Yeah Yeah Yeah Read online

  YEAH YEAH YEAH

  The Story of Modern Pop

  BOB STANLEY

  For Tessa

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1 Feet Up: The First British Hit Parade

  2 Flip, Flop and Fly: Bill Haley and Jump Blues

  3 A Mess of Blues: Elvis Presley

  4 Put Your Cat Clothes On: Sun Records and Rockabilly

  5 Teenage Wildlife: Rock ’n’ Roll

  6 Fifteen Miles from Middlesbrough: Skiffle

  7 Rock with the Cavemen: British Rock ’n’ Roll

  8 Whispering Bells: Doo Wop

  9 1960: It Will Stand

  10 Walk with Me in Paradise Garden: Phil Spector and Joe Meek

  11 The Trouble with Boys: The Brill Building and Girl Groups

  PART TWO

  12 Act Naturally: The Beatles

  13 Needles and Pins: The Beat Boom

  14 Who’s Driving Your Plane? The Rolling Stones

  15 This Is My Prayer: The Birth of Soul

  16 The Rake’s Progress: Bob Dylan

  17 America Strikes Back: The Byrds and Folk Rock

  18 Up the Ladder to the Roof: Tamla Motown

  19 1966: The London Look

  20 Endless Summer: The Beach Boys

  21 The Golden Road: San Francisco and Psychedelia

  22 Pop Gets Sophisticated: Soft Rock

  23 Crying in the Streets: Deep Soul

  24 I Can’t Sing, I Ain’t Pretty and My Legs Are Thin: Hard Rock

  25 Bubblegum Is the Naked Truth: The Monkees

  PART THREE

  26 1970: Everything’s Gone Grey

  27 An English Pastoral: British Folk Rock

  28 Freddie’s Dead: Electrified Soul

  29 State of Independence: Jamaica

  30 It Came from the Suburbs: Marc Bolan and David Bowie

  31 Deluxe and Delightful: Glam

  32 The Sound of Philadelphia: Soft Soul

  33 Progressive Rock (and Simpler Pleasures)

  34 Young Love: Weenyboppers and Boy Bands

  35 See That Girl: Abba

  36 Beyond the Blue Horizon: Country and Western

  37 Before and After the Gold Rush: Laurel Canyon

  38 1975: Storm Warning

  PART FOUR

  39 Courage, Audacity and Revolt: The Sex Pistols

  40 Cranked Up Really High: Punk Rock

  41 Pleasantly Antagonistic: New Wave

  42 Supernature: Disco

  43 Islands in the Stream: The Bee Gees

  44 Routine Is the Enemy of Music: Post-punk

  45 Back to the Future: Two Tone and Mod

  46 A Shark in Jet’s Clothing: America after Punk

  47 This Is Tomorrow: Kraftwerk and Electropop

  48 Adventures on the Wheels of Steel: Early Rap

  49 Here Comes That Feeling: New Pop

  50 American Rock (Ooh Yeah)

  51 Just a King in Mirrors: Michael Jackson

  52 Highs in the Mid-Eighties: Prince and Madonna

  53 Some Kind of Monster: Metal

  54 Poised over the Pause Button: The Smiths and the Birth of Indie

  55 1985: What the Fuck Is Going On?

  56 We Were Never Being Boring: Pet Shop Boys and New Order

  PART FIVE

  57 Chicago and Detroit: House and Techno

  58 Smiley Culture: Acid House and Manchester

  59 1991: Time for the Mu Mu

  60 All Eyez on Me: Hip Hop

  61 Bassline Changed My Life: Dance Music

  62 This Is How You Disappear: Bristol, Shoegazing and a New Psychedelia

  63 As a Defence, I’m Neutered and Spayed: Grunge

  64 Ever Decreasing Circles: Blur, Suede and Britpop

  65 A Vision of Love: R&B

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  I remember reading about a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, who used to spend Saturday mornings lurking in the Vintage Record Centre on Roman Way in North London. He would watch the old Teds and the young rockabillies, the dandified fifties revivalists and the single middle-aged men walk through the door, thumb through the racks, and all ask for the same record: ‘Do you have “Cast Iron Arm” by Peanuts Wilson?’ The answer was always no. The kid was in awe of this record. It must, he figured, be the best record ever made. What could it sound like? Who was Peanuts Wilson? Why was the arm made of cast iron? This would have been in the mid-seventies and there was no way he could find out the answers to these questions, or even get to hear the record because it was so rare, and so in demand. He dreamed about it, tried to imagine how it might sound: harder than ‘Hound Dog’, sharper than ‘Summertime Blues’. For this kid, in its magical elusiveness, ‘Cast Iron Arm’ embodied the wonder of pop music.

