juke box story 1958

With the usual toff bonhomie the Pathe News voice over does his best to persuade us the juke box is becoming respectable in 1958, having always been previously associated with the frightening youth craze of rock and roll it has now crossed over into the classical world. It's likely this concept is just a piece of social propoganda to persuade all parents and adults in general the juke box is not a point of devil worship for the young but a highly bankable industry.
"...normally associated with jazz and rock and roll, is rapidly becoming respectable... so be it rock or skiffle, strauss or stravinsky we're going to see and hear a lot more of the jukebox"
Although it would be somewhat unlikely classical records were ever released on vinyl 45's.
But watching the manufacturing of a juke box with it's loading arms being tested is fun. Within a few years the portable record player became the desired purchase.. and you didn't have to stuff that with coins to hear your rock and roll. With 45 singles also easily affordable the milk bars and cafe's were no longer the gathering point for young teenagers to hear their music. Eventually the juke boxes were replaced by piped music and the dreaded 'muzak' was born. A guarantee to make any teenager run screaming.
A classic Pathe News clip seen at your local flea pit.

rock at the british pathé archive (part 2)

Here's another dip into the British Pathé Newreels, the year is 1965 and the Beat boom is well underway. With many young men (mainly) queueing up to get hold of an electric guitar just like their heroes played there also came one big problem.
In the mid 60's imported American guitars to the UK were far too expensive and rare so your average aspiring Hank Marvin were looking to get hold of anything their own considerably lower budget would meet. Hence an avalanche of cheap copies on the market. Many imported from Holland. All well and good for twanging around on in the bedroom but once it became a bit more serious and you got down the youth club well... you had to have something with a bit more elan to plug into your Vox Amp.
But in 1963, Jim Burns along with co-founder Alice Farrell had come up with the smart move of manufacturing their own brand of electric guitars for the homegrown rocker in the making.
The Burns workshop and small team of technicians had a renowned reputation in their early days for some very original thinking when it came to guitar design and electrics, it's even said Lennon went to him for some tweaking to his Rickenbacker. That's early Beatles days right.
Anyway by the mid 60's the Burns brand of guitars had expanded rapidly and were to become a classic of the era and latterly described as the British Fender due mainly to it's similar styling. They're now highly collectable with some rare models reaching eye watering sums.

As a result the Burns brand was now a real credit to UK business, so with that now seen as a somewhat curious and unexpected addition to the economy along comes British Pathé to let everyone know what actually is going on in this mysterious world of guitar manufacturing.
The narrator informs us of how a team of craftsmen and technicians are all going to be part of assembling just one of these guitar things... "all this to make a bedlam of adolescent noise" he says cheerily, over the meandering tuneless noodling of the saxophone bedlam going on in the background which was presumably considered real music.

You'll note here the divide between the adolescent teenager and the adult is still very much in full swing as it was the year earlier in the 1964 post on British Pathe.
We now see a man testing the sound quality of one of the newly built guitars and the narrator adds
"Surprising when you consider the noise they make that each and every guitar is scientifically tuned just as if they were REAL musical instruments!".
Ah the ever present condescending tone of the adult viewing this laughably child like toy. All intoned in a plumby English public school accent.
Yes indeed the 1960's teenager had much to rebel against.. and that was just the accent !

So now the shiny new guitar is finished and held aloft for us. It happens to be a Burns Shortscale Jazz and probably wouldn't be first choice for a beat group (still capture right).
But the tour of the Burns factory is now cut off rather sharply as Part 2 was obviously in the can and yet to be edited on.
The guitar is now to be handed to an actual beat group member who is going to use this new fangled device to make that said "noise".
We can go to that below Part1.

And that Beat group is... 'Unit Four Plus Two' performing their hit song "Never Been in Love Like This Before" in a nightclub setting.

Actually it was named as the Ad Lib Club, London and there didn't appear to be an audience so presumably the Pathé crew thought that a good location and anyway handy for a drink after the shoot. A good day out for all. They probably had a few of these locations lined up around London for the right moment.
Trouble is, that wasn't quite as seamless a link as might have been hoped for because the guitar handed to one 'Unit Four Plus Two' member is not the one he receives in Part Two.
In fact that doesn't look like a Burns guitar at all. However on the next shot we do see a close up of another 'Unit' actually playing a now very rare Burns TR2 semi-solid body. (still capture right). The bass player also plays a Burns model.
The whole thing's shot in superb quality. Another slice of life in the swinging 60's world of Pathé newsreels. As seen at your local bug hutch this weekend.

