An Ashgate Book

The History of Live Music in Britain,

Volume I: 1950–1967
This volume is dedicated to Jenny McKay
The History of Live Music in
Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967
From Dance Hall to the 100 Club

Simon Frith
University of Edinburgh, UK
Matt Brennan
University of Edinburgh, UK
Martin Cloonan
University of Glasgow, UK
Emma Webster
University of Glasgow, UK
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2013 simon frith, Matt Brennan, Martin cloonan and emma Webster

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
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Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan and Emma Webster have asserted their right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this
work.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The history of live music in Britain. from dance hall to
the 100 Club.
Volume I, 1950-1967 : – (Ashgate popular and folk music
series)
1. Concerts–Great Britain–History–20th century.
2. Popular music–Great Britain–1951-1960. 3. Popular
music–Great Britain–1961-1970. 4. Music–Social
aspects–Great Britain–History–20th century.
I. Series II. Frith, Simon, 1946-
780.7'8'41’09045-dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The history of live music in Britain / by Simon Frith ... [et al.].
p. cm. – (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-1-4094-2280-8 (hardback) – isBn 978-1-3155-5718-2 (ebook)
1. Popular music–Performances–Great Britain. 2. Great Britain–Social life and customs–
20th century. 3. Great Britain–Social life and customs–21st century. I. Frith, Simon, 1946-
ML3492.H57 2013
781.630941–dc23
isBn 9781409422808 (hbk)
isBn 9781315557182 (ebk)
 Contents

General Editor’s Preface   vii

Preface   ix
Acknowledgments   xiii

1 Getting Back to Business   1

2 Live Music and the State   29

A Snapshot of Bristol in October–November 1962   55

3 Being a Musician   59

4 Do-it-Yourself!   89

A Snapshot of Glasgow in October–November 1962   117

5 Youth   121

6 The Recording Industry   139

A Snapshot of Sheffield in October–November 1962   165

7 Venues, Audiences and Promoters   169

The Rolling Stones: Richmond 1963   197

Bibliography   201
Index   215
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 General Editor’s Preface

The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music
alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic
outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international
ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution
of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context,
reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the
status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has
arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new
genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes
authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of
free, individual expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in
the field. Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and
meanings in cultural context, and draw upon methodologies and theories developed
in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology.
The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco,
whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary
or traditional.

Professor Derek B. Scott

Professor of Critical Musicology
University of Leeds
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 Preface

This is the first volume in a projected series of three. Our aim is to provide a social
history of music in Britain since 1950. The books are designed to fill an obvious
gap in the academic (and non-academic) literature – there is presently no general
history of British music in this period. But in writing this history, we will adopt
a particular focus: we are interested in the role which live music has played in
British cultural life since 1950. There are several reasons for taking this approach.
First of all, we want to shift attention in socio-economic studies of popular
music from the recording industry to the business of live music. Our starting point
here is that most present accounts of ‘the music industry’ (which are often derived
from Adorno’s analysis in the 1940s of ‘the culture industry’) over-privilege the
recording sector at the expense of the sector in which most musicians in all genres
have been located historically: the live arena. These books will chart the changing
symbiotic relationship between the recording and live sectors in the last 60 years,
a relationship that is neglected in popular music histories organised around record
releases and sales charts. Among other things, this means that we will examine
the key role of the promoter in musical life: the three volumes chart three eras
of promotional activity. We believe that a proper understanding of the live music
business is necessary for a proper understanding of the recorded music business.
The second advantage of a music history written from the perspective of live
musical activity is that it draws attention to the importance of place. Live music,
by its nature, must happen in a particular locality, and our second concern in these
books is to look at the changing sites and venues of musical performance, from the
post-war dance hall to the contemporary rock club circuit, from the state-run arts
centre to the pub back room, from the coffee bar to the stadium, from the original
jazz and folk festivals to Glastonbury and T in the Park. The history of live music
is also a history of leisure and the night-time economy, of city geographies and
holiday destinations, of fans’ movements around towns and musicians’ movements
around and between countries. Throughout these volumes we will draw material
from three cities in particular: Bristol, Glasgow and Sheffield.
Third, live music involves the state – and thus politics – much more directly
than recorded music. On the one hand, live musical events of all kinds are subject
to regulatory frameworks, to national laws concerning public performance, health
and safety, the sale of alcohol, noise nuisance and so forth, and to the decisions of
local licensing authorities. On the other hand, both national and local authorities
have been active in promoting live music, building and funding venues and,
through arts councils, directly supporting musical groups and organisations, and
sponsoring tours and performances. A history of live music is necessarily also
x The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

a history of cultural politics, and one theme that we will develop through these
three volumes is that the live sector involves a complex relationship between three
kinds of promoter: the state-funded, the commercial and the enthusiast. The last
of these may be driven by various motives (love of a particular kind of music,
bohemianism, artistic or political vision, friendship), but such musical activists
will be central to our history.
It has been the orthodox view in the academy for the last 40 years or so that
the live musical sector is in decline, as a matter of both economics (the sector’s
inability to compete with other music media in price terms) and sociology (the
sector’s declining role in people’s everyday use of music). As Glenn Gould
famously remarked in High Fidelity in 1966:

In an unguarded moment some months ago, I predicted that the public concert as
we know it today would no longer exist a century hence, that its functions would
have been entirely taken over by the electronic media. It had not occurred to me
that this statement represented a particularly radical pronouncement. Indeed, I
regarded it almost as self-evident truth. (Gould 1966: 46)

