1973 to 1975
SCHOOL’S IN FOREVER
Growing
unemployment led to the increase in the age that young people left
education establishments between 1972 and 1973. The official figure
broke the million barrier. It would fuel arguments from trade unions
that were getting complaints from their members, over youngsters
taking jobs from older people; due to them being paid less, and being
more controllable, from the education system, by employers. They had
pressed the Labour Party to stop kids entering the labour market,
before 1966. The employers also did the same for different reasons,
to the Conservative Party, who had taken power in 1970. Employers,
under the guise of the Confederation of British Industry (C.B.I.),
wanted to put an end to the young people coming to them for jobs.
Well not all youths, only the ones who had not learned much at
school. Those that left at 15 probably had not taken CSE or GCSE
exams. These were now going for jobs that in years gone by they were
not expected to take or even get! Once again this was caused by
unemployment. Another couple of factors put pressure on to raise the
school leaving age. The first has to be local councils, which are
budget minded and like all capitalist, want growing amounts of money
to use. Even the ones that claim not to be capitalist use the same
system, as more than half of any council’s expenditure is connected
to education, than keeping kids at school will help their budget.
It’s also good news for teachers and their unions, with more jobs
for them, when jobs elsewhere were getting harder to find. Though not
all teachers wanted this, as it created more work for them and
teacher training was perhaps slow to catch up with this created
demand. Newly qualified young women teachers also tendered to leave
after they got married. Teachers were thus in short supply. This
would result in more work and for the same pay, for those already
teaching. They too had to put up with the kids that had to stay on
for the extra year. Dr Rhodes Boyson, very much on the right of the
Conservative Party and an educationalist, thought that schools would
become unmanageable. Not all children simply accepted the extra year;
one boy even took his own life, by hanging himself in 1974. Parents
had to support their kids longer. Poor and uneducated parents often
let their child leave, regardless of the law. It’s likely that this
was put down to truancy, as Boyson believed. The Inner London
Education Authority found in their surveys that 15 being worst for
truancy. Many got some sort of job, which was cash in hand. This
meant that employers got away with not paying National Insurance and
any tax and the rest. Newspaper headlines screamed ONE MILLION
TRUANTS, but some benefited - both kids and adults.
Official statistics showed that only 60% left school at age 15. But
this was due to the grammar schools, who kept kids till 16 anyway.
After the age of leaving discrepancy was corrected some 70% of pupils
gave up education, so even some Grammar school pupils were flooding
on to the jobs market at 16. The increased numbers of children
leaving made the further education figures look good, with 10% more
by 1979. However in real terms this was probably a reduction or no
change at all, due to the “baby boom” generation. Nevertheless
most children accepted the extra year and those parents with children
who had left school, were not keen on their other children joining
the dole queue. More youths on the dole was making a mockery of the
need system of poverty relief that post war government had
introduced. Easter and summer leavers flooded the Employment Exchange
every time. Most got jobs quite quickly. However the opposition
parties used these new high figures to attack any Government and any
policies they had. Even if these policies had nothing to do with
unemployment. The problem for any government was that these figures
and the inflation rate figure were regular read out in the House of
Commons. If they fell they were all right, yet if the baseline trend
showed increase they were still blamed. News reports of jobless
youths committing suicide and the distressed parents put further
pressure on MP’s. The truth is that both of these figures were
unconnected with most government plans or actions to keep them low.
This is because that like medical drugs they work in some cases,
don’t in others and have side effects, which are mostly none
beneficial to the country as a whole.
The Milky bar Grocer’s daughter
One
of these ‘side effects’ was brought about because of the above
and the others already spoken of, plus the disrespect of older people
to those younger. Most adults those well over 21, during the
seventies, think that young people became more disrespectful to the
older generation. This was true because of the schooling and yet it
was the other way round as well. Many adults became quite resentful
of young people, because the young people seemed to have more money.
This spending was of course seen in the buying of popular music.
Adults paying large bills: from the rent/mortgage to food and
heating/light, left them with little surplus cash. This ‘surplus
cash’ was then spent on luxury items. Few bothered to save then. It
was universally considered that buying music was a luxury item;
indeed you could say that most of what young people spent their money
on was considered by adults to be a waste of time. In essence the
young person, once any board was paid, was free to spend on what they
liked. With adults this hardly applied, thus young people had gained
a little extra money and being criticised for it. These moans reached
government ears and with the other moans eh; should that be concerns,
they passed acts needed to keep children at schools for a longer
period. The 1972 Local Government Act, though this did not come
completely into effect until April 1974, was one such act.
