Staying alive
Charles Spencer
It will have escaped the attention of few readers of 'Olden but golden' that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of rock and roll. Even the sainted former editor of this magazine, Charles Moore, devoted his Saturday column in the Telegraph to the landmark anniversary.
Much as I revere him, I find it hard to imagine Charles letting rip with an impassioned AWOPBOPALOOBOPALOPBAMBOOM! before tearing the joint apart with his rendition of `Tutti Frutti' down the local karaoke bar. But he is a man with a knack of taking you by surprise, and perhaps that is exactly what he is planning to celebrate the publication of his long-awaited biography of Margaret Thatcher, Maybe the lady herself will provide backing vocals. She's certainly looking as weird and wild as a vintage rock-androller these days.
Needless to say, this column, immune to the tides of fashion, and about as up to the minute as South West Trains, was going to ignore the anniversary altogether. It is in any case a questionable one. Many believe the first bona fide rock'n'roll record was 'Rocket 88', recorded by Ike Turner et al. at Sam Phillips's Memphis studio in March 1951. It was more than three years later, on 5 July 1954, that Elvis Presley arrived at the same location and cut an old blues number by the splendidly monickered Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup called 'That's All Right', and Phillips realised he'd found what he'd long been looking for: a goodlooking white boy who sounded like a black man. The rest, as they say, is history.
Like today's fashionable historians, I was pondering a perverse, counterintuitive piece arguing that disco music was more important than rock'n'roll. Not that I believe it, but it's the kind of stuff you have to churn out these days if you want to be seen as slick, hip and on the money. And despite the famous adage among us old rockers that Disco Sucks, I must admit I have always had an embarrassing soft spot for the stuff, an enthusiasm that was revived the other day by the return to the West End of the stage version of Saturday Night Fever (see review, opposite). The book is lamentable, the acting is pants, but my God those Bee Gees numbers stand the test of time. So do the big hits of Chic, Sister Sledge and Donna Summer, tainted though they are by the humiliating knowledge that, in my disco-going days, girls always preferred dancing round their handbags to dancing with me.
Best laid plans and all that. I zipped into HMV to buy the latest disco compilation —I already have a dozen of them, but buying the same tracks in a different order is irresistible to mug punters like me — when my eye alighted on another collection.
It's called, with shameless hyperbole, Kings of Rock'n'Roll — Seven Guys Who Changed the World Forever, and it has an excruciatingly naff cover featuring an artist's impression of what Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochrane and, er, our own beloved Cliff Richard might have looked like had they all been gathered together in the same dressingroom sometime in the late Fifties. Cliff is seen attending to his brilliantined quiff in the mirror, and evidently trying to make it look as much like Elvis's as possible.
But what a record this is. Four songs each from Elvis, Buddy and Cliff, three from Cochrane, Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee, with Bill Haley coming on at the end like your favourite uncle to perform 'Rock Around the Clock'.
The selections are all the pick of the crop, with not a single bum track, and in just under an hour you genuinely feel you have heard the best that vintage rock'n'roll has to offer. Even Cliffs contributions, most notably 'Move It' and 'Dynamite', cut the mustard, despite the exalted company in which they find themselves. Before 'Summer Holiday', he really knew how to rock.
What's amazing, indeed miraculous about these songs is that they still sound so fresh, so alive, so raw. Whether it be the sweet innocence of Buddy Holly, with that delightful hiccup in his voice somewhere between a stutter and a yodel, or the chiming guitar of Chuck Berry, or the rip-it-up derangement of Little Richard, these are songs that leave you dazed with pleasure and excitement. Musing on rock'n'roll, in 'Move It', Cliff sang: 'They say it's gonna die but honey please let's face it/ Well, they just don't know what's a-gonna to replace it.' How wonderful that half a century on, his words still ring so true.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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