The Story of Pop

Part One: in print

For its first decade and a half, pop music was a phenomenon not much given to looking over its shoulder. It was of necessity immediate, contemporary, of the moment. To maintain chart success, acts must keep one eye on the present and the other on the future. Nobody gave much thought to what had gone before or to the fact that history was being written around them. Music journalism was all about current developments and future plans – sometimes anticipating events that would never happen.

This left music fans in a quandry – there was no shortage of news and comment about the latest 'chartbound sounds', but unless you’d kept a mountain of back issues of New Musical Express and its ilk, there was nowhere you could look for information about the music of earlier eras. Today, you’ll find a healthy selection of music reference works and biographies in any decent bookseller (and a truckload of worthless AI-generated crap on Amazon), but back in the early 70s, music fans would have searched the shelves in vain. There had been a smattering of biographies, such as Hunter Davies’ The Beatles, The Authorised Biography (1968); and The Shadows had ghost-written their own story way back in 1961. But works like these were the exception, and, critically, no one had yet risen to the monumental chllenge of compiling a complete history of pop music.

That all changed in 1973. In collaboration with Phoebus publishing, the BBC launched an ambitious 26-week radio series, tied in to a weekly partwork of the same title: The Story of Pop. The magazine was impressively produced, featuring copious photographs and incisive articles from leading music journalists. This was to be a history of everything that belonged under the pop/rock banner, the serious and the not-so-serious, by turns informative, analytical and critical. Styling itself ‘The First Encyclopaedia of Pop in 26 Weekly Parts’, the first issue – adorned by an airbrushed cover image of Elvis and Bowie – appeared at the end of September, with the series launching on Radio One that same week, on Saturday afternoon (with a Sunday afternoon repeat). I remember tuning in for some – though by no means all – of this ground breaking series. The magazine, meanwhile, launched with a series of adverts on commercial television, which was highly unusual for an endeavour involving the BBC.

The magazine wasn’t cheap – its cover price of 25p was five times the cost of the Radio Times, and five pence more than the most expensive glossies like Cosmpolitan. But this was a partwork rather than a magazine, and its 38 pages were all content, with no financial support from advertising. As such, it was remarkably good value: by the end of 26 weeks, for an outlay of just £6.50, readers would have in their possession the best and most comprehensive guide to rock and pop music that had yet been committed to print, and for an additional £1.55 you could send away for not one but two heavy duty binders to hold your collection (by comparison, the hardback book version, when it appeared in 1974, comprised only a selection of highlights from the magazines and cost £3.95).

Pop music itself had entered a phase of revivalism in the early 70s, with many acts looking back to the sounds of the 1950s, and it must have seemed like the right moment to step back and consider its origins. The BBC Omnibus strand had had a tentative stab back in 1968 with the overview documentary All My Loving, but nothing on this scale had ever been attempted. As a story, it was well beyond the remit of a single writer, and while the radio episodes were mostly handled by Tim Blackmore and Charlie Gillett, the partwork drew on the cream of British music journalism to ensure all bases were covered.

The magazine was astutely conceived, with the Elvis/Bowie cover clearly designed to appeal to fans of contemporary sounds as much as the rock revivalists. Taking 1956 as its starting point, but eschewing the obvious chronological approach, each issue juxtaposed articles on past acts and current superstars, whilst ongoing features examined the wider aspects of pop culture, and focused on specific genres. A weekly A-Z roundup of artists old and new provided a handy at-a-glance reference guide to who was who in the rock and pop arena, and the first issue was accompanied by a fold-out poster, ‘The Story of Pop Star Trek’ which illustrated, in typically colourful 1970s fashion, the network of influences that had contributed to the enormous diversity in contemporary pop. This was more than just a history – it was bang up to date with analysis and features on the latest acts. Pop fans could hardly have asked for more.