  In the twenty-first century anyone can type the name Peanuts Wilson into YouTube or Spotify or iTunes and hear ‘Cast Iron Arm’, with its honking sax, comic interludes and thunking backbeat. The same goes for the rarest British hard-rock album, Growers of Mushroom by Leaf Hound. Or ‘Carry Me Home’, a still unreleased Beach Boys outtake from their Holland album. This wasn’t possible in the pre-digital age, when information was passed around pop fans via music papers and radio shows, fanzines, cassettes and word of mouth – analogue technology, airwaves, printing presses, everything in perpetual motion. Before the arrival of Napster in 2000, the gateway for iTunes, it had been this way for the best part of five decades: this was the modern pop era.

  There have been many great music books written since 2000, on genres, micro-genres, single albums, even single songs. But there hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been a book on the whole of modern pop’s development, none to explain when and why things happened, the connections, the splinters, what has been lost or forgotten along the way.

  My intention with Yeah Yeah Yeah is to give the reader a feel for pop’s development as it happened, by drawing a straight line – with the odd wiggle and personal diversion – from the birth of the seven-inch single to the decline of pop music as a palpable, physical thing in the nineties. Chronologically, I will explore how each new era brought with it new icons and iconoclasts, the arrival and excitement of hot sounds, and how, when they began to cool off, several different styles developed and myriad subgenres were created.

  From the fifties to the nineties, pop was personal and private. You could live in its wider world but also shape it to your own ends by amassing a collection of vinyl, making tapes of singles in the order you wanted to hear them, then passing on the secret to fellow travellers. I had exercise books in which I’d write down the new Top 20 every Tuesday: at 12.45 we’d have the radio on at school, and friends huddled together to find out whether the heroic Altered Images had dislodged the dreadful Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin from the top of the chart. It was a religion. I didn’t feel the need to go to church.

  My first published work was in a fanzine called Pop Avalanche in 1986. I sent a copy to the New Musical Express and they sent me off to review a Johnny Cash show in Peterborough. Since 1990, I’ve been fortunate enough to see the pop world from both sides, as a fan, a writer, and also as a member of a pop group: I was twenty-five when Saint Etienne started, and we had the remarkable good fortune to appear on Top of the Pops, on the cover of the NME and on stage around the world. For the last dozen years I have written for The Times and the Guardian, which has given me the opportunity to interview stars and – equally important to me – to shine some light on
records, singers, writers and producers who I thought were undeservedly obscure.

  This book picks up the threads that connect doo wop, via Philly soul, to house music, or – possibly less obviously – ones that link Johnny Duncan’s ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ to the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’ to the Prodigy’s ‘Everybody in the Place’. I want to give a sense of how the web was woven. Where does Frankie Lymon fit in? More to the point, in a world where Nick Drake is considerably better known than Fairport Convention, how were both perceived at the time, and how did they affect pop’s climate? Chronologically, I explore how the technology not only interacts with music, but helps to start the era (the portable record player), then kill it (the compact disc as Trojan horse), and how modern pop was built up by communication, the distribution of information, the secret world of music papers and fanzines, late-night or illegal radio broadcasts, and stolen moments on TV shows.

  I wanted to write this book because there is no such guide. I wanted to argue that the separation of rock and pop is false, and that disco and large swathes of black and electronic music have been virtually ignored by traditional pop histories. This situation has changed considerably since Saint Etienne formed in 1990, though rockism still exists, and snobbery is still rife. At the other extreme, some purists don’t think of albums as pop at all, but I’m not going to be a seven-inch fascist – albums were an essential part of modern pop’s development.