Most
of these older people believed that the community sprit was at its
height during the war. Mrs Thatcher and others certainly did and she
plays a role in what happened. Ironically the seeds of their
discontent of the young had also been sown during the war. It was
the 1944 Education Act that took the school leaving age to 15,
although it wasn‘t raised till 1947. It also had the provision to
increase the same to 16, once the Ministry of Education was satisfied
it could be practical. And there didn’t need to be another act or
parliamentary debate on the subject. There hadn’t been much of one
on the 1944 act itself! It went through Parliament ‘smooth but
slow’
The Ministry thus thought it was practical in 1972. The minister in
charge was Margaret Thatcher. She who stopped free school milk, but
what she didn’t know, at the time, she was building up the problems
she was deal with as Prime Minister, they were trivial compared with
the cost of free milk!
There
was no evaluation done, by the scientific communities, on the likely
affects that keeping children on at school would have. No economist
did any calculations of the withdrawal of large numbers of people
from the work place, simply because many of them thought that it
would increase productivity to have better educated young people
leaving school. To fit in with this, new aspirations about increasing
A-Level and O-Level qualifications were being brought in, however the
entire Government and all the parties, simply ignored youths/children
contribution to the economy. There was opposition to Mrs Thatcher’s
plan, but it wasn’t to do with the creation of problems that
Britain was to become involved with. The Daily Telegraph called
it “little short of Lunatic”.
Thatcher was seen as being a socialist in this context, simply
because she was for-filling Labour’s broken pledge of 1966. The
other side effects of rising rates in local authorities and reduced
spending by adults having to support their children for longer than
before and more tax. They also ignored the effect inflation was based
on too much money circulating in the economy. The Church had strongly
argued for young people to be in education from the industrial
revolution, believing that the young were being corrupted morally by
having no or little education. They would probably wouldn’t have
accepted (and still won’t) that; teaching reading, maths and so on
to teenagers causes and caused a fundamental breakdown in moral
standards and social behaviour.
All
of these factors came into play again as the results of the jump in
the school leaving age had a downside to the financial side of
Britain. The first side effect of the extra year was blamed (at the
time and still is for many) on the oil price and shortage of 1973;
The Yom Kippur War of October 73 quadrupled the crude oil price.
Trade unions also took the can for it as well. The Miners led by Joe
Gormley and Rail Unions battled with Edward Heath’s Conservative
Government about how much people should get paid. Heath had given tax
cuts out in his budgets and with cheap credit was causing growth in
the economy at 7.4%. Workers thus needed high wages to pay debt.
Massive wage rises were seen by the Labour Governments between 1974 &
1979, as responsible for the colossal rise of inflation to its
highest figure (since the war) of 24.9%. This was achieved in 1975.
Only since this figure, like the record charts positions, were not
based on up-to-date figures, don’t refer to that year, but are
referring to 1974 and even 1973. Under Dennis Healy time as
chancellor, policies were brought in to control wage rises. Pay was
therefore only to rise inline with inflation and preferably under it.
These ‘contracts’ did not take into account that a firm might be
making a profit or the increasing costs of children since they were
in school now longer. Unrest among working people grew. While at the
same point, bosses increased their salaries even when the companies
were not making profits. Trade unions members on TV news tried to
defend their union’s actions. They pointed out that inflation had
eaten into the workers wagers and that land prices or oil, which had
nothing to do with their members, caused inflation. The TV News also
would come under attack by the Glasgow University Media Group as
promoting a middle ground style of news coverage, in a sequence of
books, with names such as: Really Bad News. They showed that
TV news backs various opinions and delivered a centre political view
of the world. By the end of 2000 it was a centre-right view as the
old regimes tried to control the poor morals of the people. With the
power cuts of 1972, because Arthur Scargill and others got Flying
Pickets to stop coal reaching the power stations, militant unions
became the topic of a pop song. The Strawbs hit the top of the chart
with Part of the Union. video below But was it sung in praise or against
the unions, you could ask yourselves? Not that most
teenagers were
interested in the news or the decline around them. Teenage girls were
interested only in seeing the latest pictures of pop stars in Jackie
Magazine, which came out Saturdays, Boys were into football and
league tables were often pasted onto their bedroom walls. Snooker
also had parents rushing off for small tables. Thanks to colour TV
and the BBC 2 programme Pot Black, made only because of
colour. It doesn’t make sense in black and white! That’s assuming
they had a colour set, and the power was on!