When the radio series came to an end in 1974, the magazine's run was extended for a further fourteen issues, alongside standalone specials devoted to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and 50s Rock & Roll. These publications (which would today be styled ‘bookazines’) brought together the best of the parent mag’s features in each subject area. I had The Beatles edition bought for me in August of 1974, just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in their back catalogue, and my brother had the hardback Story of Pop book bought for him that Christmas. I can’t overstate the importance of this book to me in opening up the history of pop music. Over the coming years, I read up on the bands that interested me, and even those that didn’t – the chapter on Bob Dylan was hugely influential in convincing me to listen to his albums, as were those on The Kinks, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. Its features on 50s artists from before my time shone a light onto a musical era that I might otherwise have ignored.

Despite its 300,000 word remit, the partwork couldn’t find room for absolutely everyone. Those artists judged to have been the most important and influential had whole articles devoted to them (including the likes of Adam Faith and Tom Jones), whilst others were covered in overview articles examining specific genres such as Merseybeat and Acid Rock. All of the big names were there, from Elvis, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran through Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Byrds, all the way to contemporary artists like Marc Bolan, Slade and Sweet.

The book, condensing the magzine’s vast panoply of content (and largely reprinting the pages as they they had originally appeared), was organised into five sections: ‘Rock & Roll’, ‘Black Music’, ‘The Beatles & British Rock’, ‘Dylan & American Rock’ and ‘70s Rock’. It’s interesting to note which of the artists profiled in the magazine were deemed significant enough for inclusion in the hardcover edition. Of the British acts, aside from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, only The Animals, Cream, The Bee Gees, Tom Jones, The Kinks and The Who made the final cut – Tom Jones’ inclusion being particularly intriguing. American rock was represented by Dylan, The Band, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Simon & Garfunkel, whilst the 1950s section featured Bill Haley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly amongst others.

The magazine continued beyond the life of the radio series, with a series of ‘special volumes’ extending the run to 40 issues. Such is the nature of any document that attempts to summarise an ongoing and ephemeral phenomenon – pop music didn't conveniently end in 1974 and still hasn't (although one could convincingly argue for its being dead in the water). For me, though, The Story of Pop book was as much as I needed to know about pop music circa 1974. It was an era when I was taking less of an interest in contemporary pop, and between those covers lay the future of my own personal musical investigations. In the next part of this article, I’ll go on to look at how and where I tuned into the sounds of the 50s and 60s on the radio.

The original run of 26 Story of Pop magazines have been uploaded online as pdfs, and can be found here:

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Radio-One-Pop/Radio-One-Story-of-Pop-26.pdf

Dad's Cars

‘To 1 Standard 8 Saloon 1955, complete as inspected: £400’ So reads the earliest item of paperwork I have relating to my dad’s cars. Our dad was never what you’d call a petrol head, although in his younger days, during his national service, he’d ridden a motorcycle, a fact I always found hard to equate with his mild-mannered persona. Cars or occasionally vans were a necessity – as a semi-pro musician, he needed transport to get himself and his drum kit to gigs all over the Midlands and occasionally further afield. As a young musician, he’d had to take his drums on the bus to engagements, fitting them under the stairs, so it’s easy to see why, in an era when car ownership was much less commonplace than it is today, he chose to get himself mobile at an early age.

The Standard 8, registration RNA 883, wasn’t dad’s first car, although he would often reminisce about it in later years. As the garage receipt shows, he traded in a van, of which no details survive. He owned the Standard until June 1961, when it was traded in against an Austin A35, XOJ 62. This was, I believe, another van, the same as the one later made famous by Wallace and Gromit (dad would have appreciated the connection). I have no recollection of this vehicle, which was with him for just over a year. In its place came 799 HDH, a Triumph Herald in two-tone cream and brown. I got to know this car very well over the coming years. Dad later claimed that he would let me sit on his lap and hold the steering wheel as he drove down our quiet suburban street, unlikely as this sounds. Either way, I soon became fixated on Triumph Heralds and even got to own one myself – a pedal car version made by Tri-Ang. There weren’t may production saloons available as pedal cars, so I was unusually lucky in being able to own a miniature version of ‘daddy’s car’.

