Eel Pie Island

The excellent Another Nickel in the Machine - a site focusing on 20th century London -has recently featured some great photos of A Rave on Eel Pie Island in August 1960. I have reproduced a few here, check out the original post for more.


This was obviously a beatnik affair, complete with barefoot dancing - the music probably trad jazz, the preferred soundtrack for Britain's first generation of self-proclaimed ravers. A contemporary article reports 'The tolerant atmosphere in places like the Eel Pie Island club, off Twickenham, is at first surprising: up to 500 people will gather in the hall of a the derelict island hotel and, despite their often outlandish appearance, will listen and jive together all evening without incident' (Traditional Jazz is Booming, The Time, 12 August 1961). The scene doesn't look unlike a squat party rave of the last 20 years - graffiti on the wall, androgynous baggy clothes etc.

Eel Pie Island is located in the River Thames at Twickenham in South West London, and is a key location in London counter-cultural history, particularly the Eel Pie Hotel and its dancehall. Before the Second World War it was popular for ballroom dancing, then in the 1950s hosted jazz raves (like the one pictured here), before becoming a launchpad for English R&B, with bands like The Rolling Stones and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers playing there.

A 1967 article describes Eel Pie Island as 'for the past 10 years a Mecca of the long-haired ban-the-bombers.. On three evenings a week, the humped footbridge linking the island with the mainland supports a bedraggled procession of young people who trek from all over the country to spend a few hours a the island's famous jazz club. The throbbing, smoky atmosphere of the big hall where they dance, and the jungle of rough grass and bushes leading to the edge of the Thames forms a wild haven for non-conformists'.

The article goes on to disclose 'The Secret of Eel Pie Island' - that the club is partially a 'beatnik experiment', an 'open therapeutic community' run by Arthur Chisnall, a sociologist 'as an experiment in reaching and helping disturbed youngsters in their search for a purpose in life...Beatniks and delinquents who have drifted to the island over the years have since found their way to colleges, universities and into the social service' (Times, 6 January 1967)

The hotel closed in 1967, but the club reopened for a while in 1969 as Colonel Barefoot's Rock Garden, featuring underground acts like Hawkwind and The Edgar Broughton Band. The place was then occupied for a nominal rent by the Eel Pie Commune (1969-71) - there is an interesting article by the anarchist illustrator and Commune founder Clifford Harper here describing those two years of drugs, hippiedom and political arguments: 'It had 25 bedrooms and at one point 100 people from all over the world were at Eel Pie Island. It was anarchy... It had a big lawn and some grounds and the hotel was full of people... Part of the hotel we opened as a dance hall on Friday and Saturday night. Out in the suburbs, six to seven hundred kids would turn up'.

In his memoir, Eel Pie Dharma, Chris Faiers remembers: 'The old hotel rapidly filled with dossers, hippies, runaway schoolkids, drug dealers, petty thieves, heroin addicts, artists, poets, bikers, American hippie tourists, au pair girls, and Zen philosophers from all over the world... The derelict Eel Pie ballroom was opened for business once again. It looked like a high school gym done over by hippies. There were garish psychedelic paintings all over the flaking walls. The most striking was the looming head of a red-eyed hippie king, with his Aubrey Beardsley tresses winding about the walls'.

Some great parties I am sure, but not a libertarian utopia - as usual where drugs and money are involved, some very dodgy characters were drawn to the honeypot. Another participant recalls that 'the only guns seen were those produced 18 months later by some East End gangsters, brought in to ensure the dance-hall's peaceful transition of authority from the patronage of a nearby Hells Angels chapter to that of a slightly more professional management'.

The Hotel was burned down in 1971 in the midst of a controversy about Richmond Council issuing a demolition order for the building to pave the way for a contentious redevelopment of the site.

A new book on Eel Pie Island by Dan Van der Vat & Michele Whitby is due to be published in October 2009.

Fahrenheit 451

Contemporary debates about the social impact of personal music devices were anticipated in Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953. Many years before the Sony Walkman, let alone ipods and music playing mobile phones, Bradbury imagined a world in which most people permanently wear 'Audio-Seashells'.

Montag, the novel's main character rejects them, but his wife is plugged in day and night: 'In her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk coming in'.

It is a world in which books are banned and Firemen have been redeployed to track them down and burn them (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature book paper catches alight). In this context, Bradbury presents the Seashells as part of an apparatus of mind numbing distraction along with the 'Four-wall televisor' (a living room with a screen on all walls) and an endless diet of sports and light entertainment. This apparatus prevents critical thinking, communication and anything but the most superficial relationships between human beings: 'the walls of the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music composed entirely of trap drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it'.

Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in Francois Truffaut's 1966 film version

Montag's fireman boss justifies the system to him as one that has smoothed out all social contradictions: 'If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides of a question to worry about; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy'. Against this, 'A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it."

Ultimately the distraction proves fatal, the city's inhabitants engrossed in soap opera and music as the bombs down on them.

For me the critique of information vs. thought certainly has some validity, but I've always been uncomfortable with the familiar complaint that people are spending too much time enjoying themselves with 'trivial' pleasures (often made by men against women as is largely the case in F451). Yes, there's something disturbing about people turning a blind eye to the horrors and atrocities around them, though equally it is true that many of these horrors have been perpetrated precisely by men who have rejected the domestic and the intimate in pursuit of higher 'ideals', heroism and power. Maybe the world would be a better place if Hitlers, Stalins and their ilk were content to spend more time dancing to the radio.

