Quality Street
By HUMPHREY LYTTELTON oo for pop music because it's living ... it's a rave, like. No, I don't s'pose I'll go on likin' it for ever ... I mean, when I'm twenty, I'll probably get married ... you know, settle down like and start listening to Frank Sinatra.' These words, or something very like them, came from an interview during that post-Clacton week when it was almost impossible to open a paper or switch on the television with- out coming upon some teenage neanderthal throwback being prodded and probed to reveal his or her motivations. It's ironical that Frank Sinatra, the original swooner-crooner and the first singer ever to drag involuntary shrieks of pent-up mother-instinct from his young female fans, should now be cited by the young as a symbol of sedate adulthood. But there it is. Sinatra, in company with such venerable colleagues as Nat 'King' Cole, Peggy Lee, Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald, has matured into that special sub- (or should it be supra-?) Hit Parade category labelled `quality singers.'
The label is not mine—it was coined within the music industry itself and is blithely bandied about by disc-jockeys and pop-consultants. In the BBC TV programme Juke Box Jury, we have a unique opportunity to see the mind of Tin Pan Alley actually ticking away. At one moment the jurists are lavishing all the fashionable superlatives on some bit of nonsense destined for the Top Ten— and the next moment, with expressions of deep sincerity and regret, they tell us that a record by Sinatra or Ella isloo good for the Hit Parade.' In terms of criticism, there's an obvious contradic- tion here. But Tin Pan Alley, as a profit-making industry, is not concerned with criticism but With 'the facts of life.' And one highly relevant fact of life is that there are two worlds of popular music—adjacent, often overlapping but more often in conflict.
There's no mystery about the world of 'pop.' Television cameras peer at it, journalists hover round it, intellectuals discuss and analyse it. It is the only industry whose sales returns- glamourised as the Top Ten—are published Weekly in most of the national newspapers. By contrast, the other world is diffuse and nebulous --a sort of hinterland peopled by 'quality singers,' `family entertainers,' Houswive's Choice and Family Favourites, old-timefs reeking of nostalgia and fashionable newcomers radiating sophistica- tion. The teenage fan looks upon all this as part of a dull and forbidding adult world which is advancing inexorably towards him. There was no note of pleasurable anticipation in the voice of the young man who looked forward to married life, a steady job and Frank Sinatra. One reason for the constant state of frenzy in which the 'pop' world exists—the lurching from skiffle to 'rock,' from 'rock' to Trad, from Trad to 'beat' —is the now-or-never feeling that, with growing up, it must all come to an end. It's no coincidence that, as the Beatles have gained acceptance by adults, a certain amount of their teenage following has been deflected to the Rolling Stones, a shaggy, aggressively untidy team whose special sales- gimmick is that parents loathe them. This can all be put down to the natural rebelliousness of youth, magnified by intense publicity. What is less easy to explain is the fascination and envy with which adults regard the teenage 'pop' world. The ramifications of the Top Ten have in the past year been elevated into front-page news in the most sober dailies, and today rub shoulders with State visits and dis- turbances in • Laos in the BBC news. This accurately reflects a widespread adult urge to be, or to appear 'with it.' To anyone who has ever bad a bandstand view of a charity ball or works dance, few sights are more distressing than that of elderly matrons and portly works managers, mouths stretched in ghastly grins of effort, trying to do the latest variations on St. Vitus's dance as demonstrated on Ready, Steady, Go!
This obsession with teenage fads is largely a British phenomenon. The utter failure of ITV's 'teen-beat' shows at the recent Montreux TV festival came as no surprise to me. Last March, I played a three-week engagement at a dancing club in Berne. The proprietor is a realist who likes his customers to be between twenty and forty—the under-twenties have little money to spend on drinks, the over-forties tend to have inhibiting misgivings about the state of their arteries or liver. His club is a typical Continental dancing establishment offering a night-out which is comfortable without being exorbitantly expen- sive, sophisticated without being snobbish. The existence of places like this on the Continent and in America, too, creates the feeling that popular music for adults is an active, stimulating thing and not just the left-overs from a succession of teenage crazes. In other words, most other countries have an adult 'scene' which offers as much fun and excitement as the 'pop' world of the young.
Here, in Britain, there is one question which persistently agitates those engaged in entertain- ment. `What happens to the fans when they grow up?' The clue lies in my opening quotation. Most of them marry, migrate to the suburbs, settle down comfortably in front of their TV sets and record-players and 'listen to Frank Sinatra.' To the promoter of a place of popular entertainment they virtually disappear. In the field of 'pop' music, this is not a matter for great concern. So long as the birth rate is maintained, there will always be more where they came from.
But in the adjacent field of jazz, the 'lost generations' present a real problem. During the past two weeks, jazz enthusiasts in their thous- ands have crowded into concert halls to hear the Modern Jazz Quartet—now about as modern as the New Look, but with an aura of refinement and intellectualism which attracts the newly initiated and the blase alike. As soon as the MJQ tour ends, and'Until other notables come in from America, these fans will vanish from whence they came. And now that the heady `Trad boom' is over, no concert featuring British jazz- men will flush them out. Many of them are, of course, jazz pundits who openly proclaim their lack of interest in British jazz. The pundits came out in force to see the formidable Henry 'Red' Allen, whose reputation as a giant of the Twenties and Thirties—still upheld by forceful and original playing—has swelled the attendances at jazz clubs up and down the country in the past fort- night. Fleetingly, familiar faces of long-lost jazz- clubbers reappeared. The story was always the same. 'Since I got married, I don't seem to have The fate envisaged by the teenage 'pop' fan has befallen them—only in this case for 'Frank Sinatra' read 'Count Basic' or 'Louis Armstrong: The point about 'not having the time' and 'losing touch' is a significant one. British jazz clubs, unlike their Continental counterparts, are not just jazz-slanted night clubs, but unique institutions combining the characteristics of a ballroom, a coffee-bar and a youth club. Young jazz fans tend to go to a jazz club to meet people who they know will be there. With the inadequate seating arrangements, primitive facilities, meagre refresh- ments and indifferent acoustics offered by the . average jazz club, this 'mixing' aspect is import- ant. People who break the jazz club habit, how- ever temporarily, by getting married or moving to another job, invariably find on their return that the club population has changed and they are out of the swim. So they fall away, only to reappear when some strong incentive is offered.
Two things need to happen if the dichotomy between active, get-up-and-go teenage 'pop' music and passive, sit-at-home adult entertain- ment is to be resolved. First, we must take heed of the progress of former teenage idols like Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan and Cliff Richard. In order to stay in entertainment, they have each abandoned the original style which commended them to the teenagers, and emerged as 'family entertainers.' This shows that, despite all the rumpus and the ballyhoo, the adult market is, in the long run, more powerful and influential. If you doubt this, watch the Beatles gradually abandon the beat and turn to more sophisticated things. As my forlorn interviewee knew only too well, the Mums and Dads always win in the end.
Taking confidence from this and shedding the compulsion to keep in with the kiddies at all costs, we should then provide places—not jazz clubs or beat clubs or specialist clubs of any kind—but just nice places where adults of from twenty-one upwards can go for a congenial night out, and where artists and musicians' concerned with `quality' can work. Whether this would break the spell of the television and restore the habit of 'going out' among adult Britons no one can say for sure. But it's an idea which I commend to any well-disposed multi-millionaire.
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