Part 1. The Burns Factory

Part 2. 'Unit Four Plus Two'

rock at the british pathé archive

Last Monday (14th April) British Pathé uploaded a staggering 50,000 films from their archives to YouTube, (bringing their channel total to 85,000 videos!). The logistics of collating and cataloging that lot are mind boggling enough but the very idea that it could be uploaded to their YouTube channel is... well, crazy!
For those of us who have uploaded video to them it would seem an impossible task, British Pathe must surely have sent a very large hard drive to Google and have them dump it into their servers. Oh well however they did do it, the archive is something quite extraordinary.
For those not familiar with Pathé newsreels this is their description -

Since the invention of the moving image in the 1890's, British Pathé began recording every aspect of global culture and news, for the cinema. With their unique combination of information and entertainment, British Pathé's documentaries, newsreels, serials and films changed the way the world saw itself forever.

As they said "for the cinema", the Pathé newsreels were particularly well known in Britain from the 40's though to the mid 70's where these film shorts were screened before the evenings main feature at your local flea pit. After the mid 70's they just disappeared... guess time marched on for them.

Now you might well ask what's all that got to do with the goings on in the grimy corners of a rock and roll blog. It's this - just what did they collect from the era of rock and rolls early days?
Given that youth culture didn't really exist before the 1950's, until then any young person was considered to be a child and then an adult. No in between point, a child first and then around the age of 15 you turned into your father or mother. But in the 50's the new phenomena known as the teenager began. Mainly by commercial business when they realised they could sell stuff in large quantities to a young post war consumer, ie, the baby boom generation.
And right up there at the top of the list of retail was the music industry and its many splendid desires. And oh boy did the youth get that. And that's when the whole mess was started. Rock and Roll had begun. There's some interesting and amusing early rock and roll in the Pathé archive, not a lot but 1 minute and two minute shorts of these "crazy" early teenagers doing a mad jitterbug type dance (obviously a jive) to the backdrop of Bill Haley.
Pathé delivered their verdict on all this with a slightly bewildered "whatever next" tone. There's a very fine example we'll dig out for a later post. It's of a DIY skiffle group playing in the backstreets of the East End in London to a crowd of bemused onlookers. It finishes with the group being moved on by the plod. "Hello, hello.. what's going on here then" would be the usual approach. All captured in black and white film, and probably set up and encouraged by the film crew.
So hardly a riot going on, which is what the media were all scared of when rock and roll was mentioned. That came a year or two later when Bill Haley actually arrived on the UK shore.

But when it comes to the really good stuff in the Pathé archive we arrive in full technicolor 1960's. Yes, the swinging 60's were lapped up by Pathé newsreels, and we get the benefit of looking at this funfair of activity as if it were yesterday. It doesn't disappoint. This news report might be seen as the beginnings of the Swinging 60's.
Set in 1964 It's a slightly ham fisted attempt at bringing technology and music together called 'Age - AKA Slot Machine Age'.
This technology is a type of jukebox called a scopitone. Which, as it turns out is a fancy name for what would have been an early video player in concept. This jukebox has a screen and on it a beat group is playing. They're called Sandra Barry and Her Boys. (ha).
Then the boys are seen checking out guitars in a music shop (and wouldn't we all like to reach and grab a few of those classics today). The group then goes onto perform 'Really Gonna Shake' in the shop!.. blimey.
'The Boys' try to persuade Sandra to do the shake and she repeats, "No, no, I don't want to shake!" . But eventually she does. In her gold boots! Very slick at the time. Although she doesn't quite shake in the proper sense of "Shakin' All Over", she sort of sashays to the side and back rather gently.
But it is a real live beat group.. and 'The Boys' did go on (another story), only without Sandra who didn't have a hit with this not quite shaking record.
A beautifully clear film capturing the aspirations and hopes of the evolving decade all in 2 minutes. Although the scopitone didn't figure much after this demonstration.
The British Pathé archive on YouTube is here.