Welcome to the birth of British rock music. It will rock you, but only slightly…
Released: May 1957
Topped the chart:
14th July 1957 (for 3 weeks)
25th August 1957 (for 1 week)
Four weeks total.
“According to the Daily Sketch, the Duke of Kent thought Tommy was ‘great, great, great.’”- Billy Bragg, Roots, Radicals & Rockers
“The rhythm is exhilarating and the lyrics not unlike those of Keats! Fred Keats, my milkman!” – Noel Coward
Tommy Steele wasn’t the first British person to play rock n roll, but he may well be the most pivotal. This is certainly true for our chart journey where, ten records in, we reach our first British number one.
Surprising that it’s taken that long? Perhaps not when you consider the standing of British music in the preceding 150 years. The likes of Benjamin Britten, Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst might be celebrated now, but certainly not in the late-19th and early-20th century. It wasn’t for nothing that Germany dubbed the UK “the land without music.”
That all changed with the arrive of Lonnie Donegan, a trad-jazz man from The Chris Barber Band, given a solo spot while the more experienced musicians took their break, to play his brand of “skiffle” music. As with most musical styles adopted without credit by white musicians, skiffle originated with African-American players in the 1920s, a ramshackle blend of folk and traditional blues that struggled to find mainstream success.
But success was found for Donegan, with his version of Leadbelly’s classic “Rock Island Line”. It hit the charts in 1956, two years after it was originally recorded, and was a sales phenomenon not previously seen in the 45 singles era. It would remain on the chart in the UK for eight months, and is reported to have sold an estimated three million copies. Not only that, but it was recorded a year before the arrival of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, and rocketed up the charts nearly a year before Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel.
In an impoverished Britain, still struggling after the war and with coal rationing in place until 1958, the fact you didn’t need expensive instruments to play it was appealing. John Lennon and Jimmy Page both started in DIY bands which relied on washboards and broom handles rather than drumkits and double-basses. Take a traditional song, speed it up, make it delightfully sloppy and boom, you had a skiffle group.
As Billy Bragg says in his excellent history of early British rock n roll, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, “Not only did [Donegan] get his material for free from the blues and folk traditions, he’d also discovered a teenage market for British pop music.” The gap in the market was born out of the fact that flashy, American rock n roll just wasn’t available in the UK in the mid-50s due to limits on imports- for the majority of kids, rock n roll remained mythical and in rumour only.
Not everyone was a fan. Tommy Steels himself certainly wasn’t- in his memoir Bermondsey Boy, he describes skiffle as “a little pagan” compared to “my type of music”- country and western. The skiffle scene would end up lasting less than two years, as things got more exciting when musicians in the UK started to plug in.
The first electric British rock n roll to make any kind of splash was Teach You to Rock by Tonie Crombie & The Rockets who were, as their name suggests, very much modelled on Bill Haley & His Comets. It’s somewhat rudimentary when it comes to actually rocking, but like Donegan before him, Crombie had an extensive background in trad jazz and so the song swings in a way that early white rock n roll American hits just don’t. It was popular enough to sneak into the top 30 of the UK singles chart and is, sadly, largely forgotten as a piece of history these days.
Donegan and Crombie might have been aiming for the youth market, but their lack of marketable charisma and practically ancient age in 1956 (25 and 31 respectively) meant they were never going to find long term success with that market, especially with someone as young, dangerous and sexy as Elvis breaking on the horizon.
Enter Tommy Hicks, discovered performing original number Rock with the Caveman in the legendary skiffle and coffee (yes, that was a thing) venue The 2i’s in Soho. Entering the venue for the first time, Hicks was told to “follow the sweat” to find where the music was happening, and he soon had a residency in another coffee bar, The Stork Club.
After a quick audition in the Decca gents due to a studio booking oversight and the change to a more showbiz nom de plume, Tommy Steele was ready to be unleashed to the world. As Billy Bragg notes, “What was special about Tommy Steele was his age. Other British artists had tried to jump aboard the rock n roll bandwagon in 1956, but none had captured the attention of the teen audience.”
Steele also managed to bridge the British class divide: his estuary vowels and working class background made him seem approachable to his potential teen fans, but the fact that he had spent time abroad (most notably America where he was able to soak in the burgeoning market of rock n roll 45s) in the merchant navy gave him an exotic edge that appealed to the upper classes. Indeed, Noel Coward was a fan, as was Prince Edward of Kent, the young Queen’s cousin.
Despite everything in his favour, Steele’s early singles written with his songwriting team of Lionel Bart and Mike Pratt were not runaway hits: Caveman reached number 13 (admittedly a new high for rock n roll singles at the time), while the follow up Doomsday Rock failed to chart at all.
