WITH 1962's 'TELSTAR', THE QUINTESSENTIAL BRITISH INSTRUMENTAL, THE TORNADOS TOPPED THE US HOT 100 WHERE NO LIMEY GROUP HAD EVER MADE MUCH HEADWAY. IN THE UK, PUPPYISH US BOBBIES WERE NOT AS EASILY HOISTING THRIE DISCS ABOVE NUMBER 20.
None the less, though Cliff Richard's backing quarter, the Shadows, ruled 1962's spring chart with 'Wonderful Land', their reliance on banks of violins bolstered record moguls' theories that outfits with electric guitars were passe` even if there was now a swing towards beat groups without a "featured singer" as a credible means of both instrumental and vocal expression.
Some of these groups had been toughened by hundreds of hours on stage in German clubs. Among these were the Beatles, the Searchers and similar Merseyside ensembles who infused their shared repertoires with a grinning Scouse vibrancy. A main reason why the Beatles found themselves the figureheads of the beat boom was the formidable songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney - though few London recording managers thought that anyone wanted to hear home-made songs. None could foresee that native units, many of them penning their own material, would be leaping up the charts by 1963. Beginning with Merseybeat, Britain would be a nation in which nearly every region was deemed to have a "sound". This figment of publicists' imaginations had germinated during the summer of 1963 when simple commercial expediency sent even the slowest-witted London talent scout up north to plunder the musical gold.
Gutted of its major talents, Merseybeat was left to rot as the contract-waving host turned southwards to sign up Kent's Bern Elliott and the Fenmen, the Nashville Teens from Surry and other experienced local acts, as the focus gradually narrowed once more on the capital. Most of those fortunate enough to make the charts went off the boil within a year but the beat-boom set new commercial and artistic standards for all pop groups.
By 1964, Lennon and McCartney could afford to toss spare hit songs to others, among them the Rolling Stones. The Stones' unkempt appearance was so vehemently derided by adults that, naturally, they were worshipped by the young. Neither did the group compromise with its music - music that had fermented in the specialist blues venues around London. Among others who patronized these places had been future Kinks, Yardbirds, Manfred Manns and Pretty Thing - all poised to breach the UK Top 20 within months of the Stones' first Number 1, 'It's All Over Now'.
Though far from the juke joints of black America, other UK groups like the Downliners Sect, the Animals and the Spencer Davis Group would also try to emulate the Muddy Waters, John Lee Hookers and Howlin' Wolfs of this world but they'd sometimes look and sound dangerously like pop groups. Straying from their blues core, the Yardbirds pioneered extended improvisation and, like the Pretty Things and others, had the nerve to suck Chuck Berry into the vortex of blues, giving credence to trad jazz trumpeter Kenny Ball's jaded opinion that British R&B was just "rock and roll with a mouth organ". Certainly it mined less confining seams than those of older performers like Alexis Korner, John Mayall and Grahan Bond, in whose outfits lay future personnel of Fleedwood Mac, Cream, Colosseum, Free and other acts that caught the tide in the second wave of British blues in the later Sixties.
Of a lower caste than the middle class bohemians of the blues clubs, "Mods" preferred "soul" music. Though their records were plugged heavily on pirate radio, genuine US articles like Lee Dorsey, Otis Redding and, especially, James Brown appeared irregularly in Britain. Therefore, Mods made do with groups augmented with horn sections and keyboards, led by such as Cliff Bennett, Georgie Fame, Zoot Money and Chris Farlowe.
None of these worthy bandleaders was to figure in the first all-British Top 10 in March 1964. A further demonstration that UK pop was now generating vast financial power was what has passed into myth as the "British invasion" of North America. Following exploratory forays by the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five, most of Britain's major pop acts harried the US Top 40 to such an extent that, as Frank Zappa, then in the Soul Giant, said: "If you didn't sound like the Beatles or Stones, you didn't get hired."
Even when the Yanks began striking back in 1965, it was by learning the wild Limey idioms so thoroughly that a lot of US and UK sounds were interchangeable. The hardest blow was dealt by the prepackaged Monkees, thrust together by a US business cabal for a television sit-com in which they played an Anglo-American beat group in artistic debt to long-haired entertainers from an island that only 3 years earlier had been regarded as the furbisher of nothing more than 9-day wonders like 'Telstar'.
