Soul Britannia: The Modernists, The Marquee and The Music

1956. Back to Soho. Home of the jazz clubs and the skiffle clubs. Above The Roadhouse pub on Wardour Street, tired of skiffle and trad jazz, Cyril Davies and Alex Korner are setting up a club night, playing the blues. The night is called the Blues & Barrel House Club. The band is called Blues Incorporated. Who knows if anyone will come?

They come. Big Bill Broonzy and Otis Spann even come down to hear and play, and stay at their houses while they are in town.

They've come down from the Cold War US airforce bases around London, where they've been playing for the servicemen - the only place up to then you could hear the blues in Britain. Like many GIs, they come into Soho, looking for entertainment. First to clubs like the Americana for jazz; then on to Wardour Street to the Barrel House and finally down to the basement club The Flamingo for modern jazz and latest r&b singles from Ray Charles and Lee Dorsey. Mixing with student trad jazz fans, being beatnik in old jumpers and scruffy trousers, the GIs cut a style in suits and ties. Some of the skifflers and jazz musicians are interested: Zoot Money, Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames, Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, are listening and learning.

They interest the younger kids too. From all over London they come to hang out in Soho, young mostly working-class boys who are fascinated by everything American, but can't find it in austerity Britain, can't dress like that, but they try and put on an attitude. They are not going into National Service like their older brothers, the Teds, and coming out aged and conformist. Thanks to the self-same GIs and thanks to mutually assured destruction, the country doesn't need their services. These boys are able to go to work, earn their money, buy clothes, go out, and spend it how they want. They aren't as rich as they make out - you can do a lot on the HP. They want a new kind of life all the same.

At the Flamingo, they can meet real Americans. The GIs can sell you buttoned Levi's for a fiver.
Where do you get those suits, those shirts? They just don't exist in the high street. So you need to find a way to alter things yourself. First, find something you like at Marks & Sparks, or C&A. Round the corner from The Roaring Twenties Club, where blue beat mixes with r&b from 1961, the tailor at Newmans on North End Road will make you a suit with the 'Billy Eckstine collar', or help you get the perfect 'Italian' drop to your trouser. Go to the cinema, and there are new ideas every week. La Dolce Vita with Marcello Mastroianni, Shoot The Pianist with Charles Aznavour, Rocco And his Brothers with Alain Delon, the New Wave. Always new, different, modern, changing. Think of a style, and take it to John Stevens in Fulham, Bilgorri in Bishopsgate. Now show it off at the clubs...

It's not just about the clothes anymore. It's about the music. The GIs have records to sell as well. Better than trad jazz, or skiffle, or Cliff Richard's tame rock and roll. Its a handy extra income, and a way to offload belongings before returning to the States.

March 17th 1962.

The Barasque Club, opposite Ealing Tube Station. Art Wood, singer with Blues Incorporated, asks if the owner wants a new resident band, a blues band. He agrees. Davies and Corner open a new club night, and the faces start to appear from other pockets of London, young, fashion-conscious, a little arrogant, interested in the new sounds. Soon, another club offers them a residency - The Marquee Club, at that time on Oxford Street.

Clubs in 1962 mean live music, and there are a small but growing coterie of young people who have absorbed the r&b records they have bought, and are starting to play. You'd find Brian Jones in the audience at the Marquee, Mick Jagger taking a turn as a singer with Blues Incorporated, Eric Clapton and other Yardbirds not far behind, Chris Farlowe and especially Georgie Fame and his Blue Flames turning from jazz and skiffle towards r&b at The Flamingo.

A local phenomenon amongst young men and women in London, looking for whatever the latest styles and trends are, trying to make their own identity, has encountered a club life suited to the tastes of GIs and Caribbean-Britons, and heard a music that intrigues them. Something similar is happening in some other places, in Liverpool, and in East Anglia, in smaller towns near other airforce bases. People visiting the London nightlife are bringing back the news and the new sounds to towns across the south. The rest of the country hardly know anything about it, but soon it will become a national youth culture...

Here are some tunes from Blues Incorporated in the early years. The first is taken from an LP recorded live at The Marquee Club in its first few months back in 1962, and released on Ace Of Clubs. The second is the b-side of Blues Incorporated's first single, released in 1963, many years after the formation of the group. I think this reflects the assumptions in Britain at the time that the priority for a band was playing live, and perhaps also that for many British blues musicians, they did not fully consider the idea that they could make records like their own idols. This was about to change dramatically as the recording industry, soon to be bowled over by the public fervour for The Beatles, awoke to the potential of British beat.

