British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977

The Story of Music Hall in Rock

Barry J. Faulk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317171515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.

1 British Pop Women Singers of the 1960s and the Struggle for Modern Identity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315570273-1

Unlike the Britpop scene of the mid 1990s, which was almost exclusively a male-dominated enterprise, and at times emphatically masculine (Oasis), the British beat boom of the 60s was more gender integrated; women artists such as Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield and others were able to take advantage of the mass appeal of the many “boy bands” of the British Invasion and score chart success in Britain and North America. However, as I will argue in this chapter, this hardly means that the British Invasion was gender neutral. On the contrary: gender was the fault-line that separated male bands from women artists in the enterprise of establishing a modern identity for British pop music.

Unlike the male beat groups, women singers faced a disadvantage in that they often lacked the coherent identity that characterized a musical scene. In so far as British pop women had a distinctive look it was arguably in the traditional mode of feminine glamor. The public image of 60’s women singers did not manifest a total break with the visual representations of bobbed hair, smiling faces, painted lips, provocative clothing and thin bodies that had characterized the image of woman in modern global advertising since the 1920s and 30s. ¹

Nonetheless, British women pop singers had a novel aspect that is still under-recognized. The new woman was more attuned to American music, to jazz or soul sounds, than the previous generation of female performers in England; increasingly, lead vocals were no longer about volume or range but about expressive qualities. Singers instead emulated the performance style of soul artists, which highlighted the stylized expression of emotion in vocal performance. Sixties’ pop performers also broke the mold by singing almost exclusively of romantic love, rather than in the typical lyrical mode of music-hall song, which focused on the traditional duties and responsibilities of women in the private sphere: as dutiful daughters, wives, and mothers.

These various stylistic features may not seem to add up to a revolution, especially if compared to transitional figures like singer Alma Cogan, whose pop career in the 50s occupied a transitional space between American pop song and more obvious music hall derived fare. Still, glamour and feminine independence were largely new to post-war Britain, after years of food rationing, power outages, and with middle and working classes only beginning to adapt to the new consumer lifestyle. Neither the fashion nor the performance style of singers like Dusty Springfield and Lulu were rooted in pre-WWII notions of working-class community; instead, they pointed to a fantasy future of classless leisure and social mobility. These women artists seemed to herald a new era where British men and women would be glamorous, and Britain transformed itself into merit-based, affluent consumer society. The 60’s woman singer existed in a complex but evident relation to the economic upturn of the era, before high inflation and massive unemployment would bring the dream of a consumer utopia crashing down.

However, woman artists of the era functioned in an ambiguous relation to modernizing categories in the music industry, often actively discouraged from following the modernist art strategies that would increasingly characterize the music style of their male cohort. This chapter elaborates on how the British recording and entertainment industries centered in London reproduced an older style of musical performance, associated with the music hall and variety entertainment. In the cases of 60’s British women singers, this primarily meant that women were largely restricted from becoming equal partners in the construction of a transatlantic mode of music production, characterized by the new sound of the Black Atlantic. The story of the mixed fortunes of British women singers is part of a longer history of the ambiguous fate of a laboring class, originally from the industrial north, and their rise in the ranks of a national music industry. The pursuit of a career as popular artists traditionally required singers to relocate to London, the metropolitan center. These singers had mixed fortunes in London’s music and television circles. In most cases, performers cast off their northern roots and assimilated the very different cultural prerogatives of the metropolitan South. The interests of a music industry headquartered in the South continued to have a major impact on the careers of British pop women of the 60s, insuring that the full modernization of British pop music, including its gender-integration, would proceed unevenly.

Jeff Nuttall remarks that by the 1930s, post-industrial England had become stratified in the popular imagination along clear geographic lines, with London and the South representing the governing head of the United Kingdom, and an industrial north residually linked to the nation’s “guts and root bodily functions” (5). If British cinema of the 30s and 40s spoke in a predominantly mid-Atlantic accent, the Blackpool lights still attracted northern working-class audiences with a taste for a more ribald humor. The geographical divide separating northern performers and audiences and Southern finance, the owners and managers of the record and film industries also represented a discernible cultural divide. Northern audiences responded to rougher fare, to risqué song and bawdy humor, as evidenced by the 1930’s seaside postcards of Donald McGill, or the stand-up comedy of Max Miller (from the South, but Brighton, not London) and Frank Randle (a Mancunian). Northern popular culture exercised a greater freedom in regard to propriety and respectability than the pop culture product of the South, which was tasked with representing the abstract totality of the modern nation-state.