Our books clearly challenge this view and it is a paradoxical effect of the digital
revolution that the live music sector is now seen as particularly significant both
economically (as record companies’ long-established ways of money making
no longer work) and sociologically (as the live musical event seems ever more
important for music lovers in all genres). We intend to explain this paradox – to
explain the value of live music – through a historical investigation. In broad terms
we will argue that it is through the history of live music that we can grasp the
changing relationship of the public and private in an era of great technological,
industrial and social change. It has always been through the live – public –
experience of making and listening to music that it has been most deeply embedded
in people’s everyday lives and in their understanding of their personal and social
identities.
In telling this story we will draw on a range of methodologies and sources.
We will use case studies, local ethnographies and historical snapshots. We will
draw on systematic reading of the music press, archival work (especially in the
previously unavailable Musicians’ Union archive) and a series of interviews with
promoters from a range of different musical genres, eras and locations. We will
bring together material from a wide range of non-academic secondary sources –
musicians’ autobiographies, local histories of particular venues and fan memoirs
– as well as from specialist academic studies in musicology, sociology and social
and economic history. Each volume will conclude with a description of a Rolling
Stones show.
We should note here three issues of scope and definition. First, our definition
of ‘live’ music includes music on record provided by disc jockeys for dancers
and audiences gathering in public places. This might seem a distortion of terms
 Preface xi

(though even the Musicians’ Union eventually agreed that a DJ was a musician),
but venues combining live and recorded music are an important part of our story.
Second, although popular music is at the centre of our work, we will also be
concerned with the history of classical and art music performance. This is, again,
because the different sectors have overlapping histories (in terms of venues, for
example, or promotional practices), but also because we are interested in the ways
in which people’s understanding of the live musical experience is affected by the
ideologies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music.
Third, our use of the term ‘musician’ is very broad, as already indicated. In
the live music sector the distinction between professional, semi-professional and
amateur performers is blurred both in performance settings themselves and in
musicians’ individual careers. One of our concerns is how live music practices have
changed (and have been changed by) the ways in which people and institutions
understand what it is to be ‘a musician’ in the first place.
In this book, volume 1 of our history, we cover the period 1950–1967. The
Second World War had obviously caused a huge disruption to everyday life in
Britain and hence to the organisation and enjoyment of live music. The immediate
post-war period thus involved attempts by the various established players in the
live music world to get back to normal. In the first part of the book we examine this
from three perspectives – commercial promoters, the state and musicians. By the
mid-1950s, though, it was becoming clear that new social and musical forces were
creating new forms of musical entertainment for new kinds of audience organised
in new ways. In the second part of the book we examine the rise of ‘do-it-yourself’
music making and promoting, the emergence of ‘the teenage consumer’ and the
increasing importance of the record industry in British musical culture. By 1967, a
map of live music in Britain shows a very different soundscape to that of the early
1950s and in the final part of the book we will describe this by reference, on the
one hand, to venues and audience experiences and, on the other hand, from the
perspective of promoters and the live music business.
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 Acknowledgments

The research for this book was made possible by a grant from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (AH/F009437/1).
The book, like the AHRC project, is a collaborative work. Matt Brennan did
most of the national industry interviews and archive research and drafted Chapters
1, 6 and 7. Martin Cloonan did the remaining national interviews, the archive
research on the Musicians’ Union and state regulation, and drafted Chapters 2, 3
and the account of the Rolling Stones in Richmond in 1963. Emma Webster did
the interview and archive research in Bristol, Glasgow and Sheffield, and wrote
the 1962 snapshots of those cities. Simon Frith wrote the book’s final version and
takes responsibility for all errors and infelicities.
We would like to thank the AHRC for its support, Derek Scott and Ashgate for
being willing to take on a three-volume proposal, and all the industry people who
talked to us so informatively. We are also grateful to Dave Allen, Annette Davison,
Keir Keightley and Kevin Tennent for letting us read and cite unpublished research.
Simon Frith would like to thank Cressida McKay Frith for the musical
accompaniment and Jenny McKay for reading and improving the manuscript and
for much else besides. This volume is dedicated to her.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 1
Getting Back to Business

Many forces combine to make the present an exciting and promising moment
in the history of English music. The nation is now conscious of the need for
music as part of daily life and education and, with English composition at a level
unknown since the end of the seventeenth century, the opportunities for making
and enjoying music are fuller and more varied than ever before. (Political and
Economic Planning (PEP) 1949: 211)

Most people’s musical pleasures are of the simplest and relatively few can raise
their level of musical understanding very much … most youngsters to-day like
jazz and little else; their elders fancy the old music hall songs best and a few
sentimental parlour ballads, while beyond that their musical horizon is a desert.
Some of this music is fun, some of it has charm, some of it is moving, but most
of it is pretty low-level stuff and many of the dance lyrics are of an enervating
‘wishing-will-make-it-so-kind’ that is not much use to anybody; but, like it or
not, it is the popular music of our time. (Workers Music Association 1945: 13)