If
the unions were simply being blamed and had not caused the rise to
24.9%, then was the oil rise doing the damage? I doubt it, because it
doesn’t fit with the theory that too much cash is to blame. If any
product rises in cost too much, in the market system, the rise can be
got round by not buying as much of it. Indeed the Government had a
“Save it” campaign on following the crises. Although oil may have
contributed to a small rise of less than 10% due to the need still to
buy it, something that the Government does every year was the cause
of it. The budget! This for 1973 was very different to all the
previous years. In that year the budget was set like all the others
on the spending and income for the previous year’s total. Yet in
1972 the 15-year-olds that should have left were still there, the
following year. The 1973 budget should have taken an amount of the
overall budget for that year to account for all these kids not
getting paid by employers. However since that figure wasn’t
available, due to the kids getting different levels of wages or none
at all, the chancellor could not do this. The reason for this being
that if the Government didn’t stick to the figures (of previous
years) when setting the budget, then Britain could go bust, because
employers wouldn’t have the cash to pay people. In 1971 there were
about 8 million aged between 16 and 24. Yet that’s not really
practical for our purposes. Let’s do some calculations. Since I was
at school when they raised it, I can tell you that each class of my
school had 30 to 40 pupils in it. I understand that this was about
typical around the rest of the country. So my school had 9 classes
per year of kids, before the rise, thus it had 3 sets of 9 classes.
After 1972 it had 4 sets of 9. Assuming 30 kids per class, then 270
pupils should have left each year. If they all got a job that paid
say £16 a week, then the Treasury had to make sure that £4,320 was
circulating in the economy for each school. This adds up for 30
schools to £129,600, about the number for Sheffield and so on. Even
if the Schools took on extra staff and resources, it still would
hardly affect the overall figure that was circulating. A huge amount
of money was thus issued in the budget of 1973 that was not needed;
however it would remain hidden, as costs had risen, due to oil, a
three day working week and all the other faults that hit Britain in
1973 and74. With the crisis that hit Britain a small amount of money
left floating went unnoticed. The ship of state had hit the iceberg
and no one knew!
Inflated leavers
Therefore
inflation hit that high in 1975 due to the budgets of 1973 & 74
not cutting back the cash needed to pay school leavers, who hadn’t
left! This left the money floating around, it also explains why
inflation has since never gone that high. Ironic that the woman who
brought inflation under control, was responsible for the trigger of
it going so high in the first place! “Nah!” would have said
Alfred Sherman and Alan Walters two bright academics, who wouldn’t
shake the hand of Keith Joseph in 1974. “It’s all this
subsidising and money supply ripping that Heath’s doing! Let the
entrepreneurs have a free run that will solve the problem,” it
didn’t and they did.
The
next side effect was to make Richard Branson a rich man. Branson was
really good at cheating; he was even doing it at school. It turns out
most millionaires are, according to those that study them. Branson
himself had been tax fiddling the Government by selling records by
mail order that were meant for export, thus avoiding purchase tax.
Richard himself was helping the down trodden youth also, but made
money at the same time.
Getting wind of the postal strikes forced him
to set up record shops as well. With 240,000 postal workers led by
Tom Jackson on all out strike. Branson had a huge problem thanks to
Mr Taxman, who caught up and wanted £38,000 over 3 years! Credit
made it easy for Richard, as he didn’t have to pay for the records
he got from suppliers for 60 days. Cash or cheque customers paid
quick and Virgin staff had gone to America and seen the Tower Records
chain selling music from the shelf. Each new store, helped by credit
delay, opened to pay off the taxman. Contacts with musicians brought
Tom Newman asking for a recording studio and the rest was added to
give Virgin its own label in 1971. By 1973 Virgin had signed up Mike
Oldfield, who produced experimentally a whole album, with no gaps or
voice, called Tubular Bells.
