moron (or a potential H Bomb) would get you banned from the charts. By 1999, The Sex Pistols could have performed a duet with Eminem, three strippers and a donkey, and rolled Her Majesty around Trafalgar Square in a barrel, and nobody would have given a damn. Times certainly changed quickly.

In 1977, merely suggesting that the Queen was a moron (or a potential H Bomb) would get you banned from the charts. By 1999, The Sex Pistols could have performed a duet with Eminem, three strippers and a donkey, and rolled Her Majesty around Trafalgar Square in a barrel, and nobody would have given a damn. Times certainly changed quickly.