Alexis Korner & His Blues Incorporated - Rain Is Such A Lonesome Sound (LP 'R&B From The Marquee Club' ACL1130) 1962
Alexis Korner's & His Blues Incorporated - Please, Please, Please (B-side of Parlophone R 5206) 1963

Information gathered from The Georgie Fame site, The Marquee Club website, The British Beat Boom website (very good index of many bands), and from Mod: A Very British Phenomenon by Terry Rawlings.

Soul Britannia: Windrush

Britons had come into contact with Black America directly during World War Two, socialising with G.I.s, and getting to hear some of the sounds of blues and jazz that black american soldiers listened to. This influence would continue in small pockets of rural Britain, in East Anglia for example, around the American Airforce bases of the Cold War (as it would also to an even larger extent in Germany).

Meanwhile, in the 1950s, the mainstream American recording industry was heavily promoting 'rock and roll' to the young people of Britain. It was promoted to a younger generation living in an austere economic environment, and couldn’t help but become a nationwide 'teenage' phenomenon, especially backed with the teen orientateed films of the period. 'Teddy Boy' fashion was distinctive and colourful for the time. Coffee bars provided a new form of social outlet for young people. Young Britons could not emulate the car cruising culture of their American counterparts. But they were able to interact and listen to music at the local dance hall.

But while the curious British youngster began to explore the less familiar names of rock and roll, and wonder about the blues, it would have remained a fringe curiousity and access to the recordings of black r&b artists would have been far harder to obtain, where it not for another factor in 1950s Britian. The remainder of the British public would have continued to soak up and enjoy the Elvises and Eddie Cochrans supplied by the record industry. British awareness of the history of rhythm and blues, and all related musics, would have been pegged to the pace of social change in the United States. Ironically, the awareness of black musical traditions in America would be championed by some very passionate groups of Brits in the mid 60s.

The vital bridge between American soul music and its assimilation into British cultural life is the Caribbean. Windrush led to the development of communities in numerous cities and ports where a demand for both American soul and its Caribbean variant ska existed in high enough amounts to make importation a viable business. Sound system parties became a new feature of night life in Caribbean communities such as Notting Hill in London and Toxteth in Liverpool.

What kind of nightlife culture for example was being established by the Caribbean community in Notting Hill in the late 50s? In the main, it was built on the sounds of Trinidad and Togabo, St Kitts and the surrounding islands, while being influenced by the sounds of Jamaican ska popular in the communities of Brixton and Tottenham. Sound systems were run by popular figures such as Duke Vin, Count Suckle, Baron Baker and King Dick, who conducted events, called ‘blues’ or ‘shebeens’, in basements, and even in peoples front living rooms, once all of the furniture had been moved out into the back room to make space!

“...In fifty-eight you had a lot of shebeens, you call it that, a social situation, there was nothing because of the no-coloured policy, no blacks, no coloureds in homes, entertainments, there was nothing really for black people so you had to create your own social environment. "

Such creativity in the creation of local entertainment for a new community was done in the face of the unpleasant reality that an unofficial colour ban made going to many pubs and clubs an unwelcoming and dangerous experience. Amongst the few pubs in Notting Hill where black people could make a presence were The Colville (known affectionately as ‘The Pisshouse’) and The Apollo on All Saints Road. Meanwhile, the local hall or private room was frequently off-limits to hire due to prejudice of the owner, or due to refusal of the local police to allow parties without the relevant entertainment licence - which they were unlikely to give.

“The Jamaican people created particularly the reggae, ska and bluebeat. And Fullerton, a chap called Fullerton, was a tailor and bought his first house in Talbot Road. He had a basement and we used to have blues dances and stuff. Everybody used to get down there and get down. You had people like Duke Vin who used to play with big speakers, all these things that we have now is part of our culture, discotheques were actually born out of Caribbean culture.You had a certain club that a lot of us never got into called the Montparnasse that was on Chepstow Road, the corner of Chepstow and Talbot, but round the corner was the Rio on Westbourne Park Road. Then you come further down, then Larry was in a place there with Johnnie at the corner of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Park and that was called Fiesta One. And right next door to it it had the Calypso. That what I call there, is no more than about 800 yards square. Then when you leave there you come to the corner of Colville Road and Elgin Crescent and some Barbadian guys have a club in the basement. Then Sheriff had his gym/club. It was a wild - when I say wild life you understand me - sometime you don't reach the West End. I used to hit the Grove like about four o'clock of the evening and leave there about quarter to five in the morning.”