Live though, Steele and his backing band The Steelmen were building momentum, though many venues weren’t used to this new electronic sound. Steele recalls a concert where he would only be allowed to plug his “banjo” in if a fireman in full uniform were on stage with the band. The fireman who went up there was reportedly mortified.
Panic at Decca was setting in at the same time, and so a trick that would become common in the late 50s was employed to guarantee a hit: take a song doing well on the American charts, get a British singer to do a karaoke cover of it and then release it a week before the American original in the UK, tricking listeners into thinking the homegrown version is the original.
Cynical it might be, but it worked: Steele’s version of Singin’ The Blues, with which Marty Robbins had recently had a hit on the other side of the Atlantic, is almost identical but, released first, it became the UK’s first British rock n roll number 1 single….only to be replaced by Robbins’ version the week after. Steele’s time at the toppermost of the poppermost was brief, and his top 40 hits would dry up in 1961 (his final hit was appropriately titled The Writing on the Wall). Light entertainment beckoned soon after, as previously predicted by uberfan Noel Coward.
Despite this, Steele’s influence looms large, both literally—success from a 2i’s act would lead to the impresario Larry Parnes, after signing on as one of Steele's two managers, raiding the coffee bars to launch the careers of Billy Fury, Jonny Gentle, Vince Eager, Adam Faith and Wee Willy Harris—but also figuratively. Steele was at least somewhat involved in writing his own songs and this was enough to break Tin Pan Alley’s grip of British pop music.
The path to Lennon-McCartney was set.
A certain Harry Webb and his band of Shadows would soon pounce on Steele’s teen star status, but in terms of pointing the future of British music from here, he takes some beating. A teenager playing music for teenagers? Who can imagine such a thing?
***
As for the album itself? Doubling as the soundtrack to the cheap n cheerful Brit-pop musical of the same name, the movie is as cheerfully dreadful as you might expect—a sanitised, candied retelling of Steele’s rise. It’s all down to a judo lesson, apparently and, for some reason the whole thing is narrated in heavily accented calypso.
Script and songs were knocked up in about a month, standard for the rock n roll pics of the 50s when there was a determination to strike while the iron was hot. The songs themselves find Steele and his Steelman aiming alternately for Bill Haley dancefloors with the Steelmen and Heartbreak Hotel -style atmosphere in the solo numbers, and one of these is significantly more effective than the other.
The problem is that while RCA Victor had unending riches at Elvis to make his songs work, where Decca with Steele just didn’t have the budget or the pop production expertise to make it sound the way it needed to. Rather than the strange mystery of Heartbreak Hotel, the solo numbers sound such as Butterfingers, You Gotta Go and, especially the irritatingly childlike I Like sound like they were recorded down a well about half a mile from the microphone. Will It Be You is the victim of an odd phasing affect in the volume- it’s hard to tell if this was intentional or the result of someone moving a microphone mid-song.
Though the full band numbers feel generic and rushed compared to numbers by the likes of Little Richard, they do at least have an energy to them lacking elsewhere on the record. Most interesting is Water, Water, played with a calypso band in the movie, that pops with its use of brass beyond the requisite sax that almost feels Mariachi-tinged.
The LP really comes to life consistently in the back third, when the sax is given free reign to push the energy into a higher plane on the likes of Build Up, Teenage Party and the appropriately fire-and-brimstone Doomsday Rock. Steele himself wakes up at this point and gives everything he has to these numbers, which hasn’t been apparent until this point. His voice is fun, and owes a lot to Presley, though not to the same degree as Cliff Richard on Move It. Steele also plays up the country element of early rock n roll, with a background Gene Autrey yodel on certain notes, mixed with a Cockney cheeriness. The latter would serve him well for Half A Sixpence a decade later.
As a harbinger for the future, the film ends with Steele joining the world of variety, presenting a touring show with jazz, calypso and skiffle bands on the bill with Tommy wearing a natty little jumper that looks like it’s been lent to him by Val Doonican, a fate very much in Steele’s immediate future.
Ahh 50s Britain.
Score: 5/10
Tracklist:
1. Take Me Back, Baby
2. Butterfingers
3. I Like
4. A Handful of Songs
5. You Gotta Go
6. Water, Water
7. Cannibal Pot
8. Will It Be You
9. Two Eyes
10. Build Up
11. Time to Kill
12. Elevator Rock
13. Doomsday Rock
14. Teenage Party
Sources:
Bermondsey Boy: Memories of a Forgotten World by Tommy Steele (Michael Joseph, 2006)
Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg (Faber & Faber, 2018)
Before the Beatles: The Birth of British Rock- Trash theory (YouTube video, 2020)
Comments