Some time in the summer of 1964, aged three, I was dismayed to see, from my bedroom window, a canary yellow Vauxhall Victor pulling onto the drive with dad at the wheel. What had happened to the beloved Triumph Herald? I would never see it (or, indeed, the Victor) again. The Vauxhall was a temporary car supplied by the garage from which dad got his next vehicle, a white Hillman Minx, registration KRF 467B. It arrived in time for the family summer holiday that year, when it was captured briefly on film, showing its grey/white paintwork and red upholstery.

On 7 May, 1965, the Minx was involved in an accident. I was completely unaware of this at the time, and only discovered it when going through a folder of very old paperwork, which yielded up the documents seen here. The paperwork, from insurers Beddall Bradford and Co, shows that dad’s policy was bought through his membership of the RAC. Of even greater interest is a copy of a letter that dad sent to the insurance company detailing aspects of the claim and how the repair was handled. The Minx was temporarily replaced by a Ford Anglia, mentioned on a cheque book stub from June ‘65.

By this time, dad was travelling around not merely in his part-time role as a drummer, but in his full-time job working for the G.E.C., and in the summer of 1966 he was given the use of a company car. This time, it was a Vauxhall Victor, DDD 567C, in pale grey. One of its first long hauls was to take the family down to Weston Super Mare for the annual summer holiday, a trip that was made in awful conditions of heavy rain, at a time when the M5 was still incomplete. For a while, we were a two-car family, although the Minx was kept in the garage, with its insurance cover suspended while the Victor was in daily use. This situation continued until April 1966, when dad paid off the finance outstanding on the Minx.

In September 1967, the company car was returned and dad bought himself a brand new Singer Gazelle, HRF 821F, in deep maroon. Like the Minx, this model also came from the Rootes Group, a Midlands-based manufacturer that was taken over by Chrysler in 1970. The Gazelle featured modern styling, with a very rectangular appearance and a body shell shared by other models from the group including the Hillman Hunter. It was a first for us in having a radio, which none of the earlier cars had included. I remember dad seemed particularly proud of this vehicle at the time, and there were several visits to dealerships before the deal was done. It wasn’t the first car he’d owned from new, but somehow this one seemed special, for all that it was really no more than a modest mid-range family saloon.

The Gazelle saw us through holidays to Llandudno in 1968 and 69, Ireland in 1970, and a summer season in 1971 when dad’s musical activities become his full-time job with a residency at Pontins’ holiday camp, Brixham. A garage receipt survives detailing a routine service that was carried out at a dealer in Paignton: you’ll notice that the receipt is now headed Chrysler, following the Rootes Group takeover. An undated note, probably from around this time, totted up dad’s annual mileage – his band work accounted for 7,400 miles, whilst travel for his 9-5 job amounted to 12,000: a total of nearly 20,000 miles. It’s no wonder he changed his cars with such regularity – the average saloon car of the 1960s had a far shorter life expectancy than today’s models, with many developing mechanical faults within a matter of months, and most models being prone to rust.

In the autumn of 1971, the Singer Gazelle was involved in an accident, this time more serious than the minor bump with the Hillman Minx. Dad set out for his Saturday night gig only to return within the hour – the car had been broadsided at a junction less than a mile from home. He was shaken but unhurt, though I believe the car to have been declared a write-off. Unfortunately, no paperwork survives from this incident, or indeed any later than 1971, and from here I have to rely on diaries.

‘Daddy gets new car, Austin 1800’ was my entry for Tuesday 20 June 1972. Between the Gazelle accident and now, he’d had the use of a red Vauxhall Victor, which I believe to have been a company car during a brief period of employment with Cressall, a manufacturer of electrical resistors. The new car, VOV 900J, finished in plain white, took us on holidays to Llandudno (for a third time) in 1972, and Blackpool the following year. On Good Friday 1973, arriving home from work early, dad scraped it against the wall at the end of the drive – not a major incident, but he wasn’t best pleased.

Perhaps the most unusual journey I remember making in this car was on the evening of Sunday 24 June 1973. There was a thunderstorm at the time, and I think the power had gone off. We couldn’t watch television or play records, and it was too gloomy to sit and read. On an impulse, dad decided that we were all going out in the car. Where to? It didn’t matter. Just as long as it got us out of the house. In the event, he drove us as far as West Bromwich, a journey of some twelve miles and a round trip of about an hour. 

