A great deal of what follows is true
Track 1
On Saturday 6 July 1957, the unexpectedly hot weather saw the British public shed a little of their customary reserve and head for the seaside, or – failing that – the nearest park. The Liverpool Echo that evening reported that ‘Corporation buses bound for Woolton, Aigburth Vale, and other outlying districts of the city were full, many people carrying picnic hampers.’
Some of those Woolton-bound picnickers may have settled down with their sandwiches and lemonade behind St Peter’s Church, where the annual fête (tickets 2/-, refreshments at moderate prices) was taking place. Fate and fête collided in the afternoon sunshine and a musical legend was born.
A sixteen-year-old lad named John, wearing a checked T-shirt and black jeans, led his strictly amateur band, the Quarry Men Skiffle Group, through their paces on the makeshift stage. Afterwards he struck up a conversation with another local lad named Paul. He recalled the afternoon over twenty-three years later, just hours before his senseless murder in the streets of New York:
A mutual friend brought him to see my group. And we met and talked after the show and I saw he had talent and he was playing guitar backstage and doing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ by Eddie Cochran and I turned to him right then on first meeting and said do you want to join the group and he said um hmm you know hmm de hmm and I think he said yes the next day as I recall it.
They plodded on for a couple of years, learning the hits of the time – Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, the US discs brought over by older relatives and friends in the Merchant Navy – as well as a smattering of folk songs and standards to keep their parents happy.
Then they started writing songs of their own – and found (to their amazement) that people liked them. After a while, audiences started to prefer these original compositions to the covers they’d started out playing. There were lots of other lads in the city doing the same thing, but it was John and Paul’s group that became really big before any of the others. They were even able to sell songs to other bands who were starting out. People in far-off towns heard their music on the radio and were inspired by what they heard.
Track 2
On 17 October 1961, on platform 2 of Dartford Station in Kent, two old schoolfriends met by chance. Mike was on his way to the London School of Economics; Keith was on his way to Sidcup Art College. They’d been divided – educationally and socially – by the 11-plus examination, and were reconnected by the objects they were holding: each had a Chuck Berry record under his arm.
Less than six months later, the reunited friends met a third lad named Brian, at a club in Ealing in Middlesex. Brian, originally from Cheltenham, had recently had a letter published in Disc, praising the American blues scene which the other boys so admired. They decided to try and form a band, playing the style of music they loved so much. The first part was easy, because all the songs had already been written for them by Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and the rest. Then two lads from Liverpool offered to lend them a song they’d written, so that the boys could bring it out as a record.
Track 3
In the autumn of 1962, two young middle-class artists from Cambridge had just embarked on a two-year course at the city’s technical college. One day, a new record came over the radio, by a northern English group neither of the boys had heard of. The more musically minded of the pair, named Roger, grabbed his mate by the shoulder and said, ‘Storm, man, this is it!’
It took less than five years for young Roger Barrett to get together with some more schoolmates and form a band. Storm Thorgerson took photos and his design team worked on the band’s visuals. The band went on to become of the world’s biggest-selling and most acclaimed rock acts over its forty-odd year career, only winding up when one of the founder members passed away.
Track 4
When I was about twelve years old, the BBC broadcast a recorded concert by a chap named Mike Oldfield. It was a name I knew, primarily because Mr Oldfield had been commissioned to record an updated version of the Blue Peter TV show theme. The programme had followed the recording process from start to finish, showing Mr Oldfield laying down each instrumental track in turn, building up the layers of the final piece. That sparked my interest in electronic music, studio technology, and the whole business of playing instruments. Listening to the BBC’s broadcast of Incantations was therefore the next logical step.
Five years later I’d followed the threads of Mr Oldfield’s musical career, and those of his collaborators, into a complex web woven by some of Britain’s most inventive, experimental and interesting people. The survivors keep on writing, recording, occasionally performing, and people keep on buying their records. Few, if any, have ever had a hit single in the UK.
The remixed version
On Saturday 6 July 1957, the unexpectedly hot weather saw the British public shed a little of their customary reserve and head for the seaside, or – failing that – the nearest park. The Liverpool Echo that evening reported that ‘Corporation buses bound for Woolton, Aigburth Vale, and other outlying districts of the city were full, many people carrying picnic hampers.’ Some of those Woolton-bound picnickers may have settled down with their sandwiches and lemonade behind St Peter’s Church, where the annual fête (tickets 2/-, refreshments at moderate prices) was taking place.
A sixteen-year-old lad named John, wearing a checked T-shirt and black jeans, led his strictly amateur band, the Quarry Men Skiffle Group, through their paces on the makeshift stage. Afterwards he struck up a conversation with another local lad named Paul. Soon, John and Paul started a rock’n’roll band together with some pals.
And they plodded on for a couple of years, learning the rock ’n’ roll hits of the time – Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, the US songs brought over by relatives and friends in the Merchant Navy – as well as a smattering of folk songs and easy listening standards to keep their parents happy. One day, they suddenly realised that hardly anybody was coming to see them any more. Without even realising it, they’d exhausted their repertoire of familiar, catchy, easy-to-hum danceable numbers. They had written some strong, catchy, easy-to-hum, danceable numbers of their own, of course. But no one would give them a chance to play them.
