TamTam Books News

Tuesday, May 25, 2004:

Besides Andrew Loog Oldham, another favorite British Rock n' Roll manager of mine is Simon Napier-Bell. He managed The Yardbirds, Wham and Japan among others. There is no doubt in my mind that these 'managers' are truly the architects of rock and more important what I like about 'rock.' Like Oldham, Napier-Bell is a natural writer and great wit. His first book "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," is a magnificent record of early British rock as well as his dealings with David Sylvian and others during the 80's. What a great read and culture!

Down below is an article by Napier-Bell in today's Guardian (which is now my all-time favorite newspaper for news, politics, everything). The website is
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1223531,00.html


Here's the article:

The first teenage dream

First the Teds, then the squares... the notion of the teenager was born 50 years ago. Simon Napier-Bell, later manager of Wham! and celebrated pop author, reveals how he came of age - in every way

Sunday May 23, 2004
The Observer

At the beginning of the Fifties there was no rock'n'roll, the word teenager didn't exist and British pop music was trash. In 1952 I was 13; listening to the Top 20 meant staying awake late and putting the radio under my bedclothes. The Top 20 was broadcast by Radio Luxembourg from 11 till midnight on Sundays, fading in and out from 208 on the medium wave.

Pop wasn't aimed at people under 20; it was aimed at young marrieds. Radio Luexmbourg's Top 20 was sponsored by Horace Batchelor, a man with a droning West Country accent who guaranteed listeners they could win the football pools if they followed his system. I can still hear his voice clearly. But here's the point - Horace Batchelor had picked the Top 20 for his hourly week of advertising, yet the pools were forbidden to anyone under 21. That summed up pop's target audience - 21 to 35.

What the industry was trying to sell was sheet music. People bought the latest pop song and struggled through it on the piano at home. For the industry, records were just an extra. The Top 20 chart was the bestselling sheet music, not the bestselling records.

Mostly the songs were dreadful, the lyrics excruciating. Even so, there was a certain excitement in staying awake till midnight to see which piece of trash got to Number One. Finally, though, when a ghastly song called 'Too Young' got there and stayed for six months (or was it six years?), I decided to redirect my musical talents. My brother had been given a trumpet for his birthday but had given up trying to learn it. I decided I might succeed where he had failed.

I was at Harrow County grammar where I'd arrived two years earlier from a private prep school to be bullied because my accent was too posh. Rather than hang out with friends I went home each day to practise the trumpet.

It was terrible to learn because it had to be done in public. My practice was audible five houses away. To force myself to continue, I needed inspiration and turned to trad jazz, then having a popular upsurge, where the trumpet was a lead instrument.

At the end of my second year at Harrow County, with my trumpet-playing coming along well and my accent now suitably downmarket, my parents decided I should go to a public school. At the end of the summer, I arrived at Bryanston School in Dorset and found myself once again with the wrong accent. This time, I got my vowels readjusted. Very soon I was posh again, and playing third trumpet in the orchestra, but I seemed to get into every bit of trouble that could be got into. The head hated jazz: I hated him, so I found a few friends who shared my taste in music and we formed a jazz band, instantly defining my position at school as at war with authority. Every free afternoon the sound of live jazz blaring out of the practice room in the roof of the school warned any master who dared show any pleasantness towards me that he was being recruited to side against the headmaster. Jazz, I'd discovered, was political.

After a year of this, a huge change happened in the outside world. Safely packed away in a concentration camp of British privilege, we could only read about it in the newspapers. Bill Haley's music was sweeping Britain. Young people were packing cinemas, standing in the aisles, singing and dancing to 'See You Later, Alligator' and 'Rock Around the Clock'. And there was a new word coined to describe them - teenagers - taken from an American advertisement which claimed we were 'living in a teen age'.

In class, the English master discussed it with us. 'What do you think of these teenage people?' he asked. Obviously in his mind they were unconnected with anyone who went to public school.

And we agreed. 'It's a working-class youth rebellion,' one boy replied.