Introduction

British live music in 1950 was, in many ways, still adjusting to the impact of
the Second World War, which had disrupted every aspect of British life. During
wartime, the raw materials used to make musical commodities were in short supply:
whether it was the shellac used in 78 rpm records (the dominant recording format
of the era) or the brass used to make saxophones, resources that had previously
been taken for granted were diverted to manufacture military and essential goods.
And British nightlife had obviously been affected by the German air raids.
Buildings where music was performed were damaged, whether landmarks such as
St Paul’s Cathedral or specialist venues such as London’s Café Anglais, a popular
nightspot for dancing and jazz bands. Buildings that were not damaged directly
were affected regardless, as the chaos forced many venues to close temporarily
and disrupted transport and the night-time economy. But the most severe impact
was that a generation of professional and aspiring musicians, as well as concert
promoters, agents and others involved in British musical culture, were forced to
abandon their careers and serve their country in the armed and other services.
By the time the war was over, Britain was a devastated country. In the words
of historian Geoffrey Macnab, ‘it was estimated that the country had lost a quarter
of its national wealth, some £7 billion, and its export trade was in tatters: every
2 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

last bit of energy had been depleted’ (1993: 162). Live music was, of course,
deeply affected by these economic problems. State regulation continued to restrict
musical activity. A special purchase tax was introduced: anyone buying a musical
instrument was charged a hefty 66.6 per cent in tax because instruments were
considered ‘luxury goods’. The dance band paper Melody Maker reported on the
impact of the tax, lamenting its dire consequences for the fate of British music:
‘1) musical instruments are not luxuries, they are the tools of a man’s profession;
2) musical culture in Britain will die if youth cannot afford to buy instruments;
3) in war time, instruments were necessary for morale: must morale suffer now?’
(17 April 1948: 1). The government also directed British citizens working in
essential industries to remain in their jobs and forbade these workers from taking
musical employment through a new ‘Control of Engagement Order’. As the
Melody Maker again reported, ‘the semi-pro [musician] whose daytime job is in
essential industry will find it extremely difficult to obtain release from his present
employment in order to become a full-time professional musician, should he wish
to do so’ (11 October 1947: 1).
Despite this climate of austerity in certain aspects of musical life, there was still
plenty of live music to be heard. Social historian Harry Hopkins claims that by the
end of the 1940s, ‘in “unmusical” London alone four million seats were now sold
each year for concerts, opera and ballet’ (Hopkins 1964: 236), and this statistic
only covers classical music. This chapter will therefore provide a map of the live
music business in Britain in 1950, as entrepreneurs tried to return to their 1930s
ways of working. We will approach this mapping exercise from three different
angles. First, we will examine live music culture in terms of musical discourses,
while describing the kinds of live music being performed at this time. Second,
we will explain how the live music business worked, outlining the differences
between three kinds of promoter (enthusiast, state-funded and commercial) and
their dealings with venue owners, agents and managers. Third, we will review
how the rest of the British music industry – broadcasters, record companies, song
publishers and royalty collectors – related to the live music industry and describe
how musicians interacted with the industry at a collective level, through the
Musicians’ Union. The chapter will thus introduce the main issues to be discussed
throughout the rest of the book.

Discourses, Genres and Artists

It is not easy to provide a comprehensive overview of the diversity of live music

performed in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. One way to begin is with a
framework of different social worlds with music at their centre, each with its
own set of practices and values. The idea of musical ‘art worlds’, proposed by
sociologist Howard Becker (1984), is developed by Simon Frith in his book
Performing Rites. Frith argues that, as well as interacting in different kinds of
social world, musical actors also make sense of their practice discursively, sharing
 Getting Back to Business 3

values and language that endow a musical experience with social meaning (1996:
26). A ‘discourse’ in this sense is productive; it does not simply name a pre-existing
social world, but produces that world and its social institutions, professions and
genres. Frith argues, in particular, that ‘music is heard through three overlapping
and contradictory grids’ which he calls folk discourse, art discourse, and pop
discourse (ibid.). These discourses represent ideal sets of values that are derived
from the folk, art and pop music genres that share their names. However, when
applied to practical examples, these ideal discourses quickly become complicated,
compromised and conflicting. In his study of English class and culture, for
example, Ross McKibbin concludes that by 1951 there were three musical publics:
a small public for ‘serious’ music (as broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme);
a larger public for ‘middlebrow’ music (made up of many strands including the
classical music canon); and a much larger one for popular music (predominantly
American popular music) (McKibbin 1998: 416). Such a listening map (which is
obviously also a simplification of musical tastes) is useful in drawing attention to
the confusing ways in which musical discourses are applied in practice (in BBC or
Arts Council policy, for example).
For Frith, folk discourse is a set of anti-modernist values that understands
the commercialisation of music as corruptive and suggests that the appreciation
of music should be linked to the appreciation of its social function in creating
community. Drawing on the work of folk scholar Niall MacKinnon (1993), Frith
agues that the embodiment of these values can be found in British folk clubs,
which ‘attempt to minimise the distance between performer and audience, to
provide a “different form of socialising in which active musical performance
and participation [are] integrated”’ (Frith 1996: 41). The folk festival is another
event ‘within which folk values – the integration of art and life – can be lived …
the folk festival seeks to solve the problem of musical “authenticity”: it offers
the experience of the folk ideal, the experience of collective, participatory music
making, the chance to judge music by its direct contribution to sociability’ (ibid.).
In Britain in 1950, folk discourse was certainly being applied to the various
folk music and dance traditions of the country’s different nations and regions,
though it would be a mistake to think of any of these traditions as ‘pure’ or
‘authentic’, despite the ideological values attached to them. In his book Fakesong,
Dave Harker (1985) explains how British folk traditions were as artificially
constructed as any other genre: prominent folk song collectors, such as Francis
Child in the nineteenth century and Cecil Sharp in the twentieth century, had great
influence over the selection and shaping of a canon of British folk music, just as
music conservatories were influential in constructing the canon of classical music
repertoire. In fact, by the second half of the 1940s, the process of determining
what British folk music meant was still taking place, through a revival led by
organisations like the English Folk Dance and Song Society and individuals like
Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl.
Neither was it only music that labelled itself as ‘folk’ that was socially organised
around the values of folk discourse. In their own ways, both the British brass band
4 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

