ridicule, then by attrition. The BBC carried no news items about even its most famous performers and mentioned its very name only with lip-curled distaste. Apart from records, its main public outlets were jukeboxes in the newfangled espresso coffee bars, which explained why such places were always packed with teenagers and also why adults viewed them rather like speakeasies in Prohibition America. At travelling fairs, rock ‘n’ roll would blare out over carousels and bumper cars, so strengthening its perceived links with the grubby, the dishonest and the violent.
The steadiest source of supply was Radio Luxembourg, out in mysterious mainland Europe, which operated a daily English-language music service playing all the latest rock-’n’-roll hits with Americanstyle disc jockeys, advertisements and station IDs. But Luxembourg did not come on the air until 8.00 p.m., and reception on British wirelesses was always erratic. Like all teenagers up and down the land, John listened in late at night with a portable radio at low volume under the bedclothes so that Mimi would not hear it.
With rock fizzing in his veins around the clock, even things he had once regarded as treats now seemed irksomely unreal. During the school summer holidays of 1956, he paid his usual long visit to his Aunt Mater, Uncle Bert and cousin Stanley in Edinburgh, accompanied by Aunt Nanny, her nine-year-old son, Michael, and Harrie’s nine-year-old son, David. (Husbands seldom featured in these intersister excursions.) Part of the time was spent at Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, Sutherland, near Cape Wrath, the furthermost northwesterly tip of Scotland. This was a working farm, set in vast, unspoiled tracts of sheep-dotted moorland and peat bogs. The family party roughed it in a primitive farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles, and noisy with the screeches of Mater’s pet parrot, Harry Parry.
As well as running the croft, Uncle Bert was carrying out extensive improvements, and John and young Michael and David found themselves allotted a punishing schedule of heavy manual work. ‘We were scything hay, building dry stone walls, carting wheelbarrowloads of sand,’ Michael Cadwallader remembers. ‘John soon got fed up with that, and wasn’t thrilled by the company of two nine-year-old boys. He obviously couldn’t wait to leave.’
Rock ‘n’ roll had no fiercer enemy in Britain than followers of traditional jazz, who either did not know or preferred to forget that the two were actually first cousins. Jazz had always overlapped with blues and country, the twin streams that produced Elvis Presley. The more enlightened traditional jazz bandleaders, like Humphrey Lyttelton, acknowledged this by incorporating both into their repertoire, even occasionally bringing over American bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy to make guest appearances at their concerts. However, in music, as everywhere else, the class system held firm. Rock-’n’-rollers were firmly bracketed at the most unsavoury end of the lower working class, while jazzers were middle-class student types who wore striped college scarves and drank half-pints of cider.
The most archivally minded trad bandleader of pre-rock-’n’-roll times was the trombonist Chris Barber. Since well before Presley hit Britain, Barber’s shows had featured his foxy-faced banjo player, Tony, aka ‘Lonnie’, Donegan, on guitar with a small rhythm section, performing in an otherwise forgotten American folk style known as skiffle. The word (like jazz itself) was onomatopoeic, harking back to the bleak Depression era of the thirties, when poor whites, unable to afford conventional instruments, would beat out a shuffly rhythm on makeshift ones like kitchen washboards, empty boxes and dustbin lids.
In January 1956, Donegan and a three-strong skiffle group scored a surprise hit with ‘Rock Island Line’, a train song associated with the thirties’ blues giant Huddie (‘Leadbelly’) Ledbetter. Undoubtedly helped by the word rock in its title (though the reference was purely geological) it reached number eight in Britain, was accepted for US release on the London label, and by April stood at tenth place in the American charts. For any British-made record to catch on in America was rare enough; for one to do so by reinterpreting such a uniquely American idiom was unprecedented.
British skiffle was essentially boys’ music, a gift out of the blue to boys like John who had been just too young for rock ‘n’ roll’s first uprising and felt excluded from the tough Teddy Boy culture that now monopolised it. Skiffle was rock ‘n’ roll in a milder, more socially acceptable form, also intoxicatingly American but without the taint of sexuality or violence. In its Anglicised version, it drew on every ethnic source—blues, country, folk and jazz—though its young British performers seldom knew one genre from another, let alone understood what social conditions had inspired the songs or what pain or anger or sense of social injustice had gone into their creation. All that mattered was the frantic, pattering beat and those magic references to railroads, penitentiaries and chain gangs.
Elvis Presley had made the guitar an unreachable symbol of glamour and sexual allure to young British males; now Lonnie Donegan made it a reachable one. For skiffle followed the traditional 12-bar blues pattern of four chords, in their simplest versions requiring only one or two fingers. Anyone could play them, pretty much instantaneously.
Skiffle became the British pop sensation of 1956-57, relegating even Presley and rock ‘n’ roll to the sidelines. Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group began a run of Top 10 hits that would not be surpassed until the next decade, with genuine or ersatz folk titles such as ‘Lost John’, ‘Bring a Little Water, Sylvie’, ‘Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O’ and ‘Cumberland Gap’. Record companies began a frantic hunt for alternative skiffle stars, concentrating their efforts on London’s Soho district, specifically the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, where Tommy Steele had made some early live appearances. A fledgling record producer, the Parlophone label’s George Martin, advanced his career just a little by finding his way to the 2 I’s and signing up a skiffle quintet named the Vipers.
Most important, skiffle electrified ordinary youths, far away from London, who had never considered themselves musical and once would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up and sing in public. All over the country, youthful skiffle groups were formed with names hopefully evoking the great American open road—the Ramblers, the Nomads, the Streamliners, the Cottonpickers. Kitchens were stripped of washboards and brooms; guitars that had gathered dust for years in music-shop windows disappeared overnight. In an echo of not-so-distant Austerity years, the newspapers were soon reporting a national guitar shortage.
A few would-be boy skifflers did not start as absolute beginners, thanks to fathers, older brothers or uncles who were pro or semipro musicians. But only a very few can have owed their head start to their mothers, as John did. For Julia could play the banjo, an instrument even more unexpectedly catapulted into fashion than the guitar. Well before skiffle arrived, she had begun teaching John to pick out single-string versions of ‘Little White Lies’ or ‘Girl of My Dreams’ on the sound principle that if he could play an instrument, he’d always be popular. But now the banjo was forgotten. ‘I used to read the ads for guitars,’ he would recall, ‘and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted: “Please God, give me a guitar.”’
His Aunt Mimi has gone down in history as the person who bought John his first guitar, launching him on his roundabout path to immortality. Many times would she later recount how, weary of his endless pleas and nagging, she took him by bus down into central Liverpool and paid out £17 she could ill afford at Hessy’s music store in Whitechapel. Mimi certainly did buy John a guitar, and at some financial sacrifice, but that was a step or two further along the path. The first one he owned, and used until long after his skills had outgrown it, was given to him by Julia.
Whether that was the first guitar he played is another matter. John himself was to recall initially borrowing one from another boy and experimenting rather inconclusively with it before he got his own. This may well have been in the interval between being promised his heart’s desire by his mother and actually holding the wondrous object in his hands. After several weeks’ unsuccessful search around Liverpool, Julia finally obtained one by mail order on the instalment plan. No record of the vendor has survived; the likeliest one seems to have been a mail-order firm named Headquarters