John Peel played it in full on
Radio One and it went to number one on the album chart a single was
also lifted from the album. The rights were also given to a filmmaker
and used on The Exorcist. Within a short time he was a
millionaire. The next Branson type who benefited was Pete Waterman.
Whereas Richard knew nothing of popular music, Pete knew everything
and told Magnet Record company boss Michael Levy that his companies
records where “crap”.
No sex please! We’re at school
The
other side effects of increased education would be seen in the next
decade, but it started to get more problematic in the seventies. This
was down to sex. Basic sex education had become a joke! Apart from
those in the adult world who disagreed with it entirely, it was being
taught before most children were even interested in it. However it
concentrated on the “birds and the bees” and the stuff one can
see, as Eminem would put it years later “on the Discovery Channel”.
As most young people would have left school from senior school around
the age of 15, it continued to be taught at before that age. Another
reason for it to be taught was the onset of puberty. Teacher thus
could answer these questions, which children had about changes to
their bodies, to the whole class. Actually as humans are a sexual
race, a lot of sexual development takes places a lot earlier than 12.
Be that as it may more emphasis takes place after 12. Human
reproduction teaching consisted of technical drawings of the
male/female body, a film of the birth of a child, the mention of
sperm and eggs being released, but no clear description of how the
sperm got from male to female. Generally it was referred to as the
“fertilisation process”! This was the effect of the permissive
sixties, believe it or not! But even Richard Branson had discovered
the problems with getting help for teenagers with sexual transmitted
diseases as early as 1968, when he placed an advert in his student
(anyone over 16 in education) magazine. Breaking the law by putting
in the advert, which was for a sexually education centre, the word
“venereal” resulting in a seven pound fine.
This
simple form of sex education was (by the Government and Church) of
course seen as sufficient for children leaving school at 15 then.
Equally it was not really; they would have to get details from other
people.
And that’s the crux of the matter. Youngsters after they enter
puberty need instructions from a wide variety of ages. Instead they
started after the Second World War to get it from other teenagers.
Most would agree this was and is a bad way of learning about sex,
hence the sex education that is outlined above. Yet as this was a
best poor, it was back to teenagers again for the ‘good stuff’,
hence the popularity of Sweet’s record “Little Willy” in
June of 1972, something to laugh about around the bike-shed. Video Below
Another
factor then entered, by the early seventies, was comprehensive
education. This saw most boys and girls merged into the same school.
They also did more merging at the back of the bike-shed, which
started to make some of the girls faint in class or in the assembly.
Apart from strong catholic schools, keeping the girls apart from the
boys wasn’t seen as a problem. Some however did notice that girls
didn’t get a good education, because of the distractions. Not all
of the girls got pregnant, but some did form permanent (as they
thought) relationships and got married after leaving school. However
this does all come about from being at school and what they learned
there makes them into the parents they would become after the age of
16. A decent education makes a good parent argue politicians. However
I would argue that it doesn’t even make a good politician. Most
biologists tell us we are merely animals, though members of
parliament don’t like that and have become superior to that kind of
talk. Only they ignore advice like this, with a perilous consequence.
They did with the school leaving age! But then again nobody knew much
about that sort of thing in 1944. Mr Butler (whose act it was) went
wrong in that he assumed that education of the mind is all young
people needed. This might have been true before the school leaving
age went past the age of 12. With puberty in full effect, which is by
no means a development of our sexual needs and drives, as already
mentioned these have been changing since we were born. It’s much
greater than that, puberty changes who we are. Our personality
develops, how we relate to others, of both sexes, changes. Later also
how we will raise children becomes an issue. Everyone in Britain, who
left education, before 1947, wouldn’t understand what doing this to
the children would mean. Nowadays we do though comprehend this, yet
it still is being ignored. Once again if education controls who we
are and what is studied; then any kind of talk which makes education
itself to blame for Britain's social and moral problems will not be
tolerated. All that happens are debates about how under funded
education as lead to social problems, by the left-wingers and how
private schools make better children, by right-wingers. They all
still agree that a decent education makes good parents and blame the
parents of children who have ‘bad’ kids and this attitude was
common in the seventies.