The elitism that such a stance implies is apparent in Bradbury; at one point he refers to 'The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority'. I would have thought the dictatorship of a minority is at least as big a problem.

There's also a fear of music at work here, a fear of being engulfed, invaded, penetrated by sound: 'A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness'. Sounds like my idea of a good night out!

Slim Gaillard, Jack Kerouac and Me

In Hanif Kureishi's latest novel, Something to Tell You, the narrator mentions being in a club in London in the late 1970s and meeting Slim Gaillard (1911-1991), prompting him to remark 'There can't have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road... this was a man who'd known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth'. It reminded me that I too once saw Slim Gaillard (1916-1991), in the late 1980s (1987?) playing in a room above the Alexandra pub opposite Clapham Common in South London, I believe at a Hi Note jazz club night. By this time he was an old man, singing songs and still doing his trademark stream of consciousness private 'o-reenee' dialect (apparently he was accompanied by Jason Rebello on piano).

Other than his age it wasn't vastly different from the scene described by Jack Kerouac in "On The Road" (written in 1951): '... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C's, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing 'C-Jam Blues' and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages'.

Well in Clapham I don't recall bongos or people sitting on the floor, but I guess I was a 'young semi intellectual'! That was my only direct encounter with someone from the beat generation, other than once hearing Brion Gysin give a talk in Bedford library of all places (standing in for William Burroughs who didn't show- this was mid-80s).

More on the Alexandra and dancing in Brixton and beyond in late 1980s here

Queer Albert Hall

'Queer urban culture was the site of diverse intersecting modes of queerness and "normality," coalescing around their desires for homosex, sociability, and intimacy. These antagonisms crystallized in two prominent annual events: the Chelsea Arts Ball and Lady Malcolm's Servants' Ball -both held at the Royal Albert Hall.

1926 Chelsea Arts Ball (from Getty Images)

The former, in particular, was a centerpiece in the metropolitan social calendar, a New Year's Eve costume ball that attracted massive media attention and crowds of up to 7,000 socialites, artists, and ordinary Londoners in elaborate fancy dress. These "true pageants" were, observed Kenneth Hare in 1926, notable for their "variety, inventiveness, vivacity and colour." For many men, becoming part of this carnival gener­ated a palpable sense of release. Hundreds of working-class queans flocked to both balls, discarding the masks they wore in everyday life, wearing drag, dressing outrageously, and socializing unashamedly while never appearing to be anything out of the ordinary. In so doing, they were further protected by the Albert Hall's unique legal status: it was outside the Met's operational sphere. For once, temporarily and locally, men could fully escape police sur­veillance.

A 50-feet high mermaid designed by Ronald Searle for the 1954 Chelsea Arts Ball
(from Perpetua - Ronald Searle tribute blog)

The results were spectacular. In 1934, one observer described "groups of men dressed in coloured silk blouses and tight-hipped trousers ... lips ... rouged and faces painted. By their attitude and general behaviour they were obviously male prostitutes."...

1947 Chelsea Arts Ball, taken by Tony Linck, sourced from the Life Archive

From the early 1930s the organizers of both events were increasingly exercised by these "disgraceful scenes," and a nagging sense that men's behavior was somehow out of control. In 1936, Lady Malcolm herself wrote cryptically - apparently in some desperation-to the Times: 'Each year I notice at the ball a growing number of people, who, to be frank, are not of the class for whom the ball is designed. It is what it is called- a servants' ball, and I am jealous that it shall go on deserving that name."Both balls employed private stewards to maintain "order" and exclude "undesirables." From 1933, having failed to secure a police presence, Malcolm employed two ex-CID officers to remove any identifiable "sexual perverts." From 1935 tickets were sold with the proviso that "NO MAN IMPERSONATING A WOMAN AND NO PERSON UNSUITABLY ATTIRED WILL BE ADMITTED". On entry, men's costumes had to be approved by a "Board of Scrutineers." Whatever they tried, however, the organizers could neither keep the "Degenerate Boys" out nor adequately contain their visibility; indeed, they often struggled even to identify them amidst the fancy dressed crowds. In 1938, an observer thus described the "extraordinary number of undesirable men at this Ball who were unmis­takably of the Homo-Sexual and male prostitute types." Well into the 1950s, the balls remained, in Stephen's words, "a great Mecca for the gay world."

Working-class men reappropriated two high-profile public events, creat­ing a space at the center of metropolitan culture in which they could be together and socialize free of the constraints that braced everyday queer lives.'

1947 Chelsea Arts Ball, taken by Tony Linck, sourced from the Life Archive

Quote: Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 - Matt Houlbrook (University of Chicago Press, 2005) - I couldn't find any specifically drag photos, but these images certainly show that this was some party.

George Brecht

George Brecht (1926-2008), Fluxus artist, died last month.

His many sound pieces included 'Drip Music' (1959): 'For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel' and 'Comb Music' (1959): 'For a single or multiple performance. A comb is held by its spine in one hand, either free or resting on an object. The thumb or a finger on the other hand is held with its tip against the end prong of a comb, with the edge of the nail overlapping the end of a prong. The finger is slowly and uniformly moved so that the prong is inevitably released, and the nail engages the next prong. This action is repeated until each prong has been used'.



