![]() ![]() ![]() I can't recommend it highly enough.There are countless rock & roll images that are burnt in the public’s collective memory. It's a proper social history, containing many interviews with key musicians, a clear time-line, a sense of the outside world and just the right amount of personal engagement. (If you're interested in music and youth culture from this period, please read Pete Frame's The Restless Generation: How Rock Music Changed the Face of 1950's Britain – published in 2007 by Rogan House. The crowd shot at the end is a portent of future disturbances to come. Youthful hi-jinks would set the tone for all future rock'n'roll newsreels, but that's only because it really happened. Something did change in 1956, and the contrast between the Pathé voiceover and the actual images is part of the story in itself. There's no trouble here, but lots of frantic movement and the sense of something barely contained. The crowd shots are fabulous, and that's where you see the excitement: whole hordes of Halbstarken (half-strongs, the German equivalent of Teds) coming alive in front of the camera. The dancing is actually pretty great: check out the slide at 0:47 and the rigid spasms at 0:49. So you have to use fresh eyes, and try to recapture the feeling. What's routine to us now after years of music documentaries, all building up to an agreed (though often incorrect) history, would have seemed very different in 1956. But this was the first time many Pathé viewers would have seen rock'n'roll. Today, the footage – cracker barrel, the same old shots that have since been rolled out again and again – looks all too familiar. The first British rock'n'roll bands were formed by jazzers such as Tony Crombie – as a drummer, he understood how the beat had to come first – and Don Lang, who fronted the house band on the very first post-rock'n'roll BBC show, Six-Five Special. The music is that peculiar big band/jazz/rock hybrid that was popular at that time in Europe, as players struggled to adjust to the demands of the big beat. The opening phrase "the rock'n'roll craze" suggests this was already a media trope, and the corny jive terminology ("They ain't squares") is Pathé business as usual, as is the rather stagey nature of what they decide to film. However, this late 1956 footage comes not from the UK but from Hamburg, Germany. On the London underground one day in 1956, he "saw marching towards me in uneven ranks a mass of costumed youths, flaying their arms out, and reciting their war chant: 'One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock fuck! We're gonna fuck around the clock tonight!' They had found their martial rallying music and it was Bill's." The Teds, as the singer and pop historian Ian Whitcomb later remembered, took to the beat's implied violence like ducks to water. In Britain, rock'n'roll hooked into the already established teddy boy style, the adherents of which needed no lessons in disorder. It provided a focus for an emerging youth subculture that, once twinned with the commercial success of Elvis, Bill Haley, Gene Vincent et al, became ever more confident, assertive and visible. Rock'n'roll's impact went way beyond the music, which was exciting enough. Nowhere is there anything about Elvis Presley, who had four major hits that year, nor anything about the late-summer furore that accompanied the release of the film Rock Around the Clock – a heady brew of excited newspaper reports and censorious local councils reacting to a bit of gang warfare and youthful high spirits. ![]()
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