Youths
however were downgraded by adults. The best example of this can be
seen in the BBC’s TV series Dad’s Army. Private Pike is a
stereotyped young person of the 1940’s. Yet, because he mixes with
the other people of the platoon, forms no peer group with other young
people so should have been more adult than youths of the decade it
was filmed in. However he hasn’t grown up. What his captain calls
him rang true with many adults watching in the seventies. Showing
there’s also a lot of the attitudes and beliefs of older people in
the seventies, in the character. Pike watches too many films, picking
up stupid ideas from them. And is idle or incompetent in any task he
does. Strike TV for films and you could have anyone who has left
school at 15/16. Also it’s Pike that has to do all the dirty jobs,
like any apprentice/Youth scheme lad!
Souled Out & Super Bad at Art
The
first dramatic effect of the education system that really annoyed
most people was graffiti. Although the illegal use of writing or
scribbling on things can be found at most times in history, the
painting on walls reached epidemic levels by the mid seventies. The
spray can of paint was blamed for the increase. There was a simpler
reason. Most education in schools concentrated on what had been
taught from the early days of teaching. Art was taught at first to
inspire young people with culture. Perhaps with a view to make them
think how wonderful Art Galleries were and so on. Art Colleges had
been set up and with their influence, convinced many teachers to take
Art into the classroom. It’s amazing how many people think they
can’t draw even today. This is based on the prints of paintings and
the originals in the art galleries around the world, which people
have on their walls. Few can draw like Constable;
most can draw like Lowery critics said of him “Matchstick Men and
Cats & Dogs”. Yet even his work is hard to produce. Art School
graduates often went on to teaching. When you look at some modern
art, you soon get the impression that anyone could do it. Some of it
doesn’t (to an untrained eye) look like any skill was involved at
all. For instance Cy Twombly “untitled” piece from 1959 looks
like a very young child had just been allowed to scribble all over
the six-foot canvas! Yet nobody would pay over a million pounds for
one that been done like that! With this kind of modern art being
taught at Art College, then teachers would be able to see any kids
with this kind of potential early on and then develop it. To what
extent schools were proud of these budding artists can easily be seen
it the art classroom and the corridors of the schools. The famous
still life image by Andy Warhol of Coca Cola bottles or cans, was picked up
by art teaches and haunts schools to
this day most likely.
Still it is seen by those thinking education has only positive
results, as a thing to encourage young people to escape from the
boredom of their lives.
Over
in America, around the New York Slums, where Black people were
housed, James Brown’s soul music had really taken hold. Groups and
solo acts such as: The Isley Brothers, Harold Melvin and the
Bluenotes, the Ojays and Barry White, easily crossed the pond with
smooth well produced numbers like If You Don’t Know Me By Now,
Back Stabbers and That Lady. In Britain music making was
seen as art itself. But Pete Waterman found out, when he went to the
place it was made, looking for the magic ingredient that made US soul
better than English music, it was a factory! Writers and producers
Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Tom Bell just turned out songs to earn a
living.
The Labour Party could have nationalised them, if they had been in
England. The high American crime rates blamed on black people, where
influencing the street language. Yet as can be seen the songs were
about love, even so the acts were seen as BAD. This soon caught on,
the original meaning getting lost in marketing by record companies.
These had caught on to impact that television advertising had on
selling records. With the stream of acts that were flowing into and
off the top 50 at much faster rates than in any of the previous
decades, more and more acts were having only a few hits. This was
especially true with soul music. A lot of soul groups/acts who made
albums couldn’t get them to sell. Once an act became big, it was
easy to sell albums, but acts such as Ultra Funk featuring Mr.
Superbad, Creative Source, Timmy Thomas and Robert Knight, had little
chance of having a big selling album. Because the format of the 12’’
LP limited its playing time per-side to 30 minutes, getting long soul
music on them restricted the total numbers of tracks on the album.
Average playing times of singles were on the increase throughout the
seventies anyway. The 2.30 minutes single was up to nearly 4 minutes
by the end of the decade. But soul music was aimed at dancers in
clubs and the like. Pete Waterman became an expert picker of hits
from his work as a DJ in these clubs. So the 1972 Isley Brothers’
That Lady at slightly over 6 minutes wasn’t untypical for
soul music, being long. However if you put a lot of long tracks on
one album, you reduce the track numbers down considerable.