  What exactly is pop? For me, it includes rock, R&B, soul, hip hop, house, techno, metal and country. If you make records, singles and albums, and if you go on TV or on tour to promote them, you’re in the pop business. If you sing a cappella folk songs in a pub in Whitby, you’re not. Pop needs an audience that the artist doesn’t know personally – it has to be transferable. Most basically, anything that gets into the charts is pop, be it Buddy Holly, Black Sabbath or Bucks Fizz. So, Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ is pop music (UK no. 2 in 1981), as is Waldo de los Ríos’s ‘Mozart No. 40’ (UK no. 5 ’71), and the Marcels’ ‘Blue Moon’ (UK and US no. 1 ’61). The charts are vital social history. It is much harder to recover the menacing impact of ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ or future shock of ‘I Feel Love’ without hearing them alongside contemporary hits: the former shared a chart with Mel Tormé’s ‘Mountain Greenery’ and Ted Heath’s ‘The Faithful Hussar’; the latter entered the chart sandwiched between Alessi’s ‘Oh Lori’ and the Muppets’ ‘Halfway down the Stairs’. Context is everything.

  What creates great pop? Tension, opposition, progress and fear of progress. I love the tensions between the industry and the underground, between artifice and authenticity, between the adventurers and the curators, between rock and pop, between dumb and clever, between boys and girls. A permanent state of flux informed the modern pop era and taking sides is part of the fun. Some saw punk, for instance, as a way of rewriting the rules completely, as the Futurists had done in art, while others read 1977 as a return to roots, the excitement of first-wave rock ’n’ roll revisited. Both sides had a strong case. On the one hand you had Malcolm McLaren’s Debord-quoting art-school insurrection; on the other you had the Clash and Joe Strummer’s ‘cut the crap’ ideology. In pop, the conservative can be seen as cool. But pop music isn’t there to be contained. It isn’t school – it only has unwritten rules, and they’re all there to be broken. The energy and insight of pop comes from juggling its contradictions rather than purging them. Queen may have proudly printed ‘no synthesizers’ on their first few album covers, suggesting they were all rock, no artifice, but when they changed their minds in 1980 for ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ it gave them an international number one, and became an early source for hip-hop samples; pop moved forward and everyone was happy.

  So is modern pop just chart music? Well, partly, as the magic of the charts is that they can be perfect time capsules, and can cover all pop genres with no favouring the hip or the entitled, the homebodies or the voyagers. Yet the charts did not always reflect emerging movements. Instead, the new music would percolate, inspire and – eventually – burst into the chart at a later date: the UK’s chart stats don’t bear out the influence of the Velvet Underground (one UK Top 10 hit for Lou Reed), or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (none of the four singles from it even reached the Top 50), or the Smiths (none of their singles went any higher than number ten). It may seem contradictory to write about the hitless Johnny Burnette Trio or the Stooges or Minor Threat or Juan Atkins in this book, but they emerged in the modern pop era and their influence on it, and the music of the future, is undeniable. Outliers get absorbed into the mainstream. Pop is a decades-long love affair. Opposites attract.

  When did the modern pop era start? In 1952, as I will soon explain. The end point is more complicated; the start of the digital age is much blurrier, and the tail-off is gradual. I’m using the end of vinyl as pop’s main format as a line in the sand. When Culture Beat’s ‘Mr Vain’ reached number one in the UK in 1993, it was the first chart-topper since Lita Roza’s ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window’ in 1953 not to have been issued on a seven-inch single; soon after ‘Mr Vain’ came the first number one not available on vinyl at all, only CD and cassette – Celine Dion’s ‘Think Twice’ in February ’95.

  This book is not meant to be an encyclopedia; I believe in the myth and legend of pop as much as anyone who grew up on TOTP, the NME and Smash Hits, the histories and half-truths about Gene Vincent, Arthur Lee, David Bowie or Agnetha Fältskog that made it so constantly thrilling. I love the flash and glory of pop’s superstars, whether it’s the Beatles hurtling down the platform at Marylebone station to avoid screaming fans, or a quick glimpse of Kylie’s knickers on stage.

  I love the underdog equally – Lou Christie and his almost forgotten falsetto that made Frankie Valli sound like Johnny Cash – and the bit-part players, the backroom staff, the hack writers, and the ham-radio nerds who end up as engineers: Joe Meek, Giorgio Moroder, Rodney Jerkins, studio-bound characters like Derrick May, Martin Hannett and Holland/Dozier/Holland. And John Carter, the soft-spoken Brummie songwriter who could switch from Eurovision entries (Mary Hopkin’s ‘Knock, Knock Who’s There’, UK no. 2 ’70), to garage bubblegum (the Music Explosion’s ‘Little Bit of Soul’, US no. 2 ’67), and then write the all-time summer anthem in First Class’s ‘Beach Baby’. Some say it’s just ersatz Beach Boys. Not me. I think it is the work of a committed pop fan, wanting to give something back, trying to amplify his love of the Beach Boys.