'And what about rock'n'roll?' the master asked, turning to me. 'Is it the music of rebellion? Or of teenage conformity?'

'I don't know sir, I don't like it much.'

'Of course not,' he nodded sagely. 'You prefer Dixieland jazz. Rather old-fashioned of you, don't you think?'

It riled me. From then on I forced myself to listen to modern jazz. To begin with I didn't like it much, but eventually I found myself totally hooked. I found it odd that most people of my age should prefer three minutes of Bill Haley to 15 of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. I saw pop, in its three-minute segments, as trite and mentally untesting. It was a few more years before I realised I was just being snooty.

To keep up with the modern jazz scene in London while I was at school, I ordered Melody Maker from a shop in Blandford. One week it gave me surprising news - Tony Crombie, the ultra-modern jazz drummer at the Flamingo, had formed a rock'n'roll band. It seemed like heresy but it made me listen again to rock'n'roll. I wrote him a letter, addressed to the Flamingo Club and suprisingly he wrote back: 'Try listening to these...' He pointed out the connection between rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues and suggested I listen to Little Walter, Etta James and Big Joe Turner, who had made the original version of 'Shake, Rattle and Roll'.

I listened and was hooked. The next school holidays, Lionel Hampton's big band played at Earls Court. I sold a large chunk of my record collection and used the money for three days of tickets. Here was a band which completely hit the middle ground between jazz and r'n'b. One number rocked, one swung - stylistically it was all over the place, and much the better for it.

When I was 15 I'd been telling my teachers: 'When I leave school I'm going to go to America and play jazz.' The headmaster wrote on my school report: 'Jazz will not make Napier-Bell a good citizen.'

At 16, I decided to ditch my A-levels and leave in a year. My last year I studied almost only music, 20 or so hours a week, though mostly I didn't do the work I was set but sat in my study eating toast and listening to Oscar Peterson.

I was made to take an entrance exam for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. About to escape from public school, the last thing I wanted was to find myself in yet another institution, but my pride wouldn't allow me to play badly . Even so, I was desparate to fail and I got my chance when we were told to arrange a short piece of music. I thought I'd done it rather well and the examiner too seemed quite pleased. 'Why did you do it that way?' he asked about a couple of bars towards the end of it.

I knew he wanted me to explain about the harmonic structure and chord modulation, which I was sure I'd got right, but I replied: 'Because that's how I wanted it to sound.'

'That's not the answer I'm looking for,' he said stiffly.

'Well it's the only one I'll give you,' I replied airily. 'I see no credible reason for an artist to use any other criteria.'

Sure enough I was rejected.

In July 1956, I walked out of Bryanston a free man. The pop scene in London was now fascinating. Rock'n'roll groups appeared on bills along with trad groups and pop singers - even some modern jazz made it into the charts. And on top all this, Elvis burst on to the scene. Here was a guy with as much energy as any of the jazz bands I loved, and his songs were based in blues. Pop was swaying me away from jazz.

And along with the music of Elvis and his copiers, there was a new recognition that young people were a commercial force in society. Teenagers were now more than tolerated, they were marketed to. And the first industry to do it was the record industry.

Elvis and the singers that followed him couldn't be reproduced on the piano via a piece of sheet music. If you wanted 'Heartbreak Hotel' or 'Hound Dog', you had to buy the record. Teenagers totally rejected adults and their silly pieces of sheet music, and started buying records in droves.

To be a rock'n'roll fan was now an essential part of teenage identity, as was wearing different clothes from adults. Fashion-wise there were two principal groups: the teddy boys - drape-style suits, suede shoes with thick spongy soles, coloured shirts and bootlace ties; and the Millets - rollneck sweaters and jeans. The teds were mostly working-class while the Millets were middle-class, but the reasons behind their dress choices were more complex than just their class.