Unfortunately an album with only 4 or 5 tracks per side was often
seen by the record buying public in England as being not good value
for money. Enter K-Tel International, with its cheap TV and Radio
advertised 20 plus track album. They quickly established their
product range of ‘Limited Edition’
LPs in the market place. Technically they were compressed small
grooves, which gave them increased track numbers, but very low sound
levels. This meant you had to turn up the volume control to get them
to same level as other albums and singles. Music Centres also became
popular at this time and if you pushed the radio button after just
listening to one of these albums at only a low level, were still
blasted out by the radio station, all though they always advertised
them as “Original Hits” and “Original Stars”. This being done
to prevent confusion with the Top of the Pops LPs (the ones
with the pin up girl on the cover) produced by Pickwick
International, with session musicians covering the hit songs. These
were being sold alongside them in Woolworth’s shops. Together with
their rival Arcade, K-Tel had 30% of album sales.
The need to get 20 tracks
on each album meant a further reduction in the running time was
needed. Rather than fade them all out early, verses, most likely the
second, on pop songs were edited out. However editing was extreme at
times with a 3-minute track reduced to 1.45! The artwork on some of
these albums is sometimes very good. This brings us back to graffiti!
At least 3 K-Tel LPs used the wall with spray can painted names of
the acts rather than the usual photos of them. Either this was to do
with saving money, on photo fees, or more likely not wanting to put
black people on the album, which was believed to reduce sales, or
they just wanted the first album that way Super Bad (released
in 1972). Then found it successful in terms of sales, which it was,
thus releasing Souled Out (1974)
and Soul Motion in 1976. During these dates however the spray
can culture exploded. If you look at British films made before 1976,
which feature English streets, subways and bridges, such as Cliff
Richard’s 1974 film Take Me High you’ll see little
evidence of any paint spraying or vandalism at all!
Put
all this together and you can see that teaching kids Art at school
was going to lead to them, when they got bored, using these skills to
express it. Then after 16 they learned about politics and how free
speech can be denied, which was taught them too in university, they
then expressed these views on the world they lived in! The Irish
Republican Army made very good use of their artists to decorate the
streets. All the extreme ends of the political movements used the
spray can to inform, while you could say the rich political movements
paid vast amounts of money for their artists and put it in
fashionable places.
Teaching
kids art of course doesn’t mean that every child will go out and
spray a wall somewhere. Indeed a second ingredient needs adding, yet
in schools this was there already, so the final piece is hormones,
past age 12 there’s too many of them. The mixture was perfect,
artistic expression, peer groups, hormones. Next development was the
spray can to be found in the garage of the growing car owners –
called dad!
Teenagers,
as we have seen already, pick up most of their behaviour patterns
from other young people. One woman through research confirmed that
children past the age of 12 were picking up more things from peer
groups then were learnt from parents. Peer groups are very unlikely
to form were there are a good cross-section of ages, although cliques
can form.
But mum and dad are handy to supply the stuff to fuel bad activities,
that’s if you have got both of them!
We want mum and dad together!
The
liberated sixties had caused in religious and political eyes a
breakdown of the family unit. Has they wanted to return to these
ideals the growing number of family musical acts might have given
them encouragement, but they were not the only ones who needed a
family unit. The family bands would get lots of letters from kids
whose parents were divorced or breaking up (around 80,000 in the UK
at this time). Groups like the Jacksons, Partridge Family and of
course the Osmonds all became popular as divorce rates soared.
Michael Jackson overtly concern with children might well have sprung
from this period, but it was the Osmonds who hit hardest in Britain
and I don’t mean in popularity.
Their first real hit in the States, didn’t make the top 50 here.
One Bad Apple was a direct rip off of the Jacksons’ ABC.
Yet a few years later their Rock ‘N’ Roll number Crazy
Horses gave them a top five hit. Instead of having the mellow
image they had in the States, they were considered to be like Slade
(musical) over here. It didn’t last long! The brothers soon became
Teen Idols and Donny began releasing singles aimed at teenage girls,
along with posing for photographs for girls’ magazines. The Media
were interested from the start when thousands of girls were shouting
“we want the Osmonds” at Heathrow in November 1972. However they
and Donny were not the only guys breaking girls’ hearts. Splitting
from his own fictional family (Partridge), David Cassidy was the
other pin-up on girls’ bedroom walls.
