giggling infantry, sooner or later, the right signal would be sent and answered, and the varicoloured school blazers and bikes would come together.
John was not good-looking in any conventional sense, with his slanted eyes and plunging beak of a nose. Yet he invariably proved the most successful, both in the chatting-up ritual and the encounters that followed. When the riders compared notes later, it would be John who described feeling right inside a heavily engineered brassiere, or sniffed ostentatiously at the lingering aroma of what Liverpudlians call finger pie. Part of every almost adolescent boy’s experience is to see small girls he has hitherto ignored or taken for granted suddenly grow into desirable young women. For John this happened spectacularly with Barbara Baker, whom he had known since they were toddlers together, seated on the floor at Mrs Clark’s Sunday school. For years, he had regarded Barbara with the contempt that William Brown always showed to little girls, but at the age of 15, she’d suddenly metamorphosed into a curvaceous strawberry blonde who deliberately modelled her hair and clothes on cinema sex sirens—and even had the mystic initials BB. In Reynolds Park one day, she and a girlfriend found themselves being followed in a meaning way by John and Len Garry. On this occasion, it was Len who first made the running. ‘Len asked me to join him on a walk a few nights later, and I said “Yes,”‘ she remembers. ‘But I could see John watching me.’
She soon dropped Len and became John’s first ‘steady’ girlfriend, as the sedate fifties phrase had it. In many ways, theirs was a relationship straight out of Enid Blyton: they would go for bike rides together or ice-skating at the Silver Blades rink in central Liverpool. Barbara got to know John’s mother and Aunt Mimi, and was often taken home to tea at Mendips, joining Michael Fishwick, and any aunts and cousins who were visiting, around the lavishly spread gateleg table. She remembers John as a romantic, naturally chivalrous boy, who bombarded her with love notes and drawings, was definitely not a Teddy Boy, and, thanks to Mimi’s hard verbal schooling, still did not speak with a Scouse accent.
As a rule, the courtship rituals went on without adult interference. A line was crossed one day, however, when a group including John, Barbara and David Ashton went for a petting session into the field owned by St Peter’s Church—i.e., virtually hallowed ground. Because John and Ashton were still members of the 3rd Allerton Scout Troop, both were summoned to explain their sacrilege before an official Scouts board of inquiry. ‘My Dad had been a scoutmaster, so the court was held at my house,’ Ashton remembers. ‘As I was coming home beforehand, I met John. “Don’t you fuckin’ tell what you know,” he said, and then hit me over the eye. I had a black eye for days afterwards.’
Len Garry shared John’s fondness for music—the ‘pop’ aimed squarely at their parents’ generation—but for neither was it anything resembling a passion. As they cycled around, they would sing out loud, trying to outdo each other in the number of current hit songs they knew and in their skill as impersonators. ‘I was always better at ballads,’ Len says. ‘But John was better at the uptempo stuff. A song he particularly liked was Mitchell Torok’s “Caribbean.” I remember how, even when he was riding against the wind, standing up on his pedals, he always got the timing just right.’
They had little initial interest, therefore, in the Bill Haley phenomenon, which reached the first of several climaxes during that summer. Michigan-born Haley had been an obscure country-and-western singer until 1951, when he recorded a song called ‘Rock the Joint’, exchanging his usual cowboy yodel for the style and intonation of black rhythm and blues. America’s racial situation being what it was, the disc could be marketed only if no biographical details about Haley were given. His country music public would have been appalled by the idea of a white man singing a ‘negro tune’, while no black listener would have taken the performance seriously.
Three years later, by now fronting a group named the Comets, Haley recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an exuberant piece of horological nonsense that was already a year old, with one unsuccessful version by black vocalist Sunny Dae on the market. Haley’s reinter-pretation caused equally little stir until added to the soundtrack of The Blackboard Jungle, a film on the timely subject of delinquency in a New York high school. This change in context produced a devastating effect throughout America; wherever Haley’s voice rang out with ‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock RAHK…’ the gritty drama on the screen was totally eclipsed by mayhem among the audience. Boys and girls alike went literally berserk, shrieking like banshees, tearing at the fabric of their seats, lurching out to dance in the aisles or engage in mass brawls that required dozens of police to contain them.
The separate terms rock and roll had always existed in black music as synonyms for rhythm-enhanced sex. Who exactly first joined them together to define the keening saxophone and hand-thwacked double-bass beat of Haley and his Comets can never be known for certain. The most likely contender was a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who billed his show on station WJW as The Moondog Rock ‘n’ Roll Party.
Britain’s press, to begin with, treated rock ‘n’ roll as merely another bizarre American novelty, like pie-eating contests, pole-squatting or wedding ceremonies at the bottom of swimming pools. The mood changed as it became clear that Teddy Boys—and their scarcely less bizarre and repugnant Teddy Girls—were Haley’s most fanatical converts, and seemingly intent on destroying just as many cinemas as had their American cousins. Screenings of The Blackboard Jungle were cancelled wholesale, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was banished both from radio and television, and dance halls banned the jitterbuggy dance that went with it. The result was as might have been expected: Haley’s record shot to number one in the Top 20 in May 1955, remaining on the chart for 22 weeks. The following October, it made number one again, and stayed on the chart a further 17 weeks.
With hindsight, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ looks like a kind of Phoney War—a warm-up for the cultural blitzkrieg soon to follow. Most of the excitement it generated was damped down by the sight of Bill Haley himself, a man already pushing 30, with a cherubic smile and query-shaped kiss curl on his too-high forehead, who looked little different from the parents who so condemned him.
To capitalize on sales of the ‘Rock Around the Clock’ recording, a film of the same name was rushed out, featuring Haley and the Comets with other emergent rock-’n’-roll celebrities like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, the Platters, and ‘Moondog’ Alan Freed. John went to see it expecting a life-changing experience but came away disappointed. ‘I was very surprised’. he would recall. ‘Nobody was screaming and nobody was dancing in the aisles like I’d read. I was all set to tear up the seats, too, but nobody joined in.’
As if to prove the fad had done no serious harm, John’s school report for the 1955 summer term was considerably less of a disaster than usual. English: ‘He is capable of good work and has done quite well…a good knowledge of the books.’ History: ‘He has tried hard and worked well.’ Art: ‘Very satisfactory.’ Handwork: ‘Satisfactory progress.’ Physical training: ‘(height 5, 6 and a half, weight 9 st, 4 lbs) F[airly] satisfactory.’ Geography: ‘Undoubtedly trying harder.’ General science: ‘An encouraging result. His work has been satisfactory but his behaviour in class is not always so.’ The only wholly negative entries were for French (’disappointing’ through fondness for ‘obtaining a cheap laugh in class’) and Religious Knowledge (‘His work has been of a low standard’).
‘The best report he has had for a long time,’ noted a surprised Ernie Taylor in the space reserved for headmaster’s comment. ‘I hope this means that he has turned over a new leaf.’
Please God, give me a guitar.
He first heard about Elvis Presley from a Quarry Bank classmate named Don Beatty, one of the participants in the Great Dinner Tickets Swindle. Don had a copy of the New Musical Express—at that time rather a rarity in the northwest—and pointed out a reference to America’s newest rock-’n’-roll sensation and his just-released new record, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
John