movement and amateur choral societies operated by integrating musical practice

with lived experience and building a sense of community (and ‘Britishness’).
Even musical genres that might have been understood as primarily commercial,
such as jazz, could be (and frequently were) interpreted using the language of
folk discourse. The New Orleans revivalist movement of the late 1940s, for
example, explicitly defined itself against commercial jazz, against swing, and
sought to embody in its return to ‘traditional’ instruments and playing practices
an understanding of ‘real’ jazz as the celebration of community. In the words of
Charles Fox, writing in The PL Yearbook of Jazz in 1946 (in which ‘real’ jazz is
described as a form of folk music throughout):

The jazz of New Orleans was a natural growth, springing out of the life and
needs of a comparatively limited community. Swing is a premeditated music,
run as a business, with its control in the hands of cultural illiterates who virtually
dictate the forms which popular music shall take. (McCarthy 1946: 41)

Folk discourse may have manifested itself most clearly in genres that define
themselves with the ‘folk’ word, but as a set of aesthetic and social values, it can
be found in varying degrees across many musical worlds. The same can be said of
art and pop discourses too.
According to Frith, the source of art discourse lies in the history of the bourgeois
art world and the development of the nineteenth-century high/low cultural divide
found in classical music aesthetics (Frith 1996: 36). Frith argues that the organising
institution of art discourse is the academy, ‘the music departments of universities,
conservatories, [and] the whole panoply of formal arrangements and practices in
which classical music in its various forms is taught and handed down the generations’
(ibid.: 36). With respect to live music, the central bourgeois music event is the
concert, where ‘music’s essential value is its provision of a transcendent experience
that is, on the one hand, ineffable and uplifting but, on the other, only available to
those with the right sort of knowledge … only the right people with the right training
can, in short, experience the real meaning of “great” music’ (ibid.: 39).
In mid-twentieth-century Britain, various institutions, including universities,
conservatories, the BBC and the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain
(established in 1946). supported the view that certain kinds of music and music-
related performing arts – symphonies, opera, ballet and chamber music – were to be
privileged above other genres (particularly folk and pop). Due in no small part to the
Arts Council (to be discussed further in the next chapter), British classical live music
performance indeed found itself in a period of remarkably good health by the end of
the 1940s, despite the fact that such key venues as the Queen’s Hall in London and
the Free Trade Hall in Manchester had been bombed and forced to close during the
war (PEP’s 1949 Enquiry into Music identified ‘the general shortage and the many
inadequacies of halls’ as the major problem facing live classical music after the war
(1949: 33–5)). Pre-war London-based ensembles such as the London Symphony
Orchestra and the London Philharmonic had been joined by major new orchestras
 Getting Back to Business 5

such as the Philharmonia in 1945 and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946.
Important ensembles had been established in other areas of Britain as well, such as
the City of Birmingham Orchestra (founded in 1920, it became a full-time orchestra
in 1944, changing its name to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in
1948) and the Scottish National Orchestra (founded in 1891, it became a full-time
orchestra as the SNO in 1950). The annual Edinburgh International Festival had
been launched in 1947 in collaboration with Glyndebourne, which slowly came
back to operatic life in the late 1940s, staging the premieres of Benjamin Britten’s
The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 and Albert Herring in 1947.
The Arts Council itself had been formed as a consequence of wartime efforts
to encourage the arts, which included through the Council for the Encouragement
of Music and the Arts (CEMA) a policy of providing funding not only for
London-based musical activity, but also for music – both locally produced and
touring concerts – in smaller provincial towns. But if, by 1950, Arts Council
support meant that London now ‘had the chance of becoming the musical centre
of Europe’ (PEP 1949: 14), funding for art music outside of London had declined
to the extent that the first Arts Council-commissioned report on opera and ballet
stressed the need for more support to allow national ensembles to tour the
country (Witts 1998: 229).
Frith’s third musical discourse is pop, the discourse rooted in the commercial
music world. As Frith argues, ‘its values are created by and organised around
the music industry, around the means and possibilities of turning sounds into
commodities – musical value and monetary value are therefore equated, and the
sales charts become the measure and symbol of “good” pop music’ (1996: 41). In
the logic of pop discourse, live music events sell ‘fun’ and ‘escape from the daily
grind’ (ibid.: 41–2). The supply of commercial music available in 1950s Britain
was wide-ranging, despite the privations of post-war austerity, with the influence
of American popular music being particularly prevalent. Popular music from the
USA made its impact via star performers on major record labels as well as in
featured songs from hit Hollywood films and Broadway musicals (Oklahoma! and
Annie Get Your Gun opened in London’s West End in 1948 and were both still
running in 1950) and through dance-floor fads. Other forms of popular music were
particular to Britain, such as songs from the music-hall and variety tradition and
from British film and theatre.
It is difficult to measure the popularity of different kinds of popular music in
Britain during this period, as there were few sales figures available to chart the
industry and, as business economist Terry Gourvish (2009) has demonstrated, those
that existed were unreliable. There was no systematic information about ticket sales
in the UK at this time, for example, just the occasional news story about shows that
had (usually according to their promoters) done exceptionally well (or poorly).1 It is