Photo is of him performing 'Solo for Violin' (1964) at 359 Canal Street, New York City during Flux Fest at Fluxhall - a piece for which the score reads simply 'polishing'.

More Soho Nights: Hand Jive

More on Soho Nights from today's Guardian:

'... in 1956, I heard about this new dance craze called hand-jiving. So I made a number of visits to a coffee bar called The Cat's Whiskers in Soho. Cliff Richard used to appear there. I remember the place was crowded with young kids when I arrived. It was pretty late, but not after midnight. In those days, midnight was the witching hour; things closed up after that. I did not speak to anyone, but I do remember the atmosphere was very jolly. Wholesome would be a good word. And the reason they were jiving with their hands was just because there was precious little room to do it with their feet. Everyone was doing it, which was quite a bizarre sight.
The craze just fascinated me. It seemed like a strange novelty, but it really caught on. There were quite a few variations they could do, like one called the mashed potato... What's more, hand-jiving was an activity that everyone shared and had a go at in their own particular style. Not being a great jive artist myself, it was one of the things I could do, and I used to join in. .

Ken Russell's work features in Soho Nights, at the Photographers' Gallery, London W1 (0845 262 1618), until 8 February.

Soho Nights

Showing at the Photographers Gallery in London at the moment is Soho Nights, an exhibition of photographs of London nightlife in the 1950s.



There’s a group of 1957 pictures taken by Ken Russell in the Cat’s Whisker (above), a Soho coffee bar, with a quote from a Daily Mirror article Teenagers of Soho (1.4.1957): ‘It’s so crowded the girls “hand jive” to the band as there’s no room for dancing’. The suggestion seems to be that hand jive developed because that was all there was space to do – wonder if that’s true?

The Cat's Whisker was in Kingly Street, and was an important venue in the skiffle scene - see this 1957 article from Time Magazine: 'Into umbrous, ill-ventilated underground caverns, seemingly as necessary to life as the air-raid shelters where some of the visitors were born, thousands of bemused young Londoners squeeze nightly to stomp and holler their approval of Britain's latest musical mania: U.S. rock 'n' roll, commercial hillbilly and folk music, warmed over and juiced up in a mishmash called skiffle... To the Soho hipsters who swelter and suffocate for it in the Cat's Whisker, the Côte d'Azur or The Two I's, skiffle is brand-new'.

There’s also a series of photographs taken by Charles ‘Slim’ Hewitt at Cy Laurie’s trad jazz club in 1954 (examples below). They were originally taken for an article featuring the club in Picture Post magazine that is included in the exhibition, ‘Blue Heaven in the Basement’ (10.7.1954) : ‘it is a hypnotic, ecstatic, musical experience… There are no non-partisans. The dancers are expert and frenzied… On Friday nights there is always a queue of black and blue jeans quietly intent on forcing the “House Full” sign’.

The exhibition includes a whole series of shots that were not used in the Picture Post piece and they are very striking and timeless – multi-racial dancers in jeans, striped tops, bare feet.

Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club was held downstairs at Mac's Rehearsal Rooms at 41 Great Windmill Street, Soho, and opened in 1953 - see previous posts on this scene.

Teddy Girls

I am hoping to get to the Photographers Gallery (London) next week for an exhibition on 1950s Soho Nights which apparently includes some images by Ken Russell. I am sorry I missed the Bombsite Boudiccas exhibition a couple of years ago, featuring pictures Russell took of London Teddy Girls in 1955.



For the launch of the exhibition at the Spitz in East London, the organisers tracked down some of the women in the photographs, as reported in the Times:

'"We weren’t bad girls,” says Rose Shine, then Rose Hendon, who was 15 when she posed for Russell. “We were all right. We got slung out of the picture house for jiving up the aisles once, but we never broke the law. We weren’t drinkers. We’d go to milk bars, have a peach melba and nod to the music, but you weren’t allowed to dance. It was just showing off: ‘Look at us!’ We called the police ‘the bluebottles’ – you’d see them come round in a Black Maria to catch people playing dice on the corner. But we’d just sit on each other’s doorsteps and play music.”

The teddy girls left school at 14 or 15, worked in factories or offices, and spent their free time buying or making their trademark clothes – pencil skirts, rolled-up jeans, flat shoes, tailored jackets with velvet collars, coolie hats and long, elegant clutch bags. It was head-turning, fastidious dressing, taken from the fashion houses of the time, which had launched haute-couture clothing lines recalling the Edwardian era. Soon the fashion had leapt across the class barrier, and young working-class men and women in London picked up the trend.

...Rose and her group of West End teddy girls would meet at the Seven Feathers Club in Edenham Street, North Kensington, a youth club popular with both the boys and the girls. “There was a jukebox and dancing,” she says. “Just tea and cakes, because we didn’t go to pubs then. It wasn’t until we were 20 that we might go to the pub. We weren’t bad, not like some of the boys. There was this song called Rip It Up… Well, the boys, they used to go and rip the seats.”

...Teddy girls from different parts of London rarely mingled. Grace Curtis (then Grace Living) was one of the girls Russell photographed in the East End. “We hung out down the Docklands Settlement – a club where there was space for dancing and boxing. We were East End. In those days you just stuck to your area. There was a little snack bar in the club where you could buy drinks and we just all got together and danced.”