The Austin 1800 was the contemporary version of a saloon that had been in production since 1964, with a body style that has become known as the ‘land crab.’ I remember it as being a reasonably comfortable car, with the usual vinyl upholstery typical of the era (on a hot day it gave off a distinctive smell), and curious door handles that comprised a plastic flap locked into place by a clip. As a back seat passenger, I appreciated the folding armrest that was incorporated into the bench seat. Of course, we didn’t have seatbelts in the back during this era, and even for front seat passengers they weren’t yet mandatory. I’m sure our dad used them, and remember some of the early examples as having quite fiddly locking and release mechanisms. The 1800 wasn’t quite a prestige vehicle, and always struck me as having a kind of dowdy appearance. Of dad’s earlier cars, I preferred the Herald, Minx and Victor, and was bought die-cast versions of them all. Dinky made a model of the 1800, liveried as a taxi, which I owned and later repainted in Humbol enamel to resemble dad’s example.

Sales brochure for the Morris 2200 (identical to the Austin) showing it in the, 'ahem', desirable shade of Harvest Gold

Dad no sooner took possession of the car than he began to covet an upgraded version of the model, with a more powerful six-cylinder engine. The Austin 2200 had been launched at around the same time that he acquired the 1800, and quickly became a car which he aspired to (for comparison, our uncle, who owned an estate agency, drove a Jensen Interceptor). The most desirable colour, as far as dad was concerned, was ‘Harvest Gold’, a kind of mustardy shade, ‘complemented’ by an orangey-brown interior, that told you in no uncertain terms that you were living in the 1970s. Dad finally got to own this ‘dream car’ on Wednesday 3 July 1974, as noted in my Letts Schoolboys’ Diary. It saw us through family holidays to Llandudno (again!), Weston Super Mare, and a Welsh farm cottage before being replaced, in January 1978, by a white Austin Maxi, SOV 781S. This was our first ‘hatchback’, a feature which must have been very helpful to dad in moving his drums around, as he was still playing four or five nights a week. I didn’t care for the Maxi… if the 1800 had been dowdy, this was positively plain, a really drab and unimaginative car from an era when British motor manufacturing was in steep decline.

It was replaced, in 1980 and in considerable style, by a Ford Granada, EOX 983V, finished in a kind of metallic greenish gold. This was the most prestigious car our dad ever owned, as well as being the largest. It wasn’t the famous ‘Sweeney’ style (theirs was actually a Consul), but the MkII, introduced in 1977, and looking very much like the example below, illustrated on Wikipedia. It was around for a long time, and by this time I wasn’t given to noting such things in my diary. Alongside it came a bright orange VW Beetle, followed by an Opel. Dad didn’t drive these himself: they were provided (courtesy of a local haulage company) as cars for my brother and myself to use should we wish to do so. I hadn’t yet learned to drive, so never availed myself of the opportunity. The Opel’s most memorable moment came when it caught fire, while parked directly in front of our house. Remarkably, the house sustained no damage, although the car was written off.

Dad’s last car, which he still owned at the time of his passing in August 2001, was a Vauxhall Cavalier MkII hatchback, in silver. It says something for the reliability of cars during this era that he was able to keep it on the road for so long – it dated from the mid 1980s and was still perfectly driveable over a decade later.

These, then, were dad's cars – spanning over forty years of motoring and goodness knows how many thousands of miles. None of them, with the possible exception of the Granada, was anything more than an average family saloon. Some, like the Maxi, aren't well regarded today, whilst others like the A35 and Triumph Herald are considered classics. They all served him well – it was rare for any of them to be off the road for more than the occasional service – and in that respect they did exactly what they were built to do, providing reliable family motoring to an unassuming and unpretentious man who put family above all other considerations.

Sunday in Even Older Money

Nine Years of Nostalgia...

On 14 June, I will have been writing this blog for nine years. Memories that I was writing about in 2016 are now almost a decade older than when I set them down. And yet, strangely, none of them seem any further back in time. Perhaps this is a quirk of memory: once something is remembered, is it somehow set in aspic, never to retreat any further into the past?

