NOT everyone was in favour of the emerging musical trend of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s. In September 1956, noting that the police had been called to disturbances at screenings of the Bill Haley film, Rock Around the Clock, the Evening Times said it was not the police that were needed.
“It’s a bunch of parents who have obviously been neglecting their duties,” it cautioned. “Hips won’t wiggle so readily if their youthful owners have to hold them after a good, old-fashioned tanning – the kind of thing that was here long before rock’n’roll.”
That same month, a London-based newspaper described rock’n’roll as “deplorable” and “tribal”. Concern was also expressed that the “skiffle craze” would kill off jazz.
Sir Malcolm Sargent, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, described rock’n’roll as “nothing more than an exhibition of primitive tom-tom thumping.
“The amazing thing about rock’n’roll is that youngsters who go into such ecstasies sincerely believe that there is something new and wonderful about the music. There is nothing new or wonderful about it. Rock’n’roll has been played in the jungle for centuries”.
If it was capable of inciting youngsters to riot and fight, obviously it was bad, he added.
But nothing could impede the growing popularity of rock’n’roll. By the time these young female fans were dancing on the sea front at Largs in July 1957, Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan were topping the British charts.
There had been many other pioneers, of course, among them Chuck Berry, who, only the previous month, had had a chart hit with School Days.
The sheer impact of that song was recalled in the Evening Times in 1992, on the eve of a Glasgow concert by Berry. School Days, the writer said, “delivered us from the days of old of Pat Boone, Rosemary Clooney and Alma Bloody Cogan, forcing us up out of our seats into juke joints ...”
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