Both women hoot with excitement when they remember dancing The Creep by Ken Mackintosh – a slow shuffle of a dance so popular with teddy boys that it led to their other nickname of “creepers”. “It’s the best dance,” says Curtis. “You used to dance or jive with your girlfriends, but for The Creep you could choose your partner. You could pick up a fella and go and dance with him.”

(more at When the Girls come out to play, Times, 5 March 2006)

The bottom photograph shows Elsie Hendon, 15, Jean Rayner, 14, Rosie Hendon, 15, and Mary Toovey on a bombsite in Southam Street, North Kensington, West London.

The Gyre & Gimble Coffee House: London 1950s

In the ongoing documentation of the history of London nightlife, I have mentioned before the cellar coffee bars of the West End in the 1950s. One such place was the Gyre and Gimble Coffee House (obviously named after the line in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky), situated near to Charing Cross Station in John Adam Street.

In 1956, Johnny Booker (1934-2007) took over as manager of the Gyre and Gimble (sometimes known as 'the G's') and began to play music there with friends who became the nucleus of The Vipers, one of the foremost bands in the 1950s skiffle scene. They had a number of hit records, with Booker (recording as 'Johnny Martyn') as one of the singers). Other musicians hung out at the coffee house, including folk guitarist Davey Graham, Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart and soon-to-be English pop star Tommy Steele (as writer and fellow G's habitué Michael Moorcock recalls).

In the book The Map is not the Territory, artist and Situationist Ralph Rumney, recalls an encounter in the G&G with Steele that the latter would probably rather forget (he doesn't mention in his 'Bermondsey Boy' autobiography):

"There was a place called the Gyre and Gimble in a basement in Adams Street that one used to go in at night. and you'd buy a coffee and they'd let you nod off on the table. And Tommy Steele used to come in there and twang on his guitar and sing and make an awful racket, and all of us were just trying to have a quiet kip and we kept telling him to shut up and he wouldn't. And I had a very large friend at that time - Gerald, he was called - who was a bit of a thug...

Anyway, he came down one night - well, he used to come down every night - but he came down one night and Tommy Steele was twanging away as usual - Rock Island Line and skiffle - Rockin' with the Caveman - it was really tiresome. because he didn't have much of a repertoire in those days. And from the top of the stairs Gerald yelled out STOP THAT RACKET. and Tommy Steele didn't. So Gerald just put his hand on the banister, leapt over it. and landed on Tommy Steele, feet first. and cracked about four of his ribs, so he had to be taken to hospital. Which got us barred for about three days [laughs]. And we never saw Tommy Steele there again".

There's a more positive account at the excellent Classic Cafes: 'A dingy narrow doorway, with the name of the establishment in barely-legible swirly lettering, led down stairs which opened up into a very large basement area. The smoky dive had low crude wooden tables and chairs and the whole place had a rustic feel. A sort of menu was scrawled on one of the dark walls, but I had no appetite for eating there. Most of the customers looked as though they had not seen daylight for some time. The coffee however was very good and in generously large cups... Polly and I became regulars at the Gyre & Gimble and joined an informal group of pseudo-intellectuals who used to meet there on Sunday evenings. They had dubbed themselves The New Day Dadaists and in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp discussed ideas to mock the art establishment. They even got as far to putting out an advertisement for an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite painting at a derelict house in Bloomsbury. Really radical'.

Certainly some interesting cross-cultural/counter-cultural traffic through this place, prompting questions about connections real or imagined: did anarchist Sci-Fi writer Moorcock know Rumney? Was the latter one of the 'New Day Dadaists'? Could history have taken a different turn so that Rod Stewart ended up with the Situationists in Paris in May 1968 instead of touring the States with the Jeff Beck Group?

Are you trad or mod? (London 1958)

A great piece from 1958, I believe from the Daily Mirror - journalist Anne Allen goes on a tour of London jazz clubs to try and understand the split between 'trad' and 'mod' jazz. As is clear from this article this was not just a musical dispute between the fans of 'traditional' New Orlean jazz and modern jazz - there were also stylistic differences. This was a critical junction in post-war youth culture - from the jazz enthusiasts of London run two different trajectories, the dress down trad-beatnik-hippy line and the sharp dressing-working class dandy-mod line (with the original mods being modern jazz enthusiasts):

"We went to Cy Laurie’s, a home of ‘Trad’. Down steep stairs to a room lighted only near the band and in the corners we found a hundred or so youngsters, average age about 20. Most of them were in the midst of a hectic jive session. Some were glued to the walls in gloomy concentration on the music.

Some members come three or four times a week and being in the swim is manifested by a sort of nightmare uniform. Long straight hair for the girls, black or scarlet stockings, fisherman’s knit sweaters reaching to the knees or long tube dresses.

Little beards were common and a lot of the men had tight-cut trousers with a distinctive stripe. I was told that the thing of the moment, exclusive to this club, was the turning round of clerical collars.

The overwhelming impression was of heat. The amount of thick woollen clothing currently fashionable must be nearly insupportable after hours of lightning-quick jiving...

I got nowhere in my efforts to find out their jobs. They just did not admit to working although some were obviously bona fide students.

Had we dressed the part for this club we should not have been allowed into the other club we visited – the Flamingo, the home of Modern jazz. Even silk mufflers are frowned on here and the manager insists on lending a tie to anyone with out one. Most of the members came to listen. Only a few danced, and then in a minute space with the least possible movement

Three bands played while we there. No single one could possibly maintain the pace throughout the whole evening. There was almost no pause between numbers and the music was ear-splitting.