The fans (mostly girls) would
go to no ends to see their idols. As Top of the Pops audience numbers
had grown so huge, TV centre bosses banned Cassidy from coming there
on crowd safety issues. However the real reason that the bosses were
fed up of not getting their cars in through the gates. Besides this
was trash telly and News and currant affairs were the BBC brand image
at that time. News people couldn’t get in too! They got their own
back on the fans, the BBC reported on the Six O’ Clock News about
Osmond fanatics going wild. Watching were the writers of Sweet’s
hits and Teenage Rampage was born.
Shout! Let it all out
The
rivalry between Donny and Cassidy fans was nothing compared with
their combined hate of Bay City Rollers fans. Roller fans went one
better they had their own fashion. The Rollers had started in 1967 as
the Saxons, a school-based band from Edinburgh. Line up changes and a
hard struggle had produced a hit in 1971 thanks to Jonathan King, yet
nothing after it, till 1974. This hard time was probably caused by
Manager Tam Paton. He was obsessed with image and even tried satin
and frilly shirts on them. This didn’t do them a lot of good in the
hard Scottish world of entertainment.
His control was strict. No smoking, no drink and no girlfriend. The
members were allowed all of them in truth and did, just not in the
public eye. In the end the band and their manager had to target the
market they wanted to break into by buying teenage magazines with
Osmond/Cassidy fans address in and send them promotional pictures.
The results showed up in the four top ten hits of 74. The tartan
trousers and scarfs of the band were rushed into production. Girl
followers were thus easily spotted. The only really distinctive
features of an Osmond/Cassidy fan were a picture badge of the star,
possibly a T-Shirt or bag. Some schools were having debates about
school uniform wearing. Some allowed normal clothes to be worn.
Tartan however was considered unacceptable! Scarf wearing girls were
told by teaches that those are for outside not inside the classroom.
The
Rollers fans won the battle in the end, when Cassidy pulled out from
touring after the death of a teenage girl in a crowd control accident
in 1974. He wasn’t happy with his idol image anyway. Tam Paton was
very happy with the idol image and with the antics of teenage girls
made sure that ‘Rollermania’ was seen on the headlines. The
popular press found out that stories of the band increased sales and
all were happy. All accept the band. The Rollers were not what they
seemed to be, as Midge Ure found out with his band called Silk. Like
many proper bands, Silk were so good at playing music they could be
mistaken for a record playing. They were, by none other than Bill
Martin!
If
you look at the songwriters credit on many seventies singles,
particularly the Bell/Arista label, you will probably find the names
Martin/Coulter. These blokes (the other Phil Coulter) where like
Waterman and his gang, or Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh. They were
still unknown then and their predecessors were Nicky Chinn and Mike
Chapman. They were next door to Bell Records at RAK Records and were
rivals. Martin/Coulter wanted to be like them having lots of hits.
They developed a role. Martin came up with ideas and Coulter wrote
the tune. However they liked to run the show and market the product,
which they aimed at 14-year-old girls. As packaged as Cornflakes or
holidays. They even tried the same format with another band called
Kenny.
Their hits included The Bump and Julie Anne. Real bands
were a bloody problem to them. So when Midge came to the studio
expecting to play instruments on the record, he got a shock! He got a
bigger shock when they found out all they needed them for was to sing
a chant. Silk walked into the recording of what sounded like a Bay
City Rollers track, hardly surprising as the Bay City Rollers didn’t
record their own music. Instead the same session musicians were now
playing the backing of Silk’s new single. When the group objected
Bill Martin raved at Midge (only 22 at the time) “You sing that
bloody song if you want a hit”.
Fortunately
the band did sing it and made it big time, after a slot at prime time
BBC on a new section on TOTP. Four bands without hits played to 15
million people! Well you only need a million to buy a single! They
did and Forever and Forever went huge.
They were not however
dressed like the other bands. Silk had baseball shirts and James Dean
haircuts. However this was another Martin/Coulter trick, they had
tried the shirts (only) on the Rollers.
Nor did they explain to the young Midge that they used the session
musicians to ensure that tracks were recorded quickly, thus saving
costs on studio time. At least that’s what Les McKeown (lead singer
with the Rollers) was told.
However even the Rollers were caught out by the Newspapers and their
record company told the band to play the music, which they did from
Bye Bye Baby onwards. Oddly it made the band happy for a
while. Not drinking milk! No the still did that. You could say they
put up with this rubbish, because of their background. For Les was
bullied at his secondary school where there were plenty of beatings,
if you didn’t go with the flow. He thus adopted an act of not
showing any weakness, he says, all his life.
