Anarchy 51/Blues in the Archway Road

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Blues in the
Archway Road

BEN COVINGTON

Look­ing at the post­ers that lit­ter the side streets of cent­ral and sub­urban London, one might be for­given for as­sum­ing that the Blues was cre­ated by a post-Al­der­mas­ton gen­er­a­tion of art stu­dents rather than by the af­flic­ted negro pop­u­la­tion of the American Deep South. The post­ers ad­vert­ise au­then­tic Rhythm ’n’ blues by groups which play a vari­ety of music—some Pop-ori­ented, some Folk-ori­ented, some Jazz-ori­ented but largely de­rived from the music of the more sen­sa­tional col­oured en­ter­tain­ers of the USA, like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, James Brown and T-Bone Walker. Of the 2,000 or more groups work­ing the mul­ti­tude of large and small clubs, no more than two dozen are in any way ori­ginal, even in pop-music terms, and even these are root­less shad­ows of the sing­ers on whose ma­ter­ial they draw. The dif­fer­ence be­tween the blues of mod­ern Amer­ica and the “blues” of mod­ern United Kingdom is the dif­fer­ence be­tween music which is an au­then­tic ra­cial ex­pres­sion and music which is an ex­pres­sion of no more than a lik­ing for the au­then­tic form.

  The ori­gins of British “blues” are far from clear. Their sem­inal genius may have been Muddy Waters who toured Britain in 1958 but it was not until March, 1962, when the har­mon­ica player Cyril Davies and the guitar­ist Alexis Korner opened the first of the clubs—next door to the ABC Teashop off Ealing Broad­way—that the “boom” really had its be­gin­nings. Korner and Davies played mainly pre-war blues of the negro night clubs of urban Amer­ica. Once they had their own stage the “boom” gathered in Cent­ral London, at­tract­ing a young audi­ence in re­ac­tion against a par­tic­u­larly en­feebled pop music—this was the hey-day of Cliff Rich­ard. The Band—known as Alexis Korner’s Blues In­cor­por­ated—had the now fa­mil­iar line-up of har­mon­ica, gui­tars and drums and if it was un­ex­it­ing com­pared with its Chicago par­ent it had, at least, a rhythmic earthi­ness and an emo­tional di­rect­ness which had been com­pletely ab­sent from pop music since the de­mise of rock ’n’ roll in the late ’50s.

  By the end of 1962 the Beatles had had their first small hit, Love Me Do, fea­tur­ing the ma­gical com­bin­a­tion of har­mon­ica, gui­tars and drums, and the Roll­ing Stones were mak­ing their early pub­lic ap­pear­ances at Ealing and else­where. In Janu­ary, 1963 the Stones ap­peared for the first time at the Marquee. The bill was topped by

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Brian Knight’s Blues-by-six and the Stones earned £2 each as the fill-in group. By March the Stones had moved on—to the fringe of pop suc­cess—and their place was taken by another group from Ealing, the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, later to be re-named Manfred Mann. By the time the Stones had their first small hit, Come On, in the summer of 1963 (only enough to earn them 83rd pos­i­tion in the 1963 New Mu­sical Ex­press Points Table, equal with Sammy Davis, Frank Sinatra, Ken Dodd and Chuck Berry) r ’n’ b was freely tipped as the next pop craze.   It seems to have hap­pened for much the same reason as rock ’n’ roll ten years earlier: a teen­age re­ac­tion to the sickly gut­less­ness of ortho­dox pop. Its suc­cess has led to ex­traordin­ary re­sults. The Cliff Rich­ard pop image of tidy, boy-next-door Chris­tian­ity, has been re­placed by a styl­ised image of rough-living—beards, long hair, defi­ant non­chal­ance and an in­co­her­ent, un­ar­tic­u­lated curse against con­form­ity. The new image may be as un­real as the old but it is a great deal more toler­able. It is a cliché to ob­serve that pop music is a ma­jor field for the ex­ploit­a­tion and ma­nip­u­la­tion of young people, gener­at­ing re­spect for false values and poor stand­ards, ex­ploit­ing dis­satis­fac­tion to turn young people in on them­selves rather than out on so­ci­ety, serving the func­tion ascribed by Marx to re­li­gion, that of an “opi­ate of the people”. It would be un­real­istic to claim that r ’n’ b has altered this deeply en­grained pop-cul­tural pat­tern but it may have dented it. Since the suc­cess of the Beatles—re­corded not be­cause they might be made into stars but be­cause they already were local stars—teen­agers have shown a gradu­ally in­creas­ing in­de­pend­ence of the will of re­cord com­pan­ies. Mersey­beat and r ’n’ b—or at any rate the local vari­ant on the Amer­ican theme—were cre­ated by teen­agers for them­selves and al­though the com­pan­ies have ex­ploited this music, they have had their urual role, that of cre­ating stars, stolen from them by teen­agers. This has been a tend­ency rather than a de­cis­ive trend but it may rep­res­ent the first steps of teen­agers to free them­selves of the para­sites who live off them and their en­thu­si­asms. It is not just that the qual­ity of the music is bet­ter, al­though I be­lieve it is (com­pare the Beatles’ I’m a Loser or Manfred Mann’s I’m Your King­pin with Adam Faith’s What Do You Want? or Cliff Rich­ard’s The Young Ones) but that the re­la­tion­ships be­tween stars and audi­ences have changed. The new stars are of their pub­lic, neither pat­ron­ising nor stu­pid. They are ir­rev­er­ent, they smoke, they drink, they be­have with a nat­ur­al­ness which would have earned them noth­ing but abuse ten years ago and they are ar­tic­u­late spokes­men for the teen­age thing as well as for their music. The new stars are not held in awe ex­cept by the very young. The glub-goer knows that re­cords are poor im­it­a­tions of club per­form­ances, that re­cord suc­cess leads to noth­ing so much as the di­lu­tion of a group’s “sound” in an en­deav­our to court gen­eral pop­ular­ity. It is, in short, doubt­ful whether the com­pan­ies have ever held so little sway over the avant garde “popnik”. Most young people listen to noth­ing but pop music and within this con­text the in­fu­sion of some blues-form into pop music is ex­tremely wel­come. Even in the hands of white sing­ers it has in­tro­duced into a sadly ail­ing pop cul­ture some ele­ments of an in­fin­itely richer folk cul­ture

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and some ele­ments of a less cor­rupted pop cul­ture—the music of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and James Brown still ex­presses some­thing of the agony of negro life as well as the enorm­ous sur­ging vi­tal­ity and new op­tim­ism of the Northern ghet­toes. British blues is primar­ily a dance music and if it is im­pure it has, at least, an en­thu­si­asm which is pos­it­ively damning to in­hib­i­tion. In the clubs there is a new vigour.