Older local white people reacted to the arrival of British citizens from the Caribbean with fear and incomprehension, and continued to inculcate their children with these notions. Young white people living in close proximity to Caribbean neighbours should theoretically naturally progress from a love of Elvis and rock n’ roll to an appreciation of black Caribbean culture. Instead in the summer of 1958, many Teddy boys chose to go along with what their parents were telling them ought to be done about it. With the violent actions of older men as a role-model, the general attitudes of their parents, and the influence of workers for Oswald Mosley's Fascists, it was quite simple to channel some of the ‘rebellious’ attitude of rock n’ roll teddy boys and rockers into a monolithic identity to distinguish and set white youths apart. Yet some eyewitnesses attest that in fact, the 'Teddy boy' presence in the rioting was minimal, and in fact it was the wider, older community driving the hostility. Teddy boy interest in rioting and far-right meetings began to pale off, in contrast to their older brothers and parents.

The murder of Kelso Cochrane , and its unsatisfactory investigation, revealed how the Metropolitan Police themselves mirrored the attitudes of the wider population. When white people began to enter the streets, initiating the Notting Hill Riots of 1958, the police response was inadequate and focused on the wrong targets. Such insensitive policing continued to be a problem at gatherings even years afterwards:

“The police didn't take kindly to it. A lot of things made them annoyed. The music was too loud, they didn't like blacks period gathering in any kind of situation, and the selling of drinks which was outside [the law], because you couldn't get a licence, so you had to sell drinks, So you had to break the law. All this got under their wick. The shebeen didn't survive. The police, well they survived in a sense; the police used to regularly raid them, kick their boxes in, kick their speakers in, but sheer will, just natural perseverance. That aggravated the blacks no end and gave them the determination to persevere and the whole police hatred came out of that.

Anything which happens with the blacks and the police is inherent in the early stupidness of breaking their sound systems, costing them money, and indirectly disrupting their social pattern. It carried on after the riots, way into the sixties. The riots didn't do much for change. All the riots did was establish that you can't take liberties with black people, that's what it established, you've got to stand up and defend yourself. You're not going to back off.”

One more description now from an oral account of a night in 1963, which perhaps encapsulates many of the sensations and experiences of a blues dance into one account:

"Wherever you come from, you had a feel for the music. The people dem didn't too care where you come from. Dem people didn't have a prejudice like island thing, you know. For the youth dem, it was just oneness. Like when you finish work in a factory on a friday night, this is where you go, Blues dance. All de doors close and sounds just a drop in you head. Its like a refuge still. It remind you of home, the feel of it. From Blues sessions a culture develop. I remember one on Winston Road, played by a brother called Jucklin. One night in 1963 the door just kick down and policeman just step in and you hear funny sound, sound system switch off. Dem just bust up de dance! We couldn't understand it. De older people dem did know because it happen to them. A couple of brethren get fling on police van and get charge with obstructing police officers on de Monday morning"

Around the edges of this new entertainment came the most curious white teenagers interested in these unfamiliar songs. In different cities around Britain, certain individuals were investigating the music they heard, and interacting with black people. Yet for British white youths, it was all still quite different and confusing. Pete Townsend, of The Who, describes in one interview his confused image of ‘black’ culture at that time, where the reality of the black community he knew and the one in his head were somewhat blurred:

“America was still a distant and evocative IDEA to us, full of mystique. Remember we were all war-babies. brought up on free chewing gum handed out by clean-cut grinning G.I.s.. When I drove [a Lincoln Continental] to the Marquee Club … Count [Prince Miller] said ,'The Lincoln is the Rolls Royce of the United States man. Heavy car!’ The British black population were all Caribbeans. Their clubs, their drugs, their music and dancing they freely shared - but they were too close to influence us very deeply. They had a self-contained life-style; they were good people, suspicious of young Whites who saw something special in simply being black.”

Yet, curious, they continued to approach and Djs like Count Suckle saw the opportunity to establish a more mainstream club to attract them. In 1961, after establishing a reputation as one of the capital’s leading DJs, he gained a residency at the west end’s Roaring Twenties Club, where his set, featuring a mixture of R&B, Ska and Jazz, attracted audiences from far and wide. Three years on, he moved on to the famous Cue Club in Paddington and played host to many of the biggest names in the British, Jamaican and American music industry, with the likes of The Supremes, Desmond Dekker, Joe Tex, Prince Buster, Junior Walker (to name but a few) all appearing at the venue. As the years drew on, the Count increasingly concentrated his efforts on running the club, which finally closed its doors in 1988.



Quotes taken from extracts of Notting Hill in the Sixties - Mike Phillips (Lawrence and Wishart, 1991) and Behind the Masquerade: The Story of Notting Hill Carnival – Kwesi Owusu and Jacob Ross (London: Arts Media Group, 1988). Pete Townsend quotes from interview in 1985. Information on the exact nature and locations of Notting Hill cultural life in the 50s found in Counter Culture Portobello Psychogeographical History by Tom Vague, and The Notting Hill Cornival by Caspar Melville.