By putting on sharp suits, the teds were rejecting their parents' idea that clothes were of no consequence and money shouldn't be wasted on them. Conversely, the Millets kids - by wearing jeans and sweaters - were rejecting their middle-class parents' idea that one should dress 'properly' on all occasions. Either way, teen buying power, having first created a British record industry, was now giving birth to a British fashion business.

Girls followed the same two trends - teds' girlfriends wore bright colours and leather skirts while the Millets' girls were unisex and wore the same sweaters and jeans as their boyfriends, but pony tails were the standard hairstyle for girls in both groups.

As well as no drugs or alcohol, among teenagers in the Fifties there was no sex - not full-frontal, anyway. The most outrageous girls might offer an occasional hand job, but even that wasn't common. The fear of pregnancy and the general taboo on sexual discussion kept everything under control. As a result - because not having sex with girls was perfectly normal - it took me for ever to find out I was gay. It was only when I realised I wasn't even thinking about it that I realised something was up.

After four years locked away at boarding school, I felt no part of the young people who roamed London wearing strange clothes and chanting rock'n'roll songs. I was wary of becoming a teenager. I decided remaining a loner was a better option so I started working as a semi-pro musician, getting gigs through fixers who called you with a list of impossible-to-get-to gigs. 'You've got a wedding in Kingston at 2pm, another in Bermondsey at 5pm, and then a party in Amersham. Thirty shillings each.'

It was more about fighting the limitations of London's public transport than playing music. Most of the gigs were dreadful, particularly the East End weddings where everyone drank Guinness and did the hokey cokey, and the best man wanted to get up and sing a Bill Haley song or something by Elvis.

Playing this sort of music did nothing to bring me towards liking pop but that all changed when I got a job as a roadie for Johnny Dankworth's big band. Working with these musicians I learnt about music as a business. The way the pop industry worked was far more interesting than the actual music it produced. It felt like a huge club.

Although I wanted to join, I wasn't sure how. I'd told everyone I was going to be a jazz musician, and to change now would be a severe loss of face, so I carried on as I'd planned. On my eighteenth birthday, free of parental control, I did what I'd always said I'd do: I left for America to be a musican.

I couldn't get a work permit for the States, so I emigrated to Canada where I got a job working in a dockside pub in Montreal with a three-piece band, playing requests - mainly currently popular songs. To play them, we had to learn them, so in between listening to jazz, I also listened to a good deal of pop and it wasn't long before I found how good and well-crafted many of these three-minute records were. I was really turned on by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the brilliantly made rock'n'roll records of Bobby Darin and the stunningly arranged songs of Frank Sinatra such as 'Come Fly with Me' and 'Chicago'.

But I wasn't very pleased with myself. I was only playing in a grotty dockland pub, and I wasn't a naturally fluent trumpet player. To keep myself up to the moderate standard I'd reached I had to practise every day for at least two hours. It ate away my freedom; the trumpet was beginning to seem like a a lifetime jail sentence.

I was carrying on just to save face. I'd told everyone I was going to be a great jazz musician, but what I'd really wanted was to be black and funky and cool - to move beautifully and talk jive. Once I'd realised that being an honorary dude was something I could never achieve, I got bored with the trumpet. Besides, I'd now realised I was gay and the world of jazz is as straight as it gets.

One night some gangsters shot up the the dockside pub where we worked and the police decided to close it down. The next day I sold my trumpet and freed myself from five years of daily practice. It was the most fantastic freedom I'd ever felt, almost better than leaving school.

In 1959, I came back to England. I now found myself more interested in pop. It was thriving, both creatively and as a business, and so were the under-twenties. The BBC had started programmes aimed especially at them. Saturday Club was the first, the presenter deliberately speaking with a non-BBC accent to try to cross class barriers.

I had the same problem myself. I'd come back with an American accent. When I met my friends from public school, I couldn't believe the idiotic way they talked, and nor could they believe I was so American. I had to find a new voice that bridged all those gaps - not upper-class nor lower, neither British nor American - a permanently shifting accent to be used on any occasion.

