The Beat Goes On

by Steve Brazier

Thanks to Phil Barnard's 'Farewell WMGS' in the last Newsletter, we now know how the memorial under the floor near the 'Biology Lab' rediscovered by my classmates around 1959 got there.Nothing to do with dissected specimens after all. Perhaps his roof-top exploits reflect the post-war anarchy of the 'Rock around the Clock' generation. Jonathan Hill's 'Coming of Age at the Muni' certainly reminded me of our debt to rock'n roll. You need only listen to 'Desert Island Discs' to appreciate music's central role in growing up. Today's celebrities choose punk and rap, ten years ago my own flavour of pop still dominated in the eight-disc selections. Music,like smell is a powerful trigger for the memory. Here is the music which conjures up my Muni years. Can you do your own playlist and send it to the editor?

About Christmas 1956 my older brother got a Dansette record-player. 'Rock Island Line' (Lonnie Donegan), 'Ying Tong Song' (The Goons) but especially Elvis Presley's 'Hound Dog' and 'Heartbreak Hotel' excited me and I formed an embryonic skiffle group 'Steve Brazier and the Hot Dogs'. We had no instruments, the poster attracted no audience and I don't think the other band members knew they were in it. I asked for a guitar but on my eleventh birthday only got a ukulele. I could not tune it so months of practice was fruitless. I bought my first guitar five years later: £4 from Eric Pullen's brother. But those lost five years scuppered my chance of becoming a rock star.

In the interim, through the bedroom wall hammered Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and a lot more Elvis. Donegan had become a comedy act. Recently I acquired a Leadbelly album and was amazed how unashamedly British skiffle plagiarised much of his work. No matter, it had sparked the gestation of Merseybeat and the British blues movement. A friend of my brother came round and played 'Long Tall Sally' in the front room. At the Odeon's Saturday morning pictures, some lads thrashed out 'Oh Boy' before the cartoon and lollipop stick flicking antics began. Perhaps if they could do it, so could I. Adolescence was on the horizon and it had a throbbing soundtrack. I bought my first record: 'Maybe Baby' by the Crickets. Schoolmates began having parties. There was dancing and a new form of musical chairs which involved boys and girls sharing a chair and the music never stopping. I can see the Everly's LP (with Phil and Don in raincoats on the cover) just before the lights went out at Richard Cliff's 15th birthday party. An hour later when his parents turned them on again life had changed. Suddenly a passion for Subbuteo and all things Airfix evaporated. The girl who had shared my chair agreed to come to another party but then wrote me a note changing her mind. I carried it around for years next to the torch I bore for her. Teenage rejection is unbearable but character-building. Indispensible training for what the future brings.

Radio Luxemburg's crackling became intelligible after nightfall and under the bedclothes I began to filter out my own music, heart-wrenching and thrilling, from the background dross of early 60's pop. I strained to hear Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' around dawn one morning and rushed to school, telling everyone queuing outside the physics lab, just before Mr Langford threw the chalk at Bob Baker. I was entranced by the Beatles' 'Please Please Me' at the Grammar School Valentine Dance in 1964. I happened on their radio show 'Pop go the Beatles' and broke my neck every Tuesday to get home from school by 5pm. I couldn't afford records but my second-hand Philips tape recorder soaked up everything they played. Nikki Morris invited me round to listen to Beatles' LPs and lent them to me. Her friend Gwen lent me Paul Simon's first album and Dylan's 'Freewheelin'. Wow! The copied music had the hiss associated with cheap tape and a Mickey Mouse microphone clamped against the speaker with cushions. Fifty years later I learned German by listening to short-wave radio distorted like those pirated records. This may have influenced my pronunciation. German friends tell me it makes me sound posh. But, they add, I sound dead common in English.

Home-grown boy bands appeared at Muni Christmas dances. One rehearses the Surfari's 'Wipe Out' in the hall as I sat in Mr Steele's English period. Bernard Smallwood's brother's band played too - "an organis-ed group" the tickets proclaimed as pop took the Hammond organ to its heart. Miss Mountain scowled powerless at girls' skirt lengths. She would have been more shocked by the double entendres of the songs' lyrics had she been able to make them out.

Every Thursday dinner-time, five or six of us would go to 'Cafe Noir' in Darlington Street for 'Doozledogs'. I neither liked nor could afford these bland over-sized frankfurters but peer-pressure being what it is, I conformed. We haunted record shops, crammed into hardboard booths and listened earnestly to records we did not buy. Realising that this was unsustainable, we clubbed together and every six weeks each got to buy a single for 6/7 (six and seven - remember?). This too was beyond my means but sharing the music and belonging drove me on. When it was my turn I could find only second-rate stuff from Brenda Lee, Brian Hyland, the Spotnicks and B. Bumble. They are still in the garage, evidence of my teenage need to be included. Patrick Isherwood had the Drifters' 'Save the Last Dance for Me'. Now there was a record but he wouldn't swap it and I couldn't afford it.

In 5A Mr Greenaway was our form-master. Before he arrived, our desk-lids banged to the rhythm of Chris Montez' 'Let's Dance'. Unauthorised use of the gramophone was, for me, the main consolation for being in his form. The miserable bus ride to Dunstall Park was halted if we stamped too enthusiastically to 'Glad All Over' on the driver's cab roof. Then I got Eric's brother's battered guitar and he showed me the riff to Duane Eddy's 'Shazam'. Duane our one-time gardener was named after him. Apparently his mother was a big fan. Do you remember Roden's music shop in Darlington Street [1] . Here were racks of sheet music - the only way to unlock chord sequences without a teacher or innate talent. I puzzled over Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (more clues as to how Lonnie Donegan got a repertoire). Every boy wanted to play the guitar. It seemed an easy way to impress girls. But easy it wasn't - at least not to reach the impressive stage. I was over forty when my indulgent wife encouraged me to buy a decent instrument and take lessons. And by then I was too old for rock-stardom and had already found Miss Right. She tells me she too married Mr Right - but did not realise his first name was 'Always'.

In my late forties we went for dancing lessons - I had wanted to be able to jive since a lonely evening around 1963, watching as a couple expressed the magic of the Shadows' 'FBI' in a 'Come Dancing' competition. I wanted to do more than just listen: a passive response to rock and roll felt wholly inadequate. Admittedly the early 60's had provided a get-out with the twist and the strange contortions we called dancing, none of which required any tuition or physical coordination. But they gave access to Saturday night dances at Wolverhampton Technical College, Tuesday nights at the New Market on School Street and the streaming cellar of the Milano coffee bar. We went to meet girls but had to settle for the music of local bands like 'The Atoms'. There were celebrity groups too - the Searchers playing live at another Valentine's dance at the Wulfrun Hall. Bitter-sweet moments. Where are you now, Judy Kenny, Pat Leurs, Verity Smart? Are you still dancing?

It was time to grow up and university suddenly looked a good idea. There I discovered soul music, saw Dylan go electric at the Albert Hall and the Beatles' descend from incandescence to four dull non-entities.

Too much nostalgia? No. Music takes me forward as well as back. My three year old daughter dragged me into the pop music of the 1980's and led her first rock band at 16. she still plays in Leeds, front-lining 'Penny and the Sausages'. The allusion to 'Hot Dogs' is a coincidence. I am looking forward to her two year old introducing me soon to his music. She's taught him to strum a ukulele and will show him how to tune it as soon as he can get his fingers round the neck. The beat goes on.

Stephen Brazier (1958-1965)

The author playing lead non-entity with obscure Nottingham band The Reasons

Published WMGS OPA Newsletter Autumn 2015