Inevitably northern film and music stars like Gracie Fields and George Formby went on to bigger and better contracts with southern film studios. The Mancunian Films studio was an exception, an independent enterprise that did enough business in the North of England to maintain relative independence from London studios. By the 1960s, however, more northern performers were working for corporations based in London, and relocated to the south. What American listeners characterized as the British Invasion in popular music was in the British context closer to an act of reverse colonization: the northern periphery asserting a new prominence in a pop music industry that had its center of gravity in the South. By this time, EMI was the major British record label; and along with the Rank Organization, the London-based corporation would remain one of the largest film companies well into the 1970s. There had been many women popular singers in Britain in the early 20th century, with successful careers in both music hall and film, and their various career trajectories amounted to a set of procedures for success that later performers pursuing a solo singing career were compelled to follow. In almost every instance, British women in pop in the 60s were in turn advised and pressured by management and media professionals to repeat these formulas. The paradoxical result is that record companies selling modern pop often resisted the attempts of women singers to make music for a youth audience with an increasingly cosmopolitan musical taste. The residual formula for successful popular music dominated how record producers and managers treated their talent in the 60s, with the effect that performing traditional music-hall derived pop became the routine way for singers to extend their career, though at the price of re-branding their pop music as mere entertainment.

As I elaborate later, male pop groups of the era achieved greater autonomy over their careers on account of their relative freedom within the structures of pop music capitalism. The Beatles, the Stones, and the Who struggled to achieve control over their studio process and their recorded work as soon as they achieved financial success. The male groups were able to build on their comparatively privileged position in the industry, and negotiate the musical traditions of the British past from a position of strength. With the aid of record companies and their management, male bands had license to fearlessly affiliate with transatlantic music in the modern mode, following the precedent of an earlier generation of self-consciously modernist artists (another primarily male social group).

The cultural divide separating north and south Britain helped construct a gendered division of musical labor in the 60s, with the role of modernist auteur largely restricted to men. In contrast with the male groups, women artists had to struggle to resist being identified with the pre-WWII world of working-class entertainment. The new women singers were different: they were no longer singing the family oriented fare of Gracie Fields and Alma Cogan. The shift in lyric content and musical styles in British Invasion women singers was hardly trivial: it encompassed a more emphatically urban sensibility, and reflected a heightened self-conscious about image, fashion, and an artist’s visual presentation. Yet the old stereotypes prevailed, in spite of these innovations. As a result, the careers of many British pop women developed according to the predictable path set by previous generations of women singers, into the mode of the more traditional music hall.

The legacy of the British musical past still bore down heavy upon the women singers of the 60’s British Invasion. The formulas for a successful career in popular music for women seemed set for all time by singers like Fields and Cogan, as far as the conservative British music industry was concerned. Not surprisingly, with few exceptions, the new women artists failed to develop a performance style that would convincingly signify their distance from the past for their youth audience.

For many, including many in the music industry, the new singer seemed a variation of an older type, the music hall diva of the previous generation. In particular, the label of the northern women, a crucial component of the public image of singer Gracie Fields, continued to loom large in post-WWII pop music. As Mark Simpson elaborates, the northern-woman persona constituted a powerful ideological image that symbolically resolved key contradictions in the lives of working-class British women. The persona blended “intensity” with “breeziness…a certain desperation [and] self-irony” (47). The northern woman was both charismatic and yet a familiar part of everyday Englishness, “a survivor but strangely tragic.” The stereotype dominated popular culture well into the 1960s, given new life in successful TV programs such as Coronation Street (first broadcast in 1960). That show provided a visual context for other kinds of female performance, and suggested the stereotype still provided a frame for interpreting modern women artists, even if singers participated in the modernizing idiom of transatlantic music.

Despite her considerable talent, Gracie Fields was increasingly typecast as the model northern woman in popular music; born in Rochdale, Lancashire, both Fields’ mother and father were mill workers. Fields rose to national fame a year after the death of music-hall legend Marie Lloyd, in 1922. As Simon Frith details, by the end of the decade, the performer was starring in three London venues simultaneously: playing a straight role in the musical comedy, SOS, the top of the bill at the low-brow Alhambra in Leicester Square, and performing on a late-night bill for the more affluent audiences of the Café Royal (67). This unique achievement also represents what became her chief legacy as an exemplary British popular singer: her special talent for turning various social groups segregated by class into a “mass” audience. ²

As Frith explains, Fields built a career out of her ability to turn the gap between working-class and mainstream entertainment into popular comedy that appealed to mass audiences. “The joke,” Frith writes, “was that such a grand bourgeois voice should belong to a shrill Lancashire mill-girl” (69). The singer’s trademark burlesque ballad both explored and exploited this contradiction (69). Capable of modulating into a powerful tremolo at will, Fields had the vocal skill and technique required for the comfortably middle-class art form of European operetta. In the course of her trademark song, “Sally in Our Alley,” modulated between various tonal registers with ease, just as the song built to a climax. ³ At a crucial point in the performance, Fields’ “natural” working-class voice would emerge, peeking out from under the accumulated layers of learning and vocal technique. The comic appearance of working-class character still reverberated powerfully in an England that remained a class hierarchy.

Fields did more than reach a popular audience: she developed a mode of performance that helped bridge the chasm of social class, while at the same time materializing class difference. Even in her sixties, living in Capri, Fields remained an icon of Englishness, and a fixture on British TV variety shows into the early 70s. At this point, Fields’ iconic status had dimmed the appreciation of her talent; she had become, as Frith notes, mostly a nostalgia figure for “some pre-war working-class community.”

