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 Elvis, Motown,
the Surf Sound, the British
Invasion, Psychedelia, Woodstock, Hendrix,
Bob Dylan and The
Monkees. All set against the backdrop of a new permissiveness,
Free Love and a war we couldn't win. Turn on, tune in and drop out!
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.
The UK pop scene in 1960/61 was dominated by what we now would
call 'Light Entertainment': wholesome vocal groups, cheeky chappies,
pretty girl singers/male heartthrobs who were also actors, chipper
moppets. Each of these would be marshalled, moulded, and manipulated
by svengalis in astrakhan coats chomping huge cigars.
In America, no pretenders had threatened Elvis Presley as King of
Rock & Roll. The month after his army release in March 1960, Stuck
On You bolted to Number One to be followed by It's Now Or
Never and Are You Lonesome Tonight? later in the year.
 In London the first rock groups began to emerge, but most of them
sounded pretty weak and unimaginative compared with the Americans.
Some even had hits: Nero and The
Gladiators experienced five minute stardom with Entry Of The
Gladiators and In The Hall Of The Mountain King.
Shane Fenton and The Fentones
scored with I'm A Moody Guy and Mike
Berry and The Outlaws found favour with Tribute To Buddy
Holly - an early success for independent producer Joe
Meek.
Eventually, the British pop scene of the Swinging Sixties was
bursting with vocal groups, solo artists and instrumentalists. But
at the outset, teenagers had to listen to the latest hits on the café
jukebox or a basic record player. Their only other lifeline was a
nightly dose of music from Radio
Luxembourg or Alan Freeman's Pick of the Pops on BBC
radio on Sunday afternoons.
Then in 1964 came the offshore pirate radio stations - Radio
Caroline and Radio London, which
broadcast from ships anchored just outside British waters - but in
1967 the government closed them down as a risk to shipping. In the
re-organisation of BBC radio into Radios 1,2, 3 and 4,
Radio 1 became the new station for pop music and ex-pirate DJs
like Tony Blackburn and John Peel. By
1964, for the first time in rock history, America was looking up to
Britain, and the rampant Beatlemania
at Kennedy Airport heralded a full-blown British
Invasion.
 The curious counterpoint to such a rich outpouring of great Rock
& Roll music in the 60s was a parallel boom in
middle-of-the-road pop. So for every My Generation and You
Really Got Me there seemed to be an equal number of drippy
ballads selling in vast quantities, like Ken Dodd's Tears, Val
Doonican's The Special Years and The
Bachelors (pictured at left) singing Marie.
So the soundtrack of the 60s was in many ways a curious mix of
Soul music, British Beat, psychedelia, R&B, romantic schmaltz
and records by British comedians, wholesome vocal groups, cheeky
chappies, pretty young girl singers and male heartthrobs who were
also actors.
The Sixties saw a revolution in popular music. In a few short
years interest switched from singles to albums, from mono to stereo
and from dance music to move the body to cerebral music to please
the intellect.
New styles emerged out of old ones - Girl
Group pop, beat music, folk-rock,
country-rock, acid-rock, soul - and the spirit of Rock & Roll
was re-enlivened by four young self-taught beat musicians from
Liverpool, England.
Yet the decade began with little hint of the upheaval to come.
Rock & Roll had reached a low creative ebb by 1960, not least
because several of the original purveyors were missing in action: Chuck
Berry was in jail for abducting a minor; Jerry
Lee Lewis was in disgrace after marrying his 13-year-old cousin;
Little Richard had renounced Rock
& Roll for religion; Buddy Holly
was dead, and Elvis Presley was serving his National Service with
the US Army in Germany.
In the USA, more young girls than ever before were buying records
and a new musical subculture was to emerge, based on the tastes,
fantasies and hormones of Little Miss America. Teenage magazines
appeared, packed with fan gossip, love stories and exclusive
interviews with the new, male, teen idols.
Meanwhile, a sharp black businessman named Berry Gordy Jr put the
city of Detroit on the music map with a string of small record
labels that were soon amalgamated into one huge corporation called Motown.
Britain seemed like the most unlikely place for a musical
revolution, and British teenagers had traditionally looked to
America for excitement - on record, on television and in the cinema.
But the real impetus for British rock music came not from these
infatuations (and imitations), but from the skiffle
boom of the late 50s. Skiffle was do-it-yourself music at its
simplest: the 'authentic' line-up was guitar (three chords would
suffice), washboard and thimbles (percussion) and a tea-chest with a
strung broom handle (bass).