There was less of a social club atmosphere here… Again and again I was told ‘it depends what band is playing. We follow the band’. Such is their devotion that they come from as far away as Nottingham and Bournemouth. A little older than the Trad fans down the road they also seemed more steadily employed – shipping clerk, apprentice printer, builder, shop assistant, music student. The list was endlessly varied.

...And never forget that they are not licensed for drinks, and the two we saw were absolutely rigid about the ‘Members Only’ rule… nowhere did we find anything stronger to drink that a ‘coke’.

See also London Jazz Clubs 1950s. Thanks to Steve Fletcher for sending in this clipping - he is actually in the photo on the left - and for this flyer from the Cy Laurie Jazz Club at 41 Great Windmill Street in Soho. Note the invitation to 'Dance or listen to Jazz! Styled in the New Orleans idiom'. The club was indeed open every night of the week with bands including Bill Brunskills Jazzmen, the Graham Stewart Seven, the Brian Taylor Jazzmen and of course the Cy Laurie Band - sometimes with a skiffle group - skiffle also emerged from this scene.

Memories, flyers and clippings from this scene or any other always welcome - email address is in right hand box.

For Laika

Thanks to John Hutnyk at Trinketization for reminding me that today is the 51st anniversary of the launch of Spuntnik 2, with its passenger Laika the dog becoming both the first mammal in space and the first space fatality a few hours later.

I've discussed the first songs in space by a man and a woman, but perhaps the honour should go to a dog whimpering in zero gravity. There have been quite a few Laika references in music - indeed there's both a Finnish band called Laika & The Cosmonauts and a UK band, Laika (who I once saw at the Venue in New Cross supporting, I think, Spirtitualized Electric Mainline).

The best of a number of songs referring to the dog is by Arcade Fire - not so much a song about the dog as one evoking the sadness of Laika being sent away to die as a metaphor for the fate of an errant brother ('Our mother should have just named you Laika! It's for your own good, It's for the neighborhood').

It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo

Around 1950 a new music and dance craze swept across the Americas - Mambo. It had emerged in Cuba during the 1930s as a series of variations within existing styles before becoming seen as something new, distinct and fashionable.

In New York, the key centre for Mambo was the Palladium dance hall in Manhattan. After visiting it in 1951, writer Jess Stearn wrote an article for the New York Daily News with the headline: 'Touch of Jungle Madness: Denizens of Broadway go Slightly Primitive under Spell of the Wild Sweaty Mambo'. The article continued 'it may turn the Great White Way into a veritable Congoland before it is through. It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo'.

David Garcia argues that such statements - not uncommon amongst writers in the USA and Cuba - reflected a 'shared sense of anxiety over and desire for racial and cultural Others whose sounds and bodily movements did not complement those commentators' concepts of a culturally and racially homogeneous nation'. They tended to cast 'Latin musicians and mambo music as relics of the remote or "primitive" human past' and by implication not belonging in the present on equal terms with other musics or indeed people.

Dance teachers saw a potential new market in popularising Mambo, but only by reducing it to a simplified series of steps. In a 1951 article in Dance Magazine, Don Byrnes and Alice Swanson argued that 'It is now the responsibility of the teacher to standardize, discipline and properly present this thrilling dance to make it acceptable'.

By contrast, Garcia found that 'Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers... emphasize the individuated, extemporaneous and communal aspects that defined and inspired their dancing in the 1940s and 1950s'. In contrast to rigid steps, the first generation of Mambo dancers stressed 'feeling the music', inner emotions, spontaneity and dancing as 'an embodied experience, in which sound and movement were merged through the body'.

Source: Going primitive to the movements and sounds of Mambo, David F. Garcia in Musical Quarterly, volume 89 (4), Winter 2006

Some great footage of Mambo dancing in Harlem in early 1950s, posted by the folks at dancehistory.org:

Pop! What is it Good For?

Lots of programmes about English pop music since World War Two on BBC4 in the past couple of weeks, some of them featuring the usual lazy mix of received wisdom and the same old clips of footage you’ve seen a million times before. Paul Morley though can usually be relied on for some intelligent perspective and I enjoyed his Pop! What is Good For?

At one point Morley asked Robert Wyatt what a pop song is for, in the context of his memories of the first wave of pop in the 1950s and specifically Adam Faith’s What do you want? (1958). Wyatt’s answer, aside from some time and place-specific details, could surely still apply today: “it connects you with other people. You’ve got the scene here, you’ve got the cafe, the jukebox... you’ve got girls there with their pink lipstick on. And silence, except... awkward conversations. Then you put on the jukebox then suddenly the whole room, everybody knows it, everybody can tap their feet to it. It makes a big full warm living thing out of the room where it was cold separate isolated individuals before”.

Remembering George Melly

Just a few months after the death of his former bandmate Mick Mulligan, another of the great jazz ravers has died - George Melly. We have mentioned here before his role in the 40s and 50s revivalist jazz scene in London, seemingly the time when people in England first used the word 'rave' for a party. There's lots more to be said about Melly - as pop culture writer, libertarian, surrealist for a start - but for now here's an extract from his 1965 book Owning Up, describing dance hall venues in the early 1950s (by the way does anyone know where Le Metro club he refers to was?).

