were familiar with the guitar as a normal accessory for singers of both country and blues; in Britain it was perhaps the most anonymous of all musical instruments, glimpsed fleetingly in the back rows of dance bands or as shadowy silhouettes behind Spanish flamenco dancers.
When John first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the whole edifice of rumour and ridicule that the media had created around Presley instantly melted away. All he needed to know was in the song’s opening fanfare—that anguished, echoey cry of ‘Well, since my baby left me…’ answered by double stabs of high treble electric guitar. It was, in fact, not rock ‘n’ roll or even a ballad, but a blues shout in a traditional pattern that Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson would instantly have recognised. But while blues songs deal with adult themes, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ reached directly to the primary adolescent emotion, melodramatic self-pity. For the first time, any spotty youth dumped by his girlfriend, for whatever good reason, could now aspire to this metaphorical refuge for ‘broken-hearted lovers’, ‘down at the end of Lonely Street’.
Far from the mindless nonsense Presley’s critics accused him of peddling, the lyrics were neat and skilful enough to be dissected in a Quarry Bank literature test, the hotel metaphor sustained by a bellhop whose ‘tears keep flowing’ and a ‘desk clerk dressed in black’. The arrangement had the visceral simplicity of blues played live in the wee small hours, switching between foot-stomping bass, jangly whorehouse piano and jagged guitar half-chords suggesting the bottleneck style of Delta bluesmen. Those riffs are still potent today after 10,000 hearings; to an adolescent in 1956 who’d never heard a guitar played as an offensive weapon, they were stupefying. No sound ever had been, or ever would be, more perfectly tuned to hormones going berserk.
That May, a second Presley single, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, joined ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in the UK Top 20; in August came a third, ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’, and in September a fourth, ‘Hound Dog’. Each drew John still further into this intoxicating new world where guitars rang like carillons of victory bells, pianos pounded like jackhammers and drums spat like machine guns. Each announced more joyously than the last that life need not be the grey, humdrum vista he and his fellow war babies had always known. As he himself put it: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll was real. Everything else was unreal.’
Film clips of Presley’s American TV appearances now also began to filter through, revealing him to be almost ludicrously goodlooking, albeit in a baleful, smouldering style more usually associated with female glamour icons. Here, indeed, was history’s one and only male pin-up for straight men. In common with his other British converts, John obsessively read and re-read every newspaper story about Presley, cut out and saved every magazine picture of him, pored over every detail of his hair, clothes and sublimely sullen face for what it might reveal of his private character and lifestyle. At Mendips he chattered so endlessly about his new hero that an exasperated Mimi finally brought down the guillotine. ‘It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,’ she recalled. ‘In the end I said “Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.” ’
Like thousands of other boys who had never previously cared a button for their wardrobe or grooming, he began to model his hair, his dress, his whole being, on Presley’s. Like many Quarry Bank boys, he did what he could to Elvis-ise his school uniform, fastening only the bottom of his three blazer buttons to create a drape effect and stretching his gold-and-black school tie into the nearest possible semblance of a Slim Jim. The great problem was the trousers, which men and boys alike still wore in the baggy cut that had prevailed since the 1920s. Scarcely any men’s outfitters yet stocked ready-made ‘drainpipes’, so one’s only recourse was to take a conventional pair to an alterations tailor, sartorial equivalent of the back-street abortionist, and have their cuffs tapered from 24 to 16 or (in cases of ultimate daring) 14 inches.
No fiercer controversy raged in British families of the mid-1950s than this. No matter that the British Empire had been largely built by men in narrow trousers, nor that every palace, stately home and museum in the land thronged with portraits of narrow-trousered kings, dukes, prime ministers and generals. The style was now identified with lawless, low-class Teddy Boys and, by the more knowing, with gay men—although, paradoxically, it was deemed quite respectable in fawn cavalry twill, if worn by off-duty Guards officers together with riding jackets and tweed caps.
At Mendips, Mimi was predictably horrified and outraged by her nephew’s attempted metamorphosis into a ‘common’ Teddy Boy. She might be unable to stop John ruining the hang of his tailor-made blazer and leaving his top shirt button permanently agape above his mutilated school tie. She might not have prevented Signor Bioletti at Penny Lane from restyling his nice, wavy hair, as she put it, ‘like an overgrown lavatory brush’. But with trousers she dug her heels in: John was absolutely forbidden either to buy ‘drainies’ or have any of his existing pairs tapered. His response was to smuggle some to a compliant tailor and wear the finished product only outside Mimi’s field of vision. He would deposit them at Nigel Walley’s or Pete Shotton’s and change into them there, or leave Mendips wearing them underneath an ordinary pair of trousers, peeling off this outer layer once safely out of Mimi’s sight.
One grown-up, at least, could be relied on not to shudder at rock ‘n’ roll or pour scorn on its lip-curling godhead. John’s mother Julia adored Presley’s records, thought he was dishy to look at, and relished all the ways he was upsetting the generation whose values had always so oppressed her. It was Julia who, daring Mimi’s wrath, bought John his first real rock-’n’-roll clothes—a coloured (as opposed to plain grey or white) shirt, a pair of black drainpipe jeans, a ‘shortie’ raincoat with padded shoulders. When a kitten was given to John’s two small half-sisters, Julia and Jackie, their mother named it Elvis.
With every passing week of 1956, the heavenly noises from across the Atlantic multiplied and diversified. From New Orleans came Antoine ‘Fats’ Domino, a singer-pianist with the body of a whale and the face of a kindly Burmese cat, who had already been around and playing much this same stuff since 1949. From St Louis came Charles ‘Chuck’ Berry, a loose-limbed youth with a lounge-lizard mustache, who not only wrote and performed his witty anthems in the former Whites Only realm of expensive cars and high schools, but also simultaneously played cherry-red lead guitar, jack-knifing his skinny knees or loping across the stage in profile like a duck. From Macon, Georgia, came a former dishwasher named Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a shock-haired imp endowed with the dual gift of being able to roar like an erupting volcano and ululate like an entire Bedouin tribe in mourning.
If black rock-’n’-rollers, teetered on the edge of comedy (like Presley himself), Richard’s exultant gibberish (‘Tutti-frutti O-rooty…Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom!’) was a deep-South descendant of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’. ‘The most exciting thing…was when he screamed just before the solo,’ John later recalled. ‘It used to make your hair stand on end. When I heard it, it was so great, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life…I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind.’
As with almost every other new American idea, gauche and unconvincing British replicas quickly followed. In the wake of Presley’s onslaught, a young Londoner named Larry Parnes launched the United Kingdom’s first native rock-’n’-roller—a cockney merchant seaman named Tommy Hicks, now renamed Tommy Steele. Provided with the requisite exploding hair and Presley-style guitar, Steele drew crowds of screaming girls wherever he appeared and had several Top 10 hits. But his whole marketing exemplified the notion of rock ‘n’ roll as a passing fad or soon-to-be-unmasked confidence trick. One of Larry Parnes’ first acts was to move him into cabaret by booking him into London’s Café de Paris in the footsteps of Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward. In little more than a year, his career as a teenage idol would be metaphorically wound up by a film entitled The Tommy Steele Story.
Even Steele’s patent harmlessness