1
  Hopkins claims that ‘between the Convertibility Crisis [1947] and the Devaluation
Crisis [1949], Oklahoma! cheered up 2,200,000 British citizens’, but does not give a source
for his figures (Hopkins 1964: 107).
6 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

no easier to extrapolate the relative popularity of live performers from their record
sales since no vaguely reliable British record sales chart existed until November
1952, when one was compiled by Percy Dickens for the first time in the New Musical
Express. It is, however, possible to say something about the popular success of songs
(as against performers or records): Radio Luxembourg, the BBC’s main continental
rival, broadcast a ‘Hit Parade’ show of songs from 1948 onwards.2 This was based
on the sales of sheet music rather than discs, a reminder that at this time it could
still be assumed that it was songs (performed by numerous recording artists) that
were popular rather than specific recorded performances made by specific artists. If
Frank Sinatra did well with ‘Goodnight Irene’ on Columbia Records, for instance,
then other recording companies would quickly release their own versions of the
song recorded by one of their own contracted artists, and it was still unusual for
one version to prove vastly more popular than another.3 To give an indication of
what kinds of song were popular in 1950, the table below (Table 1.1) lists all of the
number one songs for that year according to Radio Luxembourg.
The most striking feature of this chart is how clearly it demonstrates the
dominance of American popular songs in Britain. With the exception of ‘The
Harry Lime Theme’ from the British film The Third Man, all of the number
one hit songs of 1950 were first popularised by Americans (and, apart from the
Italian song ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’ and ‘Hop Scotch Polka’, originally a
British music-hall song by Billy Whitlock, written by Americans too). Some
songs became popular via Hollywood films (‘My Foolish Heart’) or musicals
(‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’); others were popularised by star
American performers and then covered by British artists: for example, ‘Dear
Hearts and Gentle People’, sung by Bing Crosby, but covered in Britain by Billy
Cotton, and ‘Music! Music! Music!’, sung by Teresa Brewer and covered by
Petula Clark.
The most popular stage acts in 1950 were also a mix of American and British
musicians. In the live setting, however, a crucial distinction was made between
instrumental musicians and singers. The vast majority of professional instrumental
musicians in both the USA and the UK were members of their respective
musicians’ unions and, following a long-standing dispute between the US union
(the American Federation of Musicians (AFM)) and its British counterpart,
American instrumental musicians were not allowed to perform in the UK and vice
versa. By contrast, singers had historically been denied membership in musicians’

2
  For a good account of sporadic British music charts prior to 1948, see Nott 2002:
207–8.
3
  Philip Ennis documents the market transition from audiences buying songs without
significantly discriminating between who sang them to gradually valuing a specific version
of a song recorded by a single artist in his book The Seventh Stream (1992: 239–40).
Although his research is limited to record sales in the USA, the British recording industry
operated similarly; hits were songs rather than records, and every record company felt the
need to have its own version of the popular songs of the day.
 Getting Back to Business 7

Table 1.1 Number 1 Songs 1950

Week ending Song title Weeks

7 January You’re Breaking My Heart 2
21 January Hop Scotch Polka 1
28 January The Harry Lime Theme 4 (returned for 3 weeks
from w/e 18 Feb)
4 February Dear Hearts And Gentle People 2
11 March Music! Music! Music! 6
22 April (If I Knew You Were Comin’) I’d Have 1
Baked A Cake
29 April My Foolish Heart 11
8 July Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered 8
9 September Silver Dollar (Roll, Roll, Roll) 7
28 October Goodnight Irene 4
25 November Rudolph The Red-nosed Reindeer 6
(Chart compiled by Smith 1999)

unions on both sides of the Atlantic, and instead belonged to unions for variety
artists and entertainers. The result was that, despite being popular in the UK via
their recordings, very few American instrumental musicians performed live in the
UK during this time – with the important exception of performances at American
military bases – while American singers did visit and tour the UK (accompanied
by British instrumentalists), sometimes with remarkable effect. Danny Kaye’s
debut at the London Palladium in 1948, for example, was:

a personal triumph such as the British music hall had not seen for a quarter of
a century. Next day, Danny Kaye had become the talk of the town. The Times
printed his photograph on its back page; Cabinet Ministers flocked to the stalls;
Royalty went round to the dressing-room. Ticket spivs reaped a rich harvest
from queues that stretched around the building. Standing-room tickets changed
hands at £3 and stalls from anything up to £20. (Hopkins 1964: 108)

The most popular British bandleaders in 1950 had been playing professionally
since well before the Second World War. Dance-band performance was a long-
term career for these men; rather than operating in a system of producing a hit
at a young age and enjoying early success before fading in popularity, they were
instead part of a musical tradition where experience was valued and reputations
were built over long periods of time. Even with the interruption of the war (in
which several of them served while others played in bands to entertain the troops),
many bandleaders had steadily increased their standings over the years, to the point
8 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

