Britain's Early Pop Music

A new book has not too long ago been published in Britain recalling the world of pop music in the dawn in the Swinging Sixties. Truly written 50 years ago, and 1st published in 1961, it does not have the benefit of hindsight. It is a completely authentic in representing views that had been present in Britain in the end in the 1950s.

A number of the words (like gay which did not then imply homosexual) appear outdated -- or politically incorrect -- 50 years later. Because the author I have preserved them to provide the flavour in the dawn in the Swinging Sixties.

In Britain within the 1950s, a new generation was beginning to emerge a decade after the horrors and deprivation in the Second Globe War.

It might have already been since we had been kids born throughout the war that we felt distinct from our elder brothers and sisters. We currently had a new name that distinguished us from earlier young generations: we had been Teenagers.

Even though the word teen to describe a person aged in between 13 and 19 had been about given that the 17th century, and teenhood given that the late 19th century, teenager was really significantly a contemporary, post war word and almost certainly such as the pop music, the huge beat that drove us  an import in the USA.

Pop music seemed to promise liberation and, in frequent using the teenagers of my day, I was enthralled by the beat in the music of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Tommy Steele. The songs sparked a rebellion against the old ballroom music -- as well as the old conventions.

The teenage rebellion that drove us then was a reaction against mother and father who had been remote and against these grey, post war years. Beat music was ours, and it fired us using a determination to yield to our desires and express ourselves.

If that sounds like the character played by James Dean within the movie Rebel Without a Result in thats no surprise. James Dean was certainly one of the very first young idols in the teenage generation. We felt an affinity with him as well as the character he portrayed. His magnificent death inside a speeding Porsche  in 1955 only additional towards the poignancy of possessing him like a function model.

It was within the cinema that I and many of my generation came face to face using the future, and it was really disturbing indeed. The movie was Blackboard Jungle. It was the very first time we had ever heard rock 'n' roll: the soundtrack was Bill Haley  as well as the Comets singing, Rock Across the Clock.

To get a teenager in England within the mid-1950s, raised on radio programmes such as the Sunday lunchtime Family members Favourites as well as the day-to-day morning programme Music While you Operate, the blast of Bill Haleys simple beat was an anthem of liberation in the conventions of post-war Britain.

The film showed what we had been supposed to perform towards the new music. Youngsters had been noticed bopping in their schoolroom to a background of a honking saxophone as well as a reedy voice exhorting them to 1 oclock, two oclock, three oclock, rock! If school had been only like that!

Mine wasn't, and when lastly the GCE O Level exams came and went, so did I. I left school, age 16, prior to term finished and celebrated my liberty inside a pub using a woman, drinking rum-and-black (rum-and-blackcurrant -- the drink of option for aspiring teenage beat rebels then). The following day, wracked using the remorse of my 1st hangover, I lay in bed and determined I needed to be a poet.

Thats what I became, prior to I set out to record in print the dawn in the Swinging Sixties in my book The Huge Beat Scene.

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