We ask Bob Stanley to put the “7 Decades” series together to celebrate Henley Business School’s 75th anniversary. The parallel between seven decades of inventive, ingenious British pop and 70+ years of innovative business teaching didn’t seem like a leap too far! Here is Bob’s essay in full, and you can find Bob’s decade summaries and accompanying playlists here.
SEVEN DECADES OF BRITISH POP INNOVATION, by Bob Stanley
We all know there is something about Britain and pop. We are good at it. We are creative, inventive, experimental and brave. But why, how? The essence of what makes us so good at it might be found it exploring some of our best music through the past seven decades and reflecting on something of a rivalry with that other pop superpower, the USA. It’s hard to conceive that, at the turn of the twentieth century, American music barely existed. In spite of the odd homegrown sentimental tunes like After The Ball, and the military marches of John Philip Sousa, America looked to Europe – especially to London and Vienna - for what it considered real music. America had no confidence in its indigenous popular music.
Fast forward fifty years and the rise of first ragtime, then jazz, and then Broadway, and Hollywood had entirely reversed the situation: London’s West End was full of imported shows like Oklahoma and Carousel, while Dickie Valentine was the closet thing we had to Frank Sinatra. The back and forth of Anglo-American popular music meant the rock’n’roll explosion that hit America in the mid-fifties, rooted in country and R&B, would inspire British youth in a way no one could have anticipated. British popular music was reborn. It has continued to reinvent itself ever since.
Running through the decades, there has usually been a ‘do it yourself’ strain to British pop that has helped it to move forward. In the 50s, Skiffle was a British take on American folk-blues (‘skiffle parties’ were originally thrown in people’s houses to help them pay the rent), transported into front rooms, then youth clubs, with its musicians making bass guitars out of broomsticks, using pre-washing machine washboards for rhythm, and playing cheap guitars from Woolworths that barely stayed in tune. It was all about invention and resourcefulness. A similar ethos would influence Punk Rock, and more DIY acts like Scritti Politti; at the turn of the nineties, sample-based grooves recorded with minimum fuss would lead to hardcore/breakbeat records by Shut Up And Dance and the Ragga Twins, which were the roots of Jungle. Music made quickly, easily and cheaply, with attitude and excitement much more important than musical chops.
Pianist Winifred Atwell has a special place in black British culture: apart from opening the first black hair salon, she was one of the few black faces on British television in the fifties. More commonly, talented black British singers like Neville Taylor and Emile Ford weren’t given the same breaks as white competitors. By the mid-sixties, the Equals and the Foundations were interracial groups playing soul clubs around the country, forerunners of the late-seventies Two Tone movement. The Acid House and Rave scenes broke down barriers further still: the first truly Black British genres – Jungle, Drum’n’Bass, UK Garage – appeared in the nineties and paved the way for present day Grime stars like Stormzy and Dave, some of pop’s most innovative and celebrated names.
As far as the music industry was concerned, London was the only place in Britain that mattered until the Beatles’ breakthrough in 1963. Not only was Liverpool then scoured for talent by the London-based record companies, but they explored pockets like the Brumbeat scene and hotspots like Newcastle (the Animals), Belfast (Them) and Glasgow (the Poets). Sixties beat groups were almost always entirely male – the Honeycombs’ drummer Honey Lantree was seen as a novelty – and female songwriters were almost unheard of; Petula Clark had to write her own songs under the pseudonym Al Grant! The seventies were harder still for women, with talents like Lynsey De Paul seen as good enough for Eurovision, but not for the weekly music press. At the end of the decade Punk opened the door for women, with the Slits, Raincoats and Dolly Mixture emerging as unique, new voices. By the 2010s, female voices dominated pop. There is also a thread of electronica that can be followed right back to Frank Chacksfield’s Little Red Monkey and the primitive clavioline in 1953, through the Tornados and Brian Eno, into the synth-dominated eighties and beyond.
Indeed, there are dozens of different stories to be told in these playlists. This is a necessarily whistle stop tour of British popular music over the last seven decades, and taken together as the ‘executive summary’, they are a startling record of variety and innovation. There are 32 tracks from each decade, which would fit perfectly onto a double vinyl album, eight tracks per side – though we are attempting to cram them onto whatever was the format of the decade, from the common ‘wireless’ radio of the 50s, to the double cassette of the 70s and of course, the now limitless capacity of the iPhone and the cloud – no problem there.
While I have tried to include the most significant names and represent every major genre, I have also used the occasional more obscure act (Eddie Hickey, Lorraine Silver, Mandy More, Hurrah, Denim, Grosvenor, Real Lies) to illuminate the era, recognising the efforts of pioneers and forgotten but key contributors. They are not strictly chronological and are designed to be an enjoyable listen.
Bob Stanley is a British musician, journalist, author, and film producer. He is a member of Saint Etienne and author of Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Modern Pop. He is also a master music curator, find his suggestions here.