where they achieved their peak popularity only after having played for several
decades. The BBC was also of great importance to the success of a bandleader:
securing a broadcasting contract was the best way of publicising the band at a
national level.
Three examples help to illustrate this career model. Trained as a pianist, Geraldo
formed his first band in 1924 and was popular up until the Second World War, when
he was appointed to supervise the bands division of the Entertainments National
Service Association and became director of bands for the BBC (Augarde 2004).
After the war, Geraldo continued to enjoy great success not only as a bandleader
but also as a manager and booking agent, supplying orchestras for cruise liners,
dance halls, theatres and restaurants. Billy Cotton was a contemporary of Geraldo,
forming his own dance band in 1925 and gaining fame throughout the 1930s. After
entertaining the troops with his band throughout the war, Cotton was offered a
regular Sunday morning show on the BBC’s Light Programme in 1949. The Billy
Cotton Band Show ‘quickly became a Sunday lunchtime institution’ (Wills 2004).
Trombonist Ted Heath played in many dance orchestras (including Geraldo’s)
before forming his own band in 1944 and growing in popularity as a bandleader
in his own right. A regular poll winner in Melody Maker, Heath was considered to
have the best swing band outside the USA.
So far we have been discussing folk, art and pop discourses and their
corresponding music worlds as if they can be clearly distinguished, but for most
musicians this is certainly not the case. They occupy musical worlds that use
elements of all three discourses. A good example of this (to which we have already
referred) can be found in the jazz world, in London’s jazz club scene. In 1950,
British jazz was mainly divided between ‘traditional’ New Orleans and Dixieland
music and ‘modern’ bebop and progressive music. Each style had its own
representative venues and events. On the one hand, ‘hundreds of clubs, operating
in pub back rooms, working men’s institutions, drill halls and palais were formed
to accommodate the legion of revivalists and their following’ (Godbolt 1984: 268).
Leading British trad jazz musicians such as Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer and
Chris Barber played at a cafe on 100 Oxford Street, which was variously known
as the Feldman Swing Club, the London Jazz Club and the Humphrey Lyttelton
Club. Modern jazzers gathered at London’s Club Eleven, which was formed by and
regularly featured musicians such as Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth.4 Both
club scenes were created by groups of enthusiasts (performers and fans) who came
together to hear music not heard on the radio or promoted by record companies
or music publishers, a kind of music not often reflected in the sales charts (folk
discourse). At the same time, these were not just folk-like communities. These
scenes were led by musicians, the best of whom possessed impressive technique
and musicianship and performed a harmonically and rhythmically complex music

4
  Club Eleven was highly influential during its short existence from 1948 to 1950,
but closed down at the end of April 1950 following a police raid (Melody Maker, 29 April
1950: 1, 6).
 Getting Back to Business 9

by any standards, a music that was being championed in its recorded form by
critics (in Gramophone and Melody Maker, for example) seeking to have jazz
recognised as an art form. And most of these new jazz spaces (and certainly
the ones that survived) were commercial enterprises, which attracted audiences
looking for entertainment. The post-war jazz club, the first expression of a new
British live music culture to come, drew on all three musical discourses at once.
A similar argument could be made about the post-war folk club (and we will
return to these developments in Chapter 4). The only further point to make here
is that these overlapping discourses (articulated across all music worlds) relate to
the interaction of amateur and professional music making. The vast majority of
musicians performing live music in the UK were enthusiasts or semi-professionals
rather than full-time musicians. This may seem counter-intuitive given the
development of mass mediated music in the first half of the twentieth century; as
James Nott has argued, the period between the First and Second World Wars ‘saw
a huge shift away from private performance in the home and a rapid increase in
the public performance of live music. The general public became listeners rather
than performers, reflecting the growing commercialisation of popular music’
(2002: 100). Despite this, however, music making remained a popular amateur
pastime and, crucially, the music performance world was one with a significant
overlap between the amateur and professional spheres. Sometimes these two
groups worked in harmony to create live music events, as when amateur choral
societies performed alongside professional orchestras in concerts. At other times,
however, there could be resentment from professional musicians (not to mention
aggravation in the Musicians’ Union) that amateur or semi-professional ensembles
were willing to perform for cut rates or for free. This was the case for many military
bands, community brass bands and dance bands. Nott points out, for instance, that
‘price cutting had always been prevalent among dance musicians because of the
large number of semi-professionals willing to offer their services for less than
professional rates’ (ibid.: 143).
There are also important gender distinctions to consider when examining the
worlds of amateurs and professionals. There were 13,700 professional musicians
working in England and Wales in 1951 (Ehrlich 1985: 235).5 As in most professions
in the UK, the career of musician was dominated by men, who outnumbered
women approximately three to one. Although music was actually an easier career
for women to pursue than most other professions, it was nevertheless a difficult
environment in which to advance. In 1912 the London Standard reported on the
inaugural concert (for charity) at the Shaftesbury Theatre of the Orchestra Femina,
made up of women players only:

Another important excursion into man’s field of labour is to be made by the other
sex in its new-born activities. Thousands of women, it is true, have for years
earned their livelihood solely by playing in more or less important institutions

5
  Unfortunately, Scotland and Northern Ireland are unaccounted for in Ehrlich’s data.
10 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

up and down the country. But they have always had the humiliating experience
of playing second fiddle in every sense of the term to some mere male rival,
while among the more complicated, or, rather, less graceful instruments of the
orchestra, they have been wholly unrepresented. (Quoted in Fifield 2005: 93)

The idea that only certain instruments were ‘appropriate’ for women was deep
laid. As a commentator in another London newspaper, the London Opinion, wrote
a few years later:

Neither Sir Henry Wood, Sir Thomas Beecham, nor Landon Ronald has any
objection to lady violinists, violas or cellists playing in the orchestra if, and
when, it be found necessary, but I understand that any idea of having lady wind
instrument players is out of the question. I am glad myself. I cannot imagine
anything more ungraceful or unwomanly than seeing a girl struggling with a
huge brass instrument like the trombone, for instance. Women can do much that
men can, but they will never be able to sing baritone, become soldiers, or blow
wind instruments – unless it be their own trumpets! (Quoted in ibid.: 95)