As a social phenomenon, the women singers of the British Invasion reflect a larger economic trend, the consolidation of British pop music within a consumer society. As Mark Simpson observes, the old hierarchy between north and south was being challenged in popular culture. It was now fashionable to be working class in popular music and the new realist cinema; the working-class ethos seemed to provide “an antidote to the stuffed-shirt, stiff-lipped (Southern) British bourgeoisie” (49). British women singers were part of this popular, but media constructed, challenge to dominant notions of Englishness centered on self-restraint, as well as even more antique images of passive, self-sacrificing womanhood. They represented a challenge to the status quo, a rebuke to social prejudice against strong women, especially assertive working-class women. At the same time, it was easy for a record industry headquartered in London to play it safe, and simpler to market male rebellion in the form of rock bands than to promote assertive women performers. Not surprisingly, the typical career trajectory of most women artists in the 60s is highly ambivalent. Their songs and self-presentation present mixed messages as to whether the singer is rebelling against social roles, or simply modeling a new way of conforming to them.

Like Gracie Fields, Alma Cogan was a popular singer with a massive voice that belied her diminutive size. If Fields represented the exemplary career for a British woman pop singer, Cogan remained in this mold, although a transitional figure in key respects. For one, Cogan was native to London, from a family of East European Jews who immigrated to Golders Green in north London in the early 20th century. The East London audience identified with her, but crucially, Cogan came to represent the ethnic and racial mix of London’s East End to the nation at large. Most of her chart hits in Britain in the 1950s were taken from the American songbook: Tin Pan Alley pop hits written for American crooners. Most of the songs, like her version of Rosemary Clooney’s “Half as Much” had light jazz touches, without emphasizing the transatlantic origins of her musical sources. By the end of the decade, Cogan’s star image had evolved from the casual black dress and white collar typical of the lower middle class (as pictured on the Alma Cogan record cover [1953]) to the more classless “party girl,” dressed in cocktail hour attire, on the Dreamboat album cover. ⁴ The new persona suggested a notion of glamor clearly derived from Hollywood. The party girl figure would seem passé in the wake of Beatle-mania, as Cogan herself realized, but the transatlantic touches that became part of her star image in the late 50s anticipate the post-austerity style cultivated by British pop women in the next decade.

Cogan was a transitional figure in another regard. Unlike Fields, who took the Noel Coward route of living in exile from England, Cogan would never leave central London. Rather than separate herself from the music industry, she re-invested the cultural capital she accumulated in her career back into the idea of the city itself: reinvesting, as it were, in the spectacle of the metropolitan center. Even after the run of chart hits ended, Cogan remained a London celebrity, a favorite subject of the UK press on account of the all-night parties she threw at her apartment on Kensington High Street. The Cogan family residence at 44 Stafford Court became a salon for a transatlantic cast of popular singers and entertainers; regular visitors included celebrities such as Noel Coward, Tommy Steele, Sammy Davis, Jr., Audrey Hepburn, Yul Brynner, and countless others. At Brian Epstein’s insistence, the Beatles themselves would join the cast of “beautiful people” as soon as they left Liverpool for London in 1964. ⁵

Cogan’s salons represented the new milieu of classless celebrities. Her soirees also represented the singer’s investment back into the music industry that had supported her career. It reinforced the notion that London was a proper global music scene, and that the entertainment industry had a culture aside from money and power. In this regard, Cogan’s parties created a “spectacle” of “Swinging London” in Guy Debord’s sense: a powerful media image that reproduces the status quo of social hierarchy.

Cogan’s chart-reign ended soon after 1961, in part because the dated “party girl” image that originally launched her career seemed quaint in the changing times of the post-Macmillan era in Britain. The last years of Cogan’s recording career serve as a harsh reminder of the singer’s subaltern status in musical capitalism. Cogan made an attempt to revive her career by recording songs written by the Beatles and the Stones, only to find that her record company, EMI, was unwilling to release the results. ⁶ The resistance that Cogan received in her attempt to adapt to new modes of music production reveals the structural hierarchy between the singer and the recording industry that was there all along. Still, Cogan’s chief legacy for 60’s women artists was the example of an assertive singer who triumphed on account of her immersion within the structure of London music capitalism.

Petula Clark began as a popular entertainer in the Cogan mold, a pop vocalist whose talents were showcased by performing mainstream pop songs. Although her hits spoke to a new affluent and younger audience, Clark began her music career as a child star, just as film and Broadway star Julie Andrews would, singing with her father on the Variety stage and radio. Like Andrews, Clark’s career began during the Blitz, and her spirited singing resonated with wireless listeners in wartime. Clark also resembled Cogan in having a pop music career that overlapped with the late days of music hall and variety; f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 British Pop Women Singers of the 1960s and the Struggle for Modern Identity
• 2 Modernist Rock Constructs the Folk: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour
• 3 New Left in Victorian Drag: The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
• 4 The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and the Making of the Rock Auteur
• 5 Modernist Nostalgia: The Sex Pistols’ Music-Hall Revival
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index