History of England 1-6

But the riots that broke in Notting Hill in the summer of 1958 had nothing to do with neighbours. It was a hot, hate-filled summer. One black resident recalled the riots thus: ‘We could feel the pressure was there … You were constantly being threatened on the streets.’ ‘Kill the niggers!’ rose the cry on Portobello Road and Colville Road. It was a grisly echo of the Thirties, when ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Yids’ cawed from the throats of blackshirts. Caribbeans were targeted, and their property attacked. But then, after years of battening down the hatches, they turned. ‘We were getting the worst of it, until a few of us decided to fight back … And when they came, we attacked before they did and they ran away.’ The police did their best, but the tide had turned. As well as bruisable skin, ‘minorities’ had heart, muscle and spirit. It was not the Teddy boys’ finest hour. They participated gleefully in the baiting of Caribbeans, but were then repelled.

Racism was not the only neurosis to afflict the country. As Hugh Gaitskell saw it, there was a creeping undercurrent of anti-Americanism too. ‘It is easy to see,’ he said, ‘how powerful anti-American sentiment can be when to this already difficult relationship is added the genuine fear felt by many people that America will land us all in war.’ It was prophetic in many respects, but he need not have worried. Beyond the environs of Westminster, the people were largely untroubled by the concerns Gaitskell ascribed to them. By the Fifties, any residual resentment towards American culture was balanced by a hunger for its boons. And the music sent over the airwaves was a boon indeed. Whatever was resented in the fiscal debt to the United States, the youth of England appreciated this inrush of hope.

First from the jukeboxes of the milk bars and then from the cafes, in the music that cooed over the airwaves there was an influence both old and new. It was the brash, generous, overbearing confluent of the United States. During the Second World War, willing girls and reluctant boys had begun to notice that Americans seemed to have it all, and the Fifties did everything to encourage that impression. In 1956 Bill Haley & His Comets released ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an example of the new trend known as rock ’n’ roll. The genre had numerous parents, all of them black, but political considerations required that its ambassadors be white. Haley himself was a plump little man with a kiss-curl on his forehead, fronting what was, in essence, a jazz band. Yet his energy and panache submerged all objections.

He was followed by Elvis Presley, or ‘the King’, as he became known. Songs like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Hound Dog’ would not have passed muster later, when musicianship and wordcraft were prized, but when sung in the Elvis purr and accompanied by gyrations so suggestive as to give the singer the sobriquet ‘Elvis the Pelvis’, they achieved mass hysteria and Olympian sales. It also helped that he was not merely handsome but beautiful, exciting but unthreatening. This was not, of course, the rock ’n’ roll that purists recognized; for them, Chuck Berry was the king. In lifting the old blues from the piano to the guitar, he had become the founder of a genre. This would be remembered in the slumbering years.

The blaze of excitement soon settled in England. Sooner or later, the instinct of a young audience is to scramble onto the stage and join in, but despite its workingclass origins, rock ’n’ roll needed instruments that were far beyond the means of English youth. Pianos, double basses, drums and even guitars lay at an impossible distance. It seemed as if an old law would reassert itself: the passion dies that cannot be performed.

The name ‘skiffle’ was a dialect word from the West Country, meaning ‘a mess’. In the United States, the term came to be applied to a kind of music in which only the most rudimentary instruments were employed. Appropriately enough for such a ramshackle genre, skiffle came to England by accident. Chris Barber had formed a jazz band, and its new banjoist was Lonnie Donegan. They were recording a disc but had run out of songs to play. Donegan had a suggestion: ‘What about some skiffle?’

In the United States, its homeland, skiffle had already been forgotten. Unlike jazz or the blues, it was barely a genre. This was interlude music at best, a distraction proposed when there was nothing worthwhile to be played, no real musicians to play it and few instruments to play it with. Nonetheless, the other two unpacked their instruments. And then, in what has been called his ‘pseudoblues wail’, Donegan broke into ‘Rock Island Line’. No one knows when the song was written, but all agree that the songwriter was a convict, and the song is one of yearning for escape.