Children of the Revolution

I entered the thirteenth year of my life in September 1954, but I had to wait a whole year before I became a teenager! Why, you ask?

Strange as may seem now, in post-war Britain the teenager never existed. The only way to distinguish between a sixteen year old and a sixty year old was to count the wrinkles. We sub-twenty year olds dressed the same as our dads, who in turn dressed the same as their dads. We watched the same movies as our parents and listened to the same music.

It’s not that we didn’t want to be teenagers, we did. We wanted to be like the kids in America. Didn’t they have the best crooners in Johnnie Ray, Guy Mitchell and Frankie Laine? Didn’t they have the best film idol in James Dean? American kids had drug stores that they arrived at in their hot rod Fords, where they ate burgers, drank sodas and danced to the jukebox. The youth of Britain wanted this too!

Then in 1955 all was about to change. The first rumblings came in the autumn of that year with the UK release of the Glenn Ford movie ‘Blackboard Jungle’. What made this movie a defining moment in British history? The theme song was “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” by Bill Haley and his Comets. Rock ‘n’ Roll had entered the lives of British youth. The revolution was upon us.

The recorded version of the song spent three weeks at number one in the UK charts from the end of November to halfway through December and then on January 6th 1956 it spent a further two weeks at number one. We had a honking tenor sax to rally us around the flag and a drummer boy to lead us into battle. We had our own identity, our lives had changed forever. Yes, we were gonna rock around the clock, but not just tonight but every night and every day until the end of eternity.

Five months later, on May 12th 1956, Elvis Aron Presley entered the UK charts with the song ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. That was it, the revolution was complete, we had our king. In the immortal words of Danny and the Juniors, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll is here to stay, it will never die.’

Suddenly the marketing men had a new target. The teenager was a viable financial proposition. Instead of racks of dowdy grey or pinstripe suits, gentlemens outfitters started stocking pastel coloured jackets which were soon to be followed by lurid Lurex weave ones. Incidentally, my first jacket as a neo-teenager was powder blue! Instead of twin sets and pearls, girls were wearing dresses with flared skirts, printed with music note and treble clef motifs, topped off with fluffy bolero jackets around their shoulders.

Coffee bars with the much lusted after jukeboxes popped up all over the place, and record shops started installing listening booths for the convenience of the new teenage clientele. Music shops also jumped on to the band wagon. Where they once only stocked sheet music and harmonicas, their walls were now lined with guitars. I recall in the window of our local music shop they had a display of ‘Hofner’ acoustic guitars, ‘Sunburst’ with ‘f’ holes, retailing at £29.19s.11d, that’s £29.99 in today’s decimalised currency, which is roughly £600 at today’s prices. What we wouldn’t have done for one of those!

Then joy upon joy, a burger joint hit town in the form of the Wimpy franchise. The high street started taking on a new appearance as shopkeepers began to dress their windows with more vibrant and dynamic displays. Their motto seemed to be ‘Adapt or Die’. If you weren’t ‘hep’ you were so yesterday!

This wasn’t a new era, it was a whole new world. This new world kept evolving through the decades, British music headed by the ‘Beatles’ in the sixties, disco in the seventies, the new romantics of the eighties, Brit Pop in the nineties and what ever genre you would like to choose for this new millennium.

This new world still exists today thanks to all of us revolutionaries. So teenagers, don’t ever forget that it was people like me and all of my contemporaries, Britain’s first teenagers, that had to ‘fight for the right to party’!