Read Online Paul McCartney by Philip Norman - Free Book Online Page B

the city was more famous–Robb Wilton, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey–they were advised to lose their Scouse accents and never mention their birthplace in their acts. Showbusiness superstition held that anything glamorous or desirable had to come, or seem to come, from London. The last place it could conceivably come from was a sooty seaport on a muddy river, far away in the north-west.
    Paul’s thirteenth birthday present from his father was a trumpet. The instrument with which Jim led his little dance band before the war still had greatest prestige on the bandstand, thanks to America’s Harry James and Britain’s Eddie Calvert, aka ‘the Man with the Golden Trumpet’. Calvert’s instrumental version of ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, from the film Underwater, had been number one in Britain’s new Top 20 for four weeks in 1955.
    However, Jim had no idea of launching Paul on a musical career, even one as modest as his own had been. Rather, the trumpet would be a social asset in a city where much of the best entertainment took place in private homes. ‘If you can play something, son,’ he advised, ‘you’ll always get invited to parties.’
    Rock ‘n’ roll first crept up on Britain in the dark. During mid-1955, showings of an American film called Blackboard Jungle caused disturbances among young members of its audience that left a trail of wrecked cinemas across the country. This reaction was not to the film, which concerned delinquent high school students in New York, but to a song played over the opening credits, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets.
    In hindsight, the record seems innocent enough, a conventional, intelligible tenor voice simply chanting the hours in the day when one can rock–i.e. dance. To adult British ears at the time, its slap-bass beat and braying saxophone were a din almost as destructively hideous as the recent war’s bombs. Indeed its consequences were to be almost as traumatic, and much longer lasting.
    The war had not made Britain any less rigidly class-bound, and rock ‘n’ roll music initially affected only the working class. Its first enthusiasts, the instigators of those cinema riots, were Teddy boys: young men who defied the drab national dress code by sporting Edwardian-style velvet-collared jackets and narrow ‘drainpipe’ trousers, with accessories often including switchblade knives, razors, brass knuckles and bicycle chains. ‘Teds’ responding to rock ‘n’ roll awoke fears of a juvenile delinquency problem on the same scale as America’s, not to mention an older, darker fear of proletarian uprising.
    But, as was soon apparent, the musical malignancy had spread much wider. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ went to number one in the new Top 20, and was followed by a string of further Bill Haley hits, all using ‘rock’ in the title and all unleashing further mayhem. When Haley visited Britain in 1956, arriving by ocean liner, he was greeted by crowds that even the young Queen would hardly attract. That was his big mistake. In total contrast with his music, he proved to be a chubby, benign-looking man with a kiss-curl plastered on his forehead and not the faintest whiff of danger or subversion. When, soon afterwards, his record-sales went into decline, Britain’s parents breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the crisis had passed.
    But by now America had a new rock ‘n’ roller of a very different stamp. Like Bill Haley, the bizarrely-named Elvis Presley wore a guitar but, unlike any vocalist–that is, any white vocalist–he used his body, especially his hips and buckling knees, to underline the amorous fervour of what he sang. He was, in other words, raw sex on crêpe soles. While Haley’s deleterious effect had largely been on males, Presley’s was overwhelmingly on females, rousing previously decorous, tight-corseted Fifties young womanhood to hysterical screams, reciprocal bodily writhings and an apparent common compulsion to tear