I was looking at some early '60s Pop Weekly magazines, a magazine which started up before The Beatles were even nationally known. It's interesting how in the bag of the solo singer/pin-up things were in England, and to a lesser extent in the U.S., at this time. This is the climate where the Beatles were told by Decca in early 1962 that groups were not very popular, and other than mainly instrumental groups like The Shadows, The Tornados (their Telstar instro was crowned in America before the Fabs invaded), The Ventures, that was mostly true. The Springfields might be considered a group but while they were airplay in Australia and the U.S. they weren't too successful in England. Peter Jay And The Jaywalkers (a bit like an early '60s Madness) and Sounds Incorporated were draws live for dancing and also backing all the solo singers, but their records weren't moving a lot of copies usually.
So page after page there's all these mostly now forgotten singers featured... all with perfect hair and the latest clothes, and to me mostly indistinguishable...some late '50s leftovers from the stage name stable too, and as often as not covering a U.S. hit generally in a too clean Pat Boone style. It makes me wonder if The Beatles hadn't come along (first mention in a November 1962 issue) if this publisher would've survived on the cooling Elvis fan base and the Buddy Holly memorial society brigade? Buddy was if anything bigger in England than anywhere, unlike the big E he'd toured there, and even posthumously most of the releases were top sellers and hits, only the Everly Brothers as any real competition. Cliff Richard had some decent songs now and then but they had begun to smooth him out like all the rest. Just before The Beatles broke things open for groups his B-side Bachelor Boy was his best side in months if not years, and it was more of a sing-a-long than a rocker at all.
Yes, things were pretty clean and smooth before those four long hairs, inspired a little by Buddy Holly without imitating (like Mike Berry or Tommy Roe obviously were), crept in through the back of those NEMS shops and that mostly novelty and comedy discs label Parlophone. In their first photo appearance in Pop Weekly they are in a junk yard and referred to as looking related to The Temperance Seven (one of those more novelty act groups), and this was after Brian Epstein had given them a good scrubbing and make-over! It's fun to see Love Me Do making the bottom of the singles chart, going away one week, creeping back in and not exceeding number 25. Then comes Please Please Me and before too much longer they and the Merseybeat group sound are the hot new thing and all the Bobbys and Marks and Adams are yesterdays news.
The instrumentalists are who I believe kept the rock & roll flame alive to get to them though. Add in The Champs, The Wailers (no, not the Jamaican guys), Johnny And the Hurricanes, Sweden's Spotnicks... and even Santo & Johnny and Dwayne Eddy should to be mentioned as well, and the fields were well ready for seeding with groups having vocal chops. The folk scene was alive and well if not top of the pops, and it represented, like the skiffle boom that brought John and Paul together in the first place, that there was genuine life out there in the U.K.
So often 1959-1963 is pictured as a dark age, but really it was a new dawn. The business may have been trying hard to push personalities that were models more than interesting singers, but the fans knew what was what the real deal just like The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and others had. There was no going back after Please Please Me pleased a nation looking for something original with life and roots to it. Enter Bob Dylan, stage left!
What do we have now if not a lot of models packaged as singers-entertainers as if stamped from some mode in a formula? Pushed to the best seller list before publication, because a couple international corporations control at least 80% of everything? Slap the auto-tune on ever thicker, lyrics that are about nothing in an a known person's life, instrumental backing from studio perfectionists if not actual machines... always darkest before the next dawn? We sure seem to need something now that even 'gangsta' rap is over forty years old (this should be grandparents' music, exactly like mentioning liking Al Jolson or Rudy Vallee to Mick Jagger in 1964).
The best thing that could happen is for the top heavy, coke snorting, yet still lumbering, dinosaur, that was the music industry should completely die and all the little b.s. corporation controlled content hypers and deliverers combined to go with it. What might follow i can't imagine, but that would be much of the fun!