Even though you can tell from his Roller experience, he was weak. Tam
Paton had them too, it would appear. For the ‘Roller’ merchandise
was credited as being “official” “approved by the band” and
also made millions. Despite Woolworths having stocked it and C&A’s
million square yards of tartan, neither the band nor Tam saw the
money.
Still fashion and music were linked together forever as well. The
effects of these fashion urges would have lasting effects and the
young girls probably never grew out of wanting to be fashionable, if
they got the bug. Males were a bit slower at catching up. But then
again even the tartan and beautifully crafted new music like You
made me believe in magic couldn’t save the Rollers (or Silk)
from the Punk Revolution and it was their last hit in 1977.
Apart
from bands that did perform themselves and those that just sang on
records, another way to have hits was just let the session musicians
do the whole thing. At Polydor records Wayne Bickerton and Tony
Waddington (another Martin/Coulter) did just that! Both the Rubettes
and later Racey, were not real groups at all. This didn’t stop
Sugar Baby Love spending three weeks at the top in 1974. Not
that Wayne & Tony who also wrote the song had a choice; no other
act would sing this ‘rubbish’. But few real bands could survive
without making hit singles. Most tried to release singles and use
them to promote the album. Generally it was because the singles
failed to make the Top 50, artists became ‘album bands’ such as
Genesis. When they did hit the singles chart in 1977 with Follow
You Follow Me, concert fans started shouting “sell out” when
it was played.
For
a solo singer not having hits was near to death in the music
industry. So we come to other person who stimulated the manic girl
fans as the other acts in this chapter, Mr Cook. More bullies at his
Secondary school, but he whacked one and the boy’s father as well,
so he became one of the gang.
Time was spent playing drums that got him into a band and a showbiz
style agent. The band eventually fell apart and his agent (who
couldn’t get him into the actors union with the name Cook) asked
the lad called David, where he lived? “Essex” was the reply. Now
you all know his name, but this happened in the sixties and David
wasn’t well known then. After trying to get singles made into hits,
David Essex settled into acting. The American rock music of the
fifties effect on British teenagers inspired the film That’ll Be
The Day and David got a part, but he never gave up on getting
into the singles chart.
The film and David’s single called Rock On, catapulted him
into the charts. A TOTP producer forced David into wearing a white
suit, this became his trade mark.
He was a big star by the time if his number one of 74, which was
called Gonna Make You A Star.
Sex and Testosterone
Funnily
enough that is what the rivals to Martin/Coulter tended to do their
acts. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman first met up at a London club in
1970. They conned their way into a meeting with Mickie Most, boss of
RAK. He had already brought Suzi Quatro over from the States to
Britain. Meanwhile over there, bands had been experimenting with make
up effects and brightly coloured clothes. By 1973 this had been named
‘Glam Rock’. Naturally the instigators of this style, bands like
New York Dolls, were critical of those that followed in their
footsteps. Chinn & Chapman embraced this form, TOTP loved it too
and it perfectly fitted with the advent of colour television
broadcasting in the UK. Although colour sets were expensive and not
all that common. I remember a cousin of mine, whose wedding was
spoilt because the Hotel had a colour TV showing Great Zoos of the
World even though the picture, was all green! Guests still
gathered round it like it was the most exciting thing in the world!
However I would dispute that Glam Rock was created by TV or TOTP,
just because of colour sets, although many costumes of Glam stars
were designed with TOTP in mind.
To
make the biggest impact on TOTP they had Suzi dressed in black
biker’s leather. It worked his first went to number one. They also
penned her, the weird 48 Crash. Video Below It didn’t make the top,
presumably teenagers couldn’t relate to the song’s subject
matter. Being that it was about the male
menopause, which is supposed
to happen at 48 years of age.
Her trade mark was a bass guitar. She had little choice but to
become a sex symbol, for most number one acts were male during these
years. Apart from Stephanie De Sykes, Quatro was the sexiest woman on
the charts, having number ones.
For
Chinn & Chapman the bread and butter acts were Sweet and Mud.
Hits like Blockbuster and Tiger Feet are the soundtrack
of the Seventies, for many people still. They reflect the high level
of testosterones swarming around teenage males.