During this period the band was rehearsing for its first public appearance... we used the upper rooms of various pubs. I suppose that most of early British revivalist jazz emerged from the same womb. Rehearsal rooms existed, of course, but we never thought of hiring one at that time. They were part of the professional world of which we knew nothing.

Many of these pub rooms were temples of 'The Ancient Order of Buffaloes', that mysterious proletarian version of the 'Freemasons', and it was under dusty horns and framed nine­teenth-century characters that we struggled through 'Sunset Cafe Stomp' or 'Miss Henny's Ball'.

Although we had not yet performed we already had a name. The fashion was for something elaborate and nostalgic. Admit­tedly Humph was satisfied with 'Humphrey Lyttelton and His Band' but he swam in deep water. Among the minnows, names like 'The Innebriated Seven', 'Denny Coffey and His Red Hot Beans', and 'Mike Daniel's Delta Jazzmen' were more typical. Mick decided on 'Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band'...

We still played a few jazz clubs, mostly in the provinces, and, due to the fact that several towns still wouldn't license Sunday cinemas, there was the odd concert. Most of our jobs, however, were in dance halls. The dance halls of Great Britain, the halls, that is, where dances are held, can be subdivided into various groups. Start­ing at the top are the great Palais, some, like Mecca, part of a nation-wide chain, others individually owned.

The Mecca Halls are standardized so that once you're inside you might be anywhere in the country. They are run like mili­tary organizations in which the musicians are privates. The band-rooms are full of printed rules: no alcohol to be brought on to the premises (we were actually frisked in some places), no women allowed behind stage except for band vocalists, no frat­ernization with the public. The decor is usually Moorish in inspiration. There are strange bulbous ashtrays on thick stems, a forest of lights sprouting from the ceiling, bouncers with cauliflower ears circling the dance floor in evening dress, revolving stages and managers with safes in their offices and 1930 moustaches.

The privately-owned halls were on the whole a great im­provement. Of course they very much depended on the character of the manager or owner. Some of these suffer from a Napoleon complex. The hall is their Europe, the visiting band­leader an ear which cannot refuse to listen to their grandiose schemes and delusions. Others are friendly and courteous men who ask you in for a drink after the dance and become, over the years, familiar faces in the endless repetitive nomadic round.

The decor of the dance halls outside the big chains was as varied as their owners. Some were luxurious, influenced by the Festival of Britain, given to a wall in a different colour, wall­papers of bamboo poles or grey stones, false ceilings and modern light fittings made of brass rods and candle-bulbs. Others were as bare as aeroplane hangars, or last decorated during the early picture palace era. Mick's inevitable comment as we staggered in with our cases and instruments into these was, 'What a shit-house!'

There was also a series of halls over branches of Montague Burtons and Co-ops. There were always a great many very steep steps to drag the drum kit up. We also played for promoters whose offices were either in London or some large provincial town, but who covered a par­ticular area and hired halls which had other day-time func­tions.

Territorial Halls where the floor was marked out with white lines and there were posters showing muscular young soldiers giving a thumb up in a jungle or diagrams of a machine gun with the parts painted different colours.

Corn exchanges, often rather beautiful nineteenth-century buildings with glass roofs and terrible acoustics. Round the circular walls were little wood-encased partitions with the names of cattle-food firms or grain merchants painted across the back in faded trompe-Foeil Victorian lettering.

Above all the town halls, massive monuments to civic pride in St Pancras Gothic, where we played on stages big enough to seat an entire chorus and orchestra for 'The Messiah', and the young bloods of Huddersfield or Barnsley staggered green-faced from the bar in a vain attempt to make the gents, and were messily sick under a statue of Queen Victoria or the portrait of some bearded mayor hanging above the marble staircase.

The jazz clubs were moments of release and pleasure from this dismal round. We didn't have to change into uniform, we could drink and smoke on the stage, above all we knew the audience would be on our side and that we would only have to play jazz. In London, too, we made a deliberate effort to go on playing jazz for kicks. At the beginning of the week, unless we were away on a long tour, we were usually in town, and every Tues­day we played in a cellar club which catered for French stu­dents and was called 'Le Metro'. The club had a curved ceiling and did look rather like a tube tunnel. Behind the bandstand was painted an unconvincing metro train. The bar had Lautrec posters in it.

Rik Gunnell and The Flamingo

An obituary in The Guardian today for music promoter Rik Gunnell (1931-2007). The clubs he was involved in were critical in London music in the 1950s and 1960s, most famously The Flamingo in Wardour Street where 'In the club's basement, black and white people mingled to an extent unknown elsewhere in London in the 1960s. Judy Garland dropped in to the club's AllNighter, and Christine Keeler played off her lovers there. A who's who of British rock and R&B appeared at the Flamingo under his aegis and a breathtaking roll call of Americans, including Stevie Wonder, Bill Haley, Patti LaBelle, John Lee Hooker and Jerry Lee Lewis'.

Other clubs he was linked to included 'Studio 51, a jazz club where the new bebop was played' after World War Two; the 2-Way Jazz Club (from 1952); the Blue Room (also 1952), featuring modern jazz; The Star in Wardour Street; Club Basic in Charing Cross Road; and Leicester Square's Mapleton hotel. The latter became an all-nighter called Club Americana in 1955 , and Gunnell started extra nights there as Club M which became popular with 'African-American servicemen based then in Britain; and 'Caribbean and African settlers of the Windrush generation'. He moved to the Flamingo in 1958; when it closed in in 1967, Gunnell took over the Bag O'Nails in Kingly Street.