Sunday In Old Money began with my diaries. Starting at the age of nine, in January 1971 – and with many gaps over the first few years – I kept notes of anything I'd seen on television, books I was reading or had bought for me, and anything else I thought worth recording. They're hardly a rival to Samuel Pepys, but in an admittedly rather shallow way, they do shine a light onto the pop culture of the era, in a time when viewing and reading habits were rather different than they are today – there was no internet, no CDs, DVDs or any of the modern formats in which we consume music, film and television.

In those nine years, I’ve posted 207 different essays, all sharing a common theme of nostalgia and memory. I doubt if they’ve been read by more than a dozen individuals – and whilst it would have been nice to get some conversations going on some of these topics, that was never really the point. I began writing this blog for myself, preserving memories while they’re still accessible. In doing so, I discovered that the most potent form of nostalgia comes from contextualisation. Mention of an old comic, piece of music or television series in isolation is all well and good, but when it’s placed within the wider cultural landscape in which it emerged, one gets a much keener appreciation of how it felt to be around during those times.

Beginning with my own diaries, I’ve drawn on sources including TV listings, pop charts and even weather records in an effort to recapture specific moments in time. In doing so, I’ve unearthed memories that I’d actually forgotten, and this is where context becomes critical. Hearing an old record may give you a hit of nostalgia, but when you hear an entire chart from say fifty years ago you begin to sense other things – where you were and what you were doing, even what the weather was like (which is why I so often refer back to Met Office records). Place that pop chart alongside the TV listings for the same week, and still more memories begin to emerge by association. It’s the nostalgia equivalent of placing two pieces of plutonium next to one another – a chain reaction of memory. Probably the bext example of this can be found in my entry from March 2017, “Daydream – a Time Detective Story” wherein I described how I’d taken a random memory and found a precise date for it. I did it by combining radio and TV listings and weather records, along with the release date of a specific piece of music. In the course of writing the item, I went from a vague memory of a random moment in time to a much clearer picture of an entire Saturday back in April 1970. If you didn’t read it at the time, you can find it here:

https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2017/03/daydream-time-detective-story.html

Here's another example: for some reason, I’d always remembered a random remark my dad made one evening in the early 1960s. He said something about watching a television series called ‘The Aeroplane Story’ which was on that same evening. There was never a television series with such a title, but it sounded exciting to me, which is probably why I remembered it. But what TV series might he have been talking about? ITV's boardroom drama The Plane Makers was very popular in the 1960s, so I looked up the transmission dates. I noticed that the third series began on Tuesday 20 October 1964. What else was happening at that time? The Tokyo Olympics. Knowing that fact sparked off another memory – at the time our dad was speaking, the television was on in the background, tuned to the early evening news – which was reporting on the Olympics. All of which strongly suggested that this random fragment of memory belonged to Tuesday 20 October 1964. It's hardly an exact science, but in the absence of a time machine, it's near enough.

None of this will mean anything to anyone else, but I’m using it here as an example of how memory can be pinned down in this manner. No other individual will have precisely the same network of memories and associations – but I hope that readers will occasionally find moments here that they can relate to their own lives, or that these essays might serve to give a better idea of how it felt to live in the 1960s and 70s than can be had from the many nostalgia-focused items one finds on television these days. 

When I started this blog, I was writing it in my spare time between holding down a full-time job (albeit one in which I worked from home 100% of the time). You can see from the right hand column those years when I had more to do and less time to devote to blogging – 2019 and 2022 were, for whatever reason, particularly busy times. On the other hand, since my job came to an end, writing these entries has often been the only thing I’ve had to do on a given day, and their number has shot up (2024’s tally of 60 having been ‘artificially’ increased by a ‘twelve days of Christmas’ series). As long as I can find subjects to write about, I will continue to do so, regardless of how few people are reading. If it provides interest or entertainment to anyone else, that’s a bonus. And if you find it interesting yourself and know someone else who might enjoy it, pass it on...