Johnny Marr Read Free Page B

Forties, Fifties and Sixties. During the Second World War, nearly 75,000 aircraft that were used in the Allied campaign entered Europe through Liverpool’s docks, and nearly a million-and-a-half US servicemen joined the war effort in the same way. Young people looking for the latest jazz, skiffle, R&B and rock ’n’ roll music tuned into the American Forces Network, a radio station for the tens of thousands of Yanks away from home – at a time when theBBC’s output catered for rather dainty minds in rather middle-class homes. In the north-west of England, the influence of the Americans was felt perhaps more keenly than anywhere else in the UK, and consequently the influence of the music the Yanks brought with them was fired there like nowhere else. Over the years, much of the correspondence between troops and civilians was centred around the huge US airbase at Burtonwood, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. It was a phenomenal place, and until the Seventies its storage facilities – designed for aircraft and tanks – was the biggest single-span building space in the world. In the Eighties, it was rumoured that more nuclear armament was stored there than anywhere else in Britain, while gossip of unnamed ‘goods’ being secretly removed in removal vans were rife.
    The local love affair with imported American pop music started during the war years. It was jazz and swing for starters, rock ’n’ roll and blues later on. After the war it was this romance with imported pop that led to the birth of great music in the region. While the short-trousered Harrison, Lennon, McCartney and Starr were picking up early Elvis and Buddy Holly records in Liverpool, at the other end of the Manchester Ship Canal the influence was equally keenly felt. Both cities had a burgeoning black market trade as sailors and airmen brought discs over from The States and sold them locally at mighty profits. With a vibrant immigrant community – Irish, Afro-Caribbean and Eastern Europeans in particular – and as a major inland port in its own right, Manchester was as likely as Liverpool or London to burst into cultural prominence.
    With Elvis and movies such as Rock Around The Clock everywhere across the region, the first major post-war teenage culturaldevelopment was the appearance in Manchester of the coffee bar. A juke box and a coffee machine were all the teenagers of the city needed to develop their own cool hang-outs. The youth of Manchester started to drag the city out of its post-war austerity and into the modern world. The city centre boasted a plethora of such bars, and they were plentiful in the suburbs too. In the early Sixties, while clubs such as The Cavern flourished in Liverpool, in Manchester it was venues such as The Twisted Wheel, The Forty Thieves and The Oasis – labelled ‘the north’s top teenage rendezvous’ – that attracted the kids of Ardwick, Chorlton, or Wythenshaw into the city centre. By 1965 there some 250 such clubs in central Manchester alone. They were largely alcohol-free affairs, open late into the night, as teenagers listened to the R&B and skiffle sounds that predated English pop proper. As Jonathan Schofield, guru of all things Mancunian, has pointed out on the website www.virtualmanchester.com/music/features , the Mersey river itself is actually born in Greater Manchester. If the Mersey bands claimed Liverpool as their spiritual home, then throughout the Sixties, Manchester answered back with a raft of Beat groups of its own. The Hollies – from whence Graham Nash went on to revolutionise Californian pop – Herman’s Hermits, The Bee Gees, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and Freddie Garretty all hailed from the Manchester suburbs, and all had enormous success both at home and abroad. The oft-derided Herman’s Hermits clocked up sales of over sixty million records worldwide, while Freddie and the Dreamers and The Mindbenders both reached the number one singles slot in the USA. Manchester was