Good stuff on 1960s British r'n'b and soul at Brown Eyed Handsome Man.

Ted Heath & Nat King Cole Shake Up Birmingham Alabama '56

The Ted Heath Orchestra were the ultimate in British pre-rock'n'roll light entertainment (Ted is pictured in 1958). The same could be said in the US for Nat King Cole. If their style was as non-confrontational as could be, they could still shake things up in the racist southern states of the USA, as was shown on their tour together in 1956. Ronnie Chamberlain, who played sax for Heath recalled:

‘We went on the road with Nat King Cole and he was attacked. It was horrible. We were booked to play in Birmingham, Alabama, and the guys in his trio were absolutely scared stiff saying, 'We don't want to go there man.' We did our show first and when Nat came on they insisted that the curtain was drawn in front of us so they couldn't see the white band accompanying this 'nigger' singer as they called him. That's how they talked down there, 'Are you with this nigger group?' We couldn't believe it. Leigh Young, Lester Young's brother, was the drummer with Nat and he was the MD and of course we couldn't see him through this curtain. It was absolute chaos and we just had to stop. In the end they relented and pulled back the curtain and big applause went up from the audience. Then there was a commotion and a guy came running down the aisle, jumped onto the stage and was on top of Nat and got him on the floor. The concert stopped immediately and we all went off. I felt really sick and went outside and puked, it frightened me so much. Poor Nat was in a terrible state and the audience were just as shocked as we were. In those days they had segregation with the whites one side, and the blacks the other side but the whole audience were as one, and afterwards someone stood up and apologised for the terrible behaviour to Nat and the band' (source: Talking Swing: the British Big Bands by Sheila Tracy, 1997).

British music paper New Musical Express (April 13 1956) also reported this incident: "One of the world's most talented and respected singing stars, Nat "King" Cole, was the victim of a vicious attack by a gang of six men at Birmingham (Alabama), during his performance at a concert on Tuesday. His assailants rushed down the aisles during his second number and clambered over the footlights. They knocked Nat down with such force that he hit his head and back on the piano stool, and they then dragged him into the auditorium. Police rushed from the wings and were just in time to prevent the singer from being badly beaten up. They arrested six men, one of whom is a director of the White Citizen's Council - a group which has been endeavouring to boycott "bop and Negro music" and are supporters of segregation of white and coloured people. The audience—numbering over 3,000—was all white" (note Chamberlain remembered the latter differently).

Hampstead Heath Rave 1955

Steve Fletcher has sent this great photo of himself and then girlfriend at a jazz 'rave' on Hampstead Heath in 1955.

According to Steve, The Ken Colyer Band played at this event. Ken Colyer was a key figure in the 'New Orleans' infuenced English jazz scene in the 1950s, with regular all nighters at his club at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street, London WC1. The Ken Colyer Club also provided a platform for the emerging British R'n'B scene in the early 1960s, with The Rolling Stones playing there regularly.

The 1950s trad and revivalist jazz scenes interest me as a largely unwritten chapter in the history of English youth cultures. Most people assume that it all started with rock'n'roll, but as discussed elsewhere on this site jazz raves were being held from the early 50s.

There is something very timeless about this photo - with his stripy top and glasses Steve could have been a member of Orange Juice in the early 1980s or maybe The Long Blondes today.

More posts on 1950s jazz raves here.

Rave Magazine 1950s

This US magazine cover is from 1954. By this point the word 'rave' was already being used in London to describe all night parties in the jazz scene.

Was it being similarly used in the US? I suspect that this magazine was using 'rave' in the earlier sense as in 'rave reviews' or even 'raving mad'. Buddy Holly seems to have this sense of raving - rather than dancing -in his 1958 hit 'Rave On':

"Rave on, rave on and tell me, Tell me not to be lonely, Tell me you love me only, rave on to me".

If anyone can find evidence of 'rave' being used as a noun to describe a party in the USA in this period, or even earlier, I would be interested to hear about it.

The Ravers Next Step: into the 1960s

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a new scene was developing, based around 'traditional jazz'. The musical distinction was that while the former favoured the 1920s jazz band sound found on Chicago recordings by Louis Armstrong and others, advocates of the latter claimed that the real New Orleans sound was to be found in the music of players who had never left the city to head North, unlike Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. This search for the ever-receding holy grail of authenticity was mocked by some at the time. Jeff Nuttall recalls that "Uncle John Renshaw, a band­leader of the time, used to say with some irony 'I'm in the sincerity racket, meself.'"

Despite its antiquarian musical roots, the trad jazz scene (and the related skiffle scene) was very much a youth sub culture of 'ravers'. Nuttall recalls that in the mid-1950s:

"Soho was alive with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz could be played and heard informally and where the rich odour of marihuana became, for the first time, a familiar part of the London atmosphere. Sam Widges was the most popular. Also there was the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm. They were open most of the night and often the management would leave you to sleep where you sat. It was a place to stay in the dry if you didn't want to go home. It became obvious that parental control was going to stop at about the age of fifteen for a large number of young people. Teenage wages were going up and so were student grants. It was becoming possible to push the leaky boat of adult delusions a little further away. The Soho Fair, which ran annually for three years [1955-7], was a festival of the ravers. Bands and guitars and cossack hats and sheepskin waistcoats flooded out of the cellars and into the streets. It was so good that it had to be stopped, so good that it was in the first Soho Fair that the real spirit of Aldermaston was born'. Trad jazz bands provided the soundtrack on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to or from Aldermaston nuclear weapons base from 1958 (picture of dancers is from 1958 march).