There is no doubt that this attitude was still widespread in the classical music
world in 1950, as was the belief that the professional symphony orchestra was a
masculine institution in which women were not particularly welcome. When the
newly established Royal Opera House sought to recruit instrumentalists for its
orchestra in 1946, in competition with the equally newly established Philharmonia
and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, its leader ‘went looking for women players’
and thereby incurred ‘a reprimand from his union’ (Lebrecht 2000: 69). As for the
more established orchestras:

‘The LSO was very macho,’ recalls the cellist, Bob Truman … ‘A lot of drinking,
a whole lot of butching it up with the boys.’ And of course they were all boys –
even in the early 1970s. (Morrison 2004: 185–6)

Parsonage and Dyson describe similar prejudices in the jazz world: ‘females were
often paid less than men and were subject to persistent discrimination by critics,
employers and even the Musicians’ Union’, although there is plenty of evidence that
‘women were active as musicians in jazz and dance bands both alongside men and
in all-female groups as well as in the position of bandleader’, the most famous of
whom was Ivy Benson, who led all-female bands known variously as the Rhythm
Girls, Ladies Orchestra and Showband (Parsonage and Dyson 2007: 129).
In the profession of teaching music, however, women outnumbered men by
over three to one; the gender ratio of musicians and music teachers combined
was thus a fairly close 52:48 split in favour of men (Ehrlich 1985: 235). When
one considers that many music teachers probably performed in public, if only at a
local level, there was probably something closer to an equal male/female split, at
least in classical performance. But this is to raise another gender issue. For male
 Getting Back to Business 11

musicians (as for men in other trades and professions), women could be regarded
as ‘amateurs’ because they did not share the male necessity for work – they were
home makers rather than breadwinners – and their entry into the music profession
was therefore likely to undercut pay rates (a particular issue in the post-war periods,
when men sought to return to occupations in which women had been employed in
their absence). During the First World War, for instance, when orchestral musicians
in London’s Stoll Theatres went on strike in demand of a 50 per cent pay increase
(assuming they were in a strong bargaining position because of the shortage of
male players), they were sacked and replaced by women instrumentalists (payed
at the original rates). A total of 2,000 women applied for the jobs in Stoll’s seven
halls (Fifield 2005: 94). While nothing so dramatic happened in the Second World
War, there is no doubt that for many in the music profession, getting back to
business after 1945 meant getting back to a male business.

The Live Music Industry

As we have shown, British live music in 1950 was plentiful, varied and best
understood as a series of different but overlapping social worlds. We will now turn
our attention to a different set of issues that emerge from the study of live music as
a business. Live music of all sorts was promoted with all manner of motivations:
for profit, for political purposes, for fun, and sometimes for all these reasons at
once. In this section we will examine the different kinds of people involved in
the business of live music, particularly venue owners, promoters, agents and
managers.
By 1950, national touring circuits had been re-established for both popular and
classical musicians. Such tours were organised around three kinds of venue. First
was the music hall and variety theatre circuit. Although the heyday of the music
hall predates the advent of cinema, music halls and variety theatres continued
to be significant for live music in Britain until well after the Second World War.
Second was the dance hall and ballroom circuit and, in particular the ballroom
chains Mecca and Rank, which had been important leisure venues since the 1930s.
Finally, there were concert halls and town halls, which, while not a centrally
operated circuit, were unified in other ways, mainly as venues for orchestras and
choirs, both state-funded and amateur community ensembles. We will examine
each of these circuits in turn.
British entrepreneurs began competing for dominance in a burgeoning
commercial live music touring market in the mid-nineteenth century. The history
of British music halls clearly demonstrates that there is nothing new about a small
number of conglomerates owning vast swathes of British live music venues: in
the late nineteenth century, businessmen such as Oswald Stoll, Edward Moss,
Richard Thornton and Frank Allen made their reputations by acquiring chains
of variety theatres and music halls which helped them gain an upper hand in
negotiations with artists. In 1899, these four venue owners agreed to form a
12 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

syndicate to consolidate their power. According to Dave Russell, the new Moss
Empires syndicate, with Stoll as managing director, was ‘basically a booking
cartel designed to reduce labour costs by offering performers guaranteed advanced
bookings in return for reduced fees’ (Russell 2004).6 This made artist unions such
as the Musicians’ Union (competing unions representing musicians founded round
the turn of the century merged to become the Musicians’ Union in 1921) and the
Variety Artists Federation (founded 1906) all the more necessary to negotiate fees
on behalf of performers. Stoll-Moss was not the only theatre syndicate: another
key venue owner in the early twentieth century was Sir Walter de Frece, whose
circuit was taken over by Charles Gulliver’s London Theatres of Variety (LTV) in
1919. Despite its name, this company also owned theatres in the provinces, and in
1928 LTV’s circuit was bought by Sir Walter Gibbons, who aimed to establish the
General Theatres Corporation (GTC) as a nationwide circuit of music halls, with
the London Palladium as its flagship venue (Murphy 2004a).
The popularity of music halls declined as cinemas began to displace other forms
of mass entertainment, especially after the advent of sound films in the late 1920s,
and yet the subsequent history of cinemas is entangled with the history of live music:
not only did cinema development impact on musical employment (thousands of
musicians in cinema pit orchestras were made redundant by the introduction of sound
films), but cinemas themselves were crucial spaces for live music into the 1950s and
1960s. The Gaumont chain, for example, offered variety acts as well as films on its
programmes and its cine-variety policy meant that its new cinemas in the 1930s and
1940s were built with stage facilities and dressing rooms (Eyles 1996: 114–15). As
with music halls, business conglomerates did their best to consolidate ownership
of British cinemas and create nationwide film circuits. In addition to buying music
halls, Gibbons also invested in cinemas, and it was not long before GTC as a whole
was bought by the rival Gaumont-British Picture Corporation (Murphy 2004a).
J. Arthur Rank got into cinema ownership relatively late in the game, after
buying his first film house in the late 1930s. He became the biggest cinema
circuit owner of all during the Second World War, when, according to Richard
Davenport-Hines (2004), ‘partly by the chance deaths of his nearest rivals, Rank
acquired control of the Gaumont-British … production company (1941) and of
the exhibitors Odeon Theatres (1942)’. The Odeon chain was to play a significant
part in the emergence of a new generation of concert promoters in the 1950s,
who began by staging music shows in cinemas on Sundays and then did deals for
concerts on other nights:

