Music in the Sixties

Music in my Life: Part Two

The 60s

By now it was the sixties. Teddy boys, skiffle and rock and roll were almost over and I needed new, raw music that spoke to me and wasn't what they played on “Housewife’s Choice” or “Forces Favourites”. My Dad hated almost all of the new music that was on Six-Five Special and Juke Box Jury. Imagine caring enough to actually hate Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde or Cliff Richard!

The Beatles and the Stones gave us kids a taste of pop music and “white-boy blues” that in turn led us back to the original blues artists like Muddy Waters and BB King that my Dad would have approved of. 

Money was tight and albums were expensive, so none of us had more than half a dozen. We all bought different ones and played them at each other’s houses. My friend Dave Diaper had a lot of Beatles music because his whole family liked them so I bought the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Donovan instead. Harmonicas were a feature on all of the records I bought at that point so I learned to play the blues harp. I would practice in the bath where the acoustics were brilliant, and in the school playground where the school dog would howl along in a very authentic bluesy growl.

At the church youth club we played singles by the Ivy League, and Manfred Mann. On Saturdays us boys went fishing on the common where someone always sat on the picnic bench and played the latest hits on the BBC Light Programme’s Saturday Club with Brian Matthew. Don Lang played trombone with Lord Rockingham’s XI playing “There’s a Moose Loose about this Hoose” and even some skiffle by Lonnie Donnegan or Tommy Steele, but that show was also where we first heard the latest hits. Both the Who and the Kinks had happened by then. 

“My Generation” was a pivotal track. The Who had a tough time getting the record produced because of it’s analogue rawness and the way the band sounded (and probably was) almost out of control. Part of it’s magic was the hum and whistle of feedback, caused by waving the mics and guitars close to the speakers. The white-coated studio engineers had probably done their national service working as boffins on Sonar or Radar and they saw their job as keeping all the needles out of the red. The Who were aiming for the infra red and a whole spectrum beyond that if possible.

In my early teens I would go to dances on the pier and at the Top Rank Suite on Southampton Common. The first proper band I saw there was the Yardbirds. I think Jeff Beck was in the band at the time. I remember seeing a fox on my way to the gig but not a lot of detail about the music except that they were quite a polished show band. 

My school days in Southampton ended in 1966 and I completed my A levels in South Wales. By then I was a proper Mod, with a Lambretta TV 175 scooter, which was covered in mirrors, crash bars and the rest. I fitted a particularly objectionable megaphone exhaust that probably ruined the performance but sounded great to my ears. It also inhibited by ability to turn right as it would hit the road and lift the wheels off the tarmac. 

Scooter scrambles to Cardiff were common. The main band I followed at the time was Love Sculpture with the amazing Dave Edmunds covering Hendrix songs as well as prog-classical stuff like Sabre Dance. This was also the time of Amen Corner and the Small Faces, and God’s second coming in the form of Eric Clapton. I also attended a few laid back, beatnik sort of folk clubs back then and we danced to Tamla Motown and Ska music in the youth clubs and at a rather sleazy club under Newport station, called Platform Six, I think. There was always a fight.

My first outing in a band was at a school end of term, playing bass on “There is a House in New Orleans” in 1967. 

Luckily, I fell in with a fairly cultured crowd in South Wales and we would often pop over to Bristol’s Colston Hall to see touring bands, playing mostly Jazz. I saw Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach Trio several times, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Joe Harriott on tenor sax with Indo-Jazz Fusions; another game-changer for me. Bristol soon became a Mecca for us and so, when it came time to go to teacher training college, Fishponds in Bristol was my first choice.

But before college, if I had a lost summer in the 60’s, it was the summer of ‘68. I joined a couple of old friends from Southampton and we bummed around the country hitch hiking barefoot and picking up new friends along the way. We were very young and naive but, gosh, we had some adventures.

The highlight’s for me that summer were seeing Jimi Hendrix, Tyrannosaurus Rex, (Later T-Rex.) Family and other bands live at Knebworth before heading down to sleep rough in Hyde Park for a free concert by a cut-down version of Traffic. Steve Winwood of Traffic was a big hero, and still is.

About this time (1968) CBS Records issued the first album-length sampler called “The Rock Machine Turns You On.” My copy, like most of them, was mono. It had tracks by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Spirit, the Zombies, The Butterfield Blues Band, Blood Sweat and Tears, Simon and Garfunkel and mavericks like Roy Harper. It influenced a generation and was never (officially) brought out on CD or tape.

By the Autumn of 1968, there I was in Bristol with a grant and all expenses paid. The first things I bought were a mono turntable, a valve amplifier and a 10 inch speaker. Then I bought some wood and made the boxes to put them in. The fist album I played on it was “All Blue” by Miles Davis, followed by Pink Floyd’s “Saucerful of Secrets”, then Jethro Tull’s “This Was”, my Hendrix albums and Cream’s “Wheels of Fire.” 

Of course we formed a college band, heavily influenced by Jethro Tull, Joni Mitchell and the Incredible String Band. I played flute, whistle and harmonica, Sue Doyle sang and Ade George played guitar. I kept doing that kind of thing until I was well into my thirties; and why not?

Miles Davis

I saw Pete Green’s Fleetwood Mac, The Nice, The Who, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and the Incredible String Band during my Bristol days, as well as jazzers like Roland Kirk, blues players like John Mayall, and the folkie scene heroes like Keith Christmas. I met Roy Harper at a University sit-in and John Peel at a shambolic Pink Floyd gig while selling IT and OZ magazines. ‘Heady times.

By 1970 my tastes spread to progressive jazz, blues, folk, psychedelia and all combinations thereof. It was the fusion areas that interested me most. “Bitches Brew” and "In a Silent Way" by Miles Davis pulled all that onto one canvas with an outrageous all star line up that redrew the map of modern jazz.