‘Play “Twenty Flight Rock”!’ the crowd would scream after the first verse; or else, ‘Play “Roll Over Beethoven”!’; or else, ‘Play “Peggy Sue”!’
And so the four young boys decided to concentrate on their college work, or just went back to their day jobs.
Meanwhile, in London, Mike, Keith and Brian plodded on for a while, and then gave up because they’d played all the songs they liked. If they tried to play one of their own compositions, the audience would howl them down.
‘Play “Come On”!’, they would shout, or else ‘Play “Little Red Rooster”!’
Mike studied hard at the LSE and eventually became a teacher, where his extravagant classroom antics were only witnessed by a few dozen teenagers at a time. He never did take to ‘Mick’ as a nickname. Keith and Brian got day jobs too. Roger Barrett became a painter, while his three mates became architects. Mike Oldfield continued to play guitar in folk clubs and picked up some session work now and again. They all lived unhappily ever after, because this parallel existence of middle-class conformity didn’t suit any of them at all.
Go back to the beginning of the timeline and follow this other branch – the one where John Lennon and Paul McCartney decided to take an early bath – to its very end. Would Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones have decided to keep their band together, if Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ hadn’t been available for them to record as an early single? What (if anything) would young Syd Barrett have been turned on by, if ‘Love Me Do’ hadn’t come on the radio? What would have inspired Mike Oldfield to turn away from folk music and move into a rock idiom? Would there even have been a rock idiom without the famous meeting between the Beatles and Bob Dylan?
Or would you have grown up in a world of show tunes and schmaltzy ballads, of novelty songs and cowboy songs, of Cliff Richard songs and Tommy Steele songs and Perry Como songs and Jim Reeves songs. For ever.
Following this Path of Least Resistance means that we’d have ended up more or less where we are anyway, six decades on: with a chart full of shitty love songs, written by a total pool of two or three people and sung by a host of manufactured acts who will be forgotten in a few months’ time, while people like Simon Cowell make all the money out of the suckers who claim to ‘love music’ but who actually care nothing for it. Not one jot!
They just swallow the crap that comes out of the radio, without ever questioning it or wondering if there’s something different on the other channels. They never buy a record or go to a real gig. They never read the music papers to find out more about the rest of the scene – and yet they’ll tell anyone who listens that they ‘love music’. Most people who claim to ‘love Indian food’ never venture beyond chicken tikka masala. It’s the same with music.
Every sizeable town has at least one place – usually a large pub or club of some description – catering for this audience. You can see the endless parade of ‘top quality artists’ filing through their doors every weekend. Only a small minority of them ever pick up a musical instrument; the karaoke gear they bring with them does all the heavy lifting. They sing the same set as everybody else (not necessarily in the right order) and walk away with 150 notes in their arse pocket. Ask them why, and this is what they’ll tell you: ‘We only play the “crowd pleasers” because that’s people want to hear. Nobody wants to hear original songs, or songs they don’t know.’
It’s exactly what John Lennon didn’t say to Paul McCartney on 6 July 1957.
I ask you to imagine all this, because your own musical adventure never even began, because British popular music was stillborn behind St Peter’s Church in Woolton, when Paul told John, ‘You’ll never get anywhere trying to write your own songs. It isn’t what people what to hear.’
You grew up in a world of show tunes and schmaltzy ballads, of novelty songs and cover versions, of Ed Sheeran tunes and Diane Warren tunes and Andrew Lloyd-Webber tunes. For ever.
Is that really what you want?
Or do you want to stand up and be counted?
If your musical tastes are a bit more discerning than The X Factor and the John Lewis Xmas ads, we know just the place for you. We have somewhere in Aberdare where you can come without having to endure cries of ‘Play “The Crowd Pleasing One”!’, or ‘Play “The One That Got to Number 1”!’, or ‘Play “Something We Know”!’. Because simply playing those will get you nowhere, and it never would have. If you can’t play an instrument yourself, don’t worry – we know plenty of people who can. If you can play a bit, but don’t know where to go next, come down and have a knock. Another fine innovator and musical elder statesman, who has been around for fifty years without ever troubling the Official Charts Company or its predecessors, once said: ‘Practising for fifteen hours a day only makes you very good at practising. Playing makes you good at playing.’
A word of warning: you probably won’t enjoy everything you hear after you walk through the doors. Good! If you slavishly like everything you hear, without question or criticism, you’re in the core demographic for Heart FM. There’s a ‘top quality artiste’ in the village club on Saturday night. Go and listen to that crap instead. You deserve each other.
If, on the other hand, you’d like to have your musical prejudices challenged, your horizons broadened, and your circle of friends expanded, what are you waiting for? Thirty-odd years ago, a chance afternoon meeting with a friend led me into a pub full of musicians, of all tastes and ages. In my heart, I never really left.
Jac’s can do that for you. What are you waiting for?
Jac's Music Venue, Aberdare 