The biggest change in music was that the Top 20 was no longer the bestselling sheet-music, it was the bestselling records. The result was that singers were now more important than the songs they sang, and mostly they were now aiming at a young audience. It was great to see people in their late teens taking over the music business - Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. But I soon learnt that none of these young artists had any control over their lives at all. There was an army of manipulating entrepreneurs behind them, the most famous of whom was Larry Parnes. Latching on to both the teenagers' love of rock'n'roll and the new emphasis on singers, he'd started grooming teenagers for rock'n'roll stardom.

Larry was mid-twenties and middle-class, with a shop somewhere in Essex selling women's fashion. More importantly, he was gay. In the Fifties this was both illegal and socially unacceptable, but for him it formed the basis of his enormous success. Using his ability to spot (and lust after) exactly the sort of young men teenage girls would fancy, he signed up 17-year-old youths and groomed them into stars.

First they were sanitised - had their skin problems dealt with and were taught to wash and clean their teeth - then they were given a thin veneer of anarchy by being re-named with tough-sounding words - Duffy Power, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury. But there was nothing truly anti-establishment about them; they weren't true rock'n'rollers, they were just pop stars - Larry's pretty boys, all living together in one big house.

The idea of organising music rather than playing it appealed to me, and the pop world was wide open. It seemed as though, just by deciding you could do it, you could instantly become a manager, a record producer, a songwriter or a promoter. There were no rules as there had been in the old music business. The new business was aimed at a teenage market and it needed people to run it who were not much older than the customers. Moreover, in contrast to the straightness of the jazz world, and in an era when homosexuality was punished with prison, the pop business was as gay-friendly a place as it was possible to imagine.

Along with others, it wasn't long before I grabbed my chance and joined in.

May 1954: the truth about the teds

On 29 May 1954, Picture Post revealed 'The truth about THE 'TEDDY BOYS' and the Teddy girls'. The reporter found reality didn't match the myth:

We were in a dance-hall in Tottenham - a suburb of London - and the young men we wished to contact were distinctive and obvious. The floppy jackets hung to their knees, the poplin shirts were advertisement white, the trousers were ankle tight, the shoes were good black leather, and the ties were narrow bows. An ugly outfit? That is a matter of opinion; and we were not seeking opinion - only facts.

What do they do during the day or the week?

One is a toy maker, one a glass cutter. Another is an engineer's apprentice, one a die cutter, another an electric welder and, surprisingly, another a National Serviceman on leave - back in his Teddy Boy civilian 'uniform'. (His hair was shorter than the others, but would still have horrified the sergeant-major.)

They were not interested in drink - a beer, perhaps, but more likely a mineral water. They showed unobtrusive good manners and conduct to the girls with whom they danced. The interesting thing to watch on this boy-and-girl relationship was that the boys grouped themselves together, the girls had their own 'pitches' and there was no public display of 'petting' or kissing. The admiration for the female took another direction - 'That's my sister - isn't she a smasher,' or 'I give my Mum £2 10s. a week. She's the best in the world.' There was no talk of Father.

It seemed to me, after several visits to this dance-hall, and watching these young men at their daily work, there was little to criticise - a touch of vanity, perhaps, a gesture of exhibitionism, a release from the methodical, rather dull routine of earning a living. But harm and violence did not seem to be among them; and the manager of the Mecca Dance Hall which we surveyed endorsed this opinion very strongly. 'No trouble at all, these boys,' he kept saying.

But there was something else to be found out, and that was from the police and the courts; for rowdyism among gangs of 'Teddy Boys' is a fact. These cases attract great attention, and acid comments from magistrates.

These are the types which have been over-publicised; and... we feel it is an exaggeration and out of all proportion.

Of course, there are 'Teddy Boys' with evil ways; but there is a vast majority of young men who merely wish to wear Edwardian clothes as a change from boiler suits and factory overalls.

Simon Napier-Bell is the author of Black Vinyl, White Powder (Ebury Press)

Tosh // 11:38 PM
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