In a 1962 New Statesman article, George Melly described 'An All-Night Rave at the Alexandra Palace', a "'trad' ball" where "Band followed band from 9.30 P.M. until 7.30 A.M. the next morning. The audience were dressed almost without exception in 'rave gear'... the essence of 'rave gear' is a stylized shabbiness. To describe an individual couple, the boy was wearing a top hat with 'Acker' painted on it, a shift made out of a sugar sack with a C.N.D. symbol painted on the back, jeans, and no shoes. The girl, a bowler hat with a C.N.D. symbol on it, a man's shirt worn outside her black woollen tights. Trad' dancing in the con­temporary sense is deliberately anti-dancing. When I first went to jazz clubs, there were usually one or two very graceful and clever couples. But today the ac­cepted method of dancing to trad music is to jump heavily from foot to foot like a performing bear, pref­erably out of time to the beat... Trad musicians have chris­tened these self-made elephants 'Leapniks'." The Acker referred to here was Acker Bilk, the jazz clarinettist and unlikely musical figurehead for late 1950s/early 1960s ravers.

The trad jazz scene as a youth movement was soon to be overwhelmed by The Beatles and everything that followed. In the semi-situationist journal Heatwave (1966), Charles Radcliffe included the ravers in The Seeds of Destruction, a ground-breaking survey of 'youth revolt':

"The Ravers... had some Beat characteristics and rather tenuous connections with the anti-bomb movement but their main preoccupations were Jazz clubs and Jazz festivals; this was the period when ersatz traditional (Trad) Jazz, as purveyed by Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and others was inordinately popular. Partly Trad's popularity arose in reaction to the decline of the small fifties Beat scene; it was easy to dance to and Jazz clubs were among the few places where teenagers could do more or less as they wished without adult interference. Partly it arose because the musicians did not take themselves too seriously and were often simply good-time Ravers".

Ravers' dress was a kind of "'music-hall-cum-riverboat-cum-contemporary-folk-art' with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol decorated bowlers, umbrellas, striped trousers, elegant jackets. The chicks had long hair, wore ban-the-bomb type uniforms (duffle coats, polo-neck jerseys, very loose around the hips, and jeans). The Ravers were, on the whole, distrusted by other groups with whom they came into contact; the Beats used the term 'Raver' derogatorily and the nuclear disarmers treated Ravers' 'superficiality' with superior amusement and occasional annoyance... The Ravers, as such, died with the 'traditional' Jazz boom but the 'Raver philosophy' continues and there are once again groups calling themselves Ravers. The term has likewise regained its approbatory meaning after the frequent critical use by the CND generation".

Here we have a phenomenon that was to re-emerge with 'ravers' from the 1980s onwards - the use of the term as a put down by the would-be serious minded.

The George Melly quote is reproduced from 'Revolt into Style: the pop arts' (1970); Jeff Nuttall from 'Bomb Culture' (1969). Image source: Science and Society Picture Library. For more on Heatwave, see the excellent Dancin' in the streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago. 2005

We would love to hear some first hand accounts of 1950s/60s raves - photos too would be great. If you were there why not leave a comment, or email transpontine@btinternet.com

Birth of rave

When was the birth of rave as a word for a wild party and raver as the party-goer? Quite a few sources suggest a Caribbean origin. The Wikipedia entry on 'Rave' currently states that 'The slang expression rave was originally used by people of Caribbean descent in London during the 1960s to describe a party'. We have however already established that jazz parties in London were already being called raves by 1952 at the latest.

Simon Reynolds has pondered (by email) that 'he wouldn't be surprised if it was actually a Scottish or Irish term originally cos there was a big Irish influence in Jamaica, a lot of indentured servants and the like, and you have that whole crossover between the shebeen and the blues - rowdy house parties'. This is an interesting line of enquiry, the Online Etymology Dictionary notes the word relating to madness is Old French, with another meaning in Scottish dialect. The dictionary mistakenly dates 'rave' as party to 1960, but pushes the birth date back further by noting that 'rave up' for party goes back to 1940. So far then, 1940 is the earliest specific use related to partying. Anyone got any examples from that time, or even an earlier usage? The full definition from the Online Etymology Dictionary is as follows:

rave (v.):
c.1374, "to show signs of madness or delirium," from O.Fr. raver, variant of resver "to dream, wander, rave," of unknown origin (see reverie). The identical (in form) verb meaning "to wander, stray, rove" first appeared c.1300 in Scottish and northern dialect, and is probably from an unrelated Scand. word (cf. Icelandic rafa). Sense of "talk enthusiastically about" first recorded 1704. Noun meaning "rowdy party" is from 1960, though rave-up was British slang for "wild party" from 1940; specific modern sense of "mass party with loud, fast electronic music and often psychedelic drugs" is from 1989. Raver, from this sense, is first recorded 1991. Raving is attested from 1475; sense of "remarkable" is from 1841.