 Guitar sales rose phenomenally and a new British pop music began
to develop - especially in provincial cities such as Liverpool,
Manchester and Newcastle where one-time skiffle outfits were
evolving naturally into Rock & Roll groups. In 1961 it was
estimated that around 350 groups were operating in Liverpool alone,
and it was almost inevitable that one of these would rise to the top
eventually.
What
nobody could have foreseen was what an effect The Beatles would have
on rock music around the world.
The success of The Beatles revitalised the music scene as never
before. Literally thousands of groups were formed in the aftermath
of Beatlemania, and between 1964 and 1966 home-grown British beat
music swamped Britain, and the world.
The Fab Four effectively put America back in touch with its own
rock heritage, reviving the dynamism of Rock & Roll and
breathing new life into half-forgotten styles. As in Britain, they sparked off a massive explosion of new groups
- an explosion which was further enhanced by the 'British
Invasion'
of other innovative groups from the UK.
As the music world entered the late Sixties, many of the changes
set in motion earlier in the decade ultimately came to fruition.
Popular music became more socially aware, more experimental, and
musicians attained a degree of artistic control over their music
that would have been unthinkable a short ten years before.
Whilst established stars, especially The
Beatles (three Number
Ones with We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer and
Eleanor Rigby) and The Rolling Stones (three Top Five
hits with Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown, Paint It
Black and Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?), were
releasing brilliant recordings, new British acts couldn't seem to
come up with anything substantial in 1966. Most appeared to have
an aura of novelty about them, as if they were just more products
of the trite and ephemeral pop machine.Other successful British acts of the year included
The Troggs
and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and
Tich. If Dave Dee's
television appearances seemed contrived, so too did those of The
New Vaudeville Band. Their brassy oompah and megaphone vocals
recalled The Temperance Seven, and though they weren't around for
long they had a pair of sizeable hits with Winchester
Cathedral and Peek A Boo.
Neil Christian, a rocker since the late 50s, had his first and
last hit with That's Nice, New Yorker Roy C had a
UK-only smash hit with Shotgun Wedding, Crispian St
Peters had a quick fling with You Were On My Mind and
The Pied Piper, and The Merseybeats reappeared as a
trimmed-down duo called The Merseys, but Sorrow was to be
their only success.
Alan Price - a refugee from The Animals - went on to carve a
respectable solo career after his 1966 debut, I Put A Spell On
You. He had six trips into the Top 20 and subsequently
snuggled into television and cabaret work, and by the 70s had
established himself as a film soundtrack writer.
Meanwhile, clubs around the country were still vibrating to the
sound of blues from groups like John
Mayall's Blues Breakers, The
Graham Bond Organisation and Chris Farlowe and The
Thunderbirds.
All had released singles to little response, but in 1966 Farlowe
broke through with the Mick Jagger/Keith Richard-penned song Out
Of Time, which became a surprise Number One. Farlowe never
repeated the feat, and after a chequered career with Colosseum and
Atomic Rooster he retired to his London antique business,
performing sporadically throughout the late seventies.
Bobby Hebb had an impressive start with Sunny, but
disappeared almost immediately - as did a number of bright and
not-so-bright prospects including Robert Parker with Barefootin',
The Capitols with Cool Jerk, Napoleon XIV with They're
Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha, and The Count Five with Psychotic
Reaction.
Bob Lind had a one-off folk hit with Elusive Butterfly and
Simon and Garfunkel rang in the new year with the chart-topping Sounds
Of Silence, a song they'd recorded back in 1964.
The Happenings, a harmony group in the Four Seasons mould, made
their mark with See You In September and I Got Rhythm,
and a young New York group called The Left Banke made a stunning
debut with Walk Away Renee. After a less powerful
follow-up, Pretty Ballerina, the group's main-man
Michael Brown left, and their brilliance withered.
Perhaps most significantly - thanks especially to the efforts of
Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones
- rock music was
coming to be seen as an instrument of change.
The late Sixties were a time of great social and political
upheaval, a time when traditional values were being questioned or
discarded altogether. A new spirit of affluence and optimism
engendered a liberal atmosphere whish the youth of the Western world
could embrace and exploit (albeit with the inevitable clash with
authority, in the shape of parents, laws and governments).
Popular music underwent a change which was both a reflection and
an essential ingredient of the social revolution. A whirl of
psychedelic noise ushered in the 'Summer of Love' and as word spread
there was a sudden migration of young people to the Haight-Ashbury
area of San Francisco.
By 1966 the area was a thriving artistic community and also
boasted two of the most influential radio stations - KSAN and KMPX -
which were forerunners of the FM radio boom.
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