  There are so many connections which can be lost in the fractured, static nature of the digital age; without record labels to give us the names of writers and producers to study, without record shops or fanzines to filter endless information, we are less likely to find the obvious connections that run through modern pop. Listening to Amy Winehouse’s ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’ on iTunes we wouldn’t know that she samples Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’. Or that this song was written by Motown staffers Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who went on to write Chaka Khan’s ‘I’m Every Woman’ and their own hit ‘Solid’ (US no. 12, UK no. 3 ’84) but had previously worked for New York’s Scepter/Wand labels, where they wrote for ex-beauty queen and early soul pioneer Maxine Brown. Or that Scepter/Wand initially made its money from girl group the Shirelles, whose first major hit was ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’60), and who were also favourites of Amy Winehouse. We have to know where music has come from in order to understand where it’s at and where it could be heading. This book is a framework, and hopefully it will lead you to discover plenty of new favourites and new inspirations.

  PROLOGUE

  Britain and America were two very different worlds in the early fifties, with two very different pop cultures. 1945 had been the year in which the twentieth century had truly become the American century: the USA was the only country to emerge from the war stronger than it had been in 1939, with the Depression a distant memory, and the Marshall Plan had enabled it to enrich and rebuild
future allies (Germany, Japan, Turkey), while cocking a snook at potential rivals (Great Britain). American and British cultures had thrillingly intersected – and clashed – during the war, when ordinary Britons were both dazzled by handsome GIs stationed in London, Newport, Southampton and Suffolk, and also appalled by the fact of segregation. Pre-war there had been little cultural overlap; post-war, the countries separated again, but that brief encounter played on their memories.

  Bombed-out Britain, at the turn of the fifties, looked to America for inspiration, and to Hollywood and Broadway for entertainment. It would have found a fair amount of dirt on the edges of American popular culture after the war: big-circulation magazines packaged prostitution, rape and violence as entertainment in short stories on the Wild West, which Hollywood then mined for its cowboy movies; film noir, a yet-to-be-christened genre, was equally charged, crime-ridden and rich in sin. After all, one and all had just been at war and seen some very terrible things.1

  But mainstream American popular music was quite dissimilar. Post-war and pre-rock ’n’ roll, it conformed to a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade aesthetic, which British writers and performers aspired to mimic. Prior to the war the pop charts in Billboard, America’s trade magazine for the music industry, had been very urban and very white, and – on the surface – nothing much had changed by the early fifties.

  Britain, on the other hand, was a musical backwater – variety shows, summer seasons in seaside resorts, state-run radio, virtually no TV – and it had none of the pop pretensions which would see it rise in the sixties. It sucked up everything America provided, with little knowledge of the upheavals that were affecting ‘the home of modern popular music’.

  To try and understand the beginnings of the modern pop era better, we have to dig back a little and explore the major changes that had occurred in American popular music in the forties. During the war there had been two strikes in America – both for an increase in royalties – which had significant long-term consequences. The first, by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1941, blocked any of the organisation’s songs from being played on the radio, a gift to rival set-up BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated). ASCAP was home to established songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and Sammy Cahn, ones who could both read and write music. BMI looked to the future, away from sheet music, and its copyrights were largely of jazz, blues and country music, which ASCAP had effectively boycotted. Jazz pianist Bobby Troup wrote ‘Daddy’,2 a number one in 1941 for big-band leader Sammy Kaye which Kaye would likely never have recorded if ASCAP hadn’t been on strike. It was also possible to record ancient, out-of-copyright music: in January ’41 Time magazine reported how ‘the airwaves gave off strange sounds last week. Ray Noble’s magnificent band was reduced to rendering a super-syncopated version of “Camptown Races”, followed by “Liebestraum” in rumba time.’ Another surreal result of the ban was a string of foreign songs – also beyond ASCAP copyright – reaching the chart: Jimmy Dorsey’s ‘Amapola’, Artie Shaw’s ‘Frenesi’ and Glenn Miller’s ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ were all US number ones in 1941. These were new flavours and ingredients for American pop music which would continue to inform it long after the strike ended: major hits of 1950, for instance, included Anton Karas’s ‘Harry Lime Theme’ from the Vienna-set movie The Third Man, Vaughn Monroe’s hushed, eerie and exotic ‘Bamboo’, and the Weavers’ version of Leadbelly’s folk-blues song ‘Goodnight Irene’.