I worked out a deal with the Rank Organisation, whereby if we booked a theatre
on a Tuesday, say, and they had a movie playing there, I convinced them that if
people wanted to see the movie on a Tuesday, they would go on a Wednesday
or Thursday. I guaranteed them that the money they estimated they would

6
  Stoll left this syndicate in 1910; Stoll Theatres re-merged with Moss Empires in
1960.
 Getting Back to Business 13

take, they would take more with the concert. And the first one was the Odeon
Hammersmith. (Davison 2010)7

Dance halls and ballrooms were also crucial to the British live music business.
Although the Rank Organisation is best known for its role in development of
the British film industry, by the 1950s it also operated a substantial number of
ballrooms and dance halls. However, the biggest such chain was owned by Mecca,
which grew under the leadership of Carl Heimann. Heimann joined the firm Ye
Mecca Cafés in 1924 working as a waiter, but quickly moved up the ranks to
become catering manager for dance halls and convinced the company to begin
acquiring and managing its own halls (Nott 2004). Throughout the 1930s, Heimann
developed the dance hall division of the company along with Scottish entrepreneur
Alan Fairley; by 1946, they were joint chairmen of the new Mecca Ltd; in the
1950s, they were rivalled only by Rank (whose ballroom circuit was known as Top
Rank) in market share of the British dance hall circuit.
The story of concert halls is different from that of music halls and dance halls,
primarily because the former served as key venues for classical and art music in post-
war Britain and involved both state-subsidised and commercial concert promotion.
The development of concert halls and town halls where music could be performed
became an important feature of British urban history in the nineteenth century:

As concert-going became ever more popular in England, concert facilities began

to be provided by local governments as a public amenity. And as music – for
example, that of Elgar – was becoming increasingly a matter of national identity,
its performance became a matter of political expediency. Moreover, the choirs
[of various towns] were, like the town halls themselves, symbols of civic pride …
The municipal hall frequently became the chief place of musical entertainment
in the town, housing a great organ and a festival choir, all reflecting new-found
wealth and pride. (Forsyth 1985: 140)

Such halls often had resident or affiliated choirs, orchestras or other musical
ensembles, and also received touring musicians from elsewhere. After 1946, certain
concert halls, opera houses and orchestras also received national state support via
the Arts Council. From its inception, the aim of the Arts Council was to ‘increase the
accessibility of the fine arts to the public’ and while this policy effectively excluded
both amateur and popular music from Arts Council support, there was, nevertheless,
still some overlap between the worlds of state-subsidised and commercial music:
many town halls were available for hire by commercial promoters and while it is
tempting to ascribe particular styles of music to each circuit – to say, for instance,
that star singers dominated live music performance in variety theatres, while big
bands mainly stuck to the dance hall circuit and classical repertoire orchestras only

7
  Tony Smith recalls his father, John Smith, getting into national promotion through
the same route (Smith 2010).
14 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

played concert halls – in reality there was a degree of crossover in terms of what kind
of music was performed in what kind of venue.
In addition to the touring circuits so far described, a more seasonal network of
live music venues included seaside piers and summer holiday camps. The most
important British resort chain was owned and managed by Billy Butlin, a self-
made businessman. Butlin opened his first holiday camp in 1936 and quickly
expanded his business, attracting holiday makers partly by instituting concerts at
the camps which featured variety theatre and radio stars (Reid 2004). Although
Butlin’s camps were sequestered during the war to house servicemen and women
from the Navy and the Air Force, Butlin turned this to his advantage by offering to
build further camps (with state funds) for the military during the war; once the war
ended, he bought the new camps back from the government at a fraction of what
it cost to build them and quickly turned them into additional holiday resorts – an
interesting example of public/private partnership. By 1947, not only was Butlin a
millionaire, but he also claimed to spend £4,500 per week on live dance music at
his camps, making him a significant concert promoter as well as Britain’s biggest
holiday caterer (Melody Maker, 23 August 1947: 4). He also began to promote
ballroom dance festivals both on and off the campsites (in Earl’s Court in London,
for example – see Melody Maker, 31 January 1948: 1).
To summarise, by the time the Second World War ended, a small handful of
companies controlled a substantial portion of the important venues for British
live music. Considering that ownership was being consolidated in British music-
related industries as well, in hotels, restaurants, the theatre and London’s West
End clubs, it is clear that by 1950 a significant amount of live performance was
controlled and managed by a relatively small number of players.8
In order to create their live music events, venue owners had to work with
promoters, agents and managers.9 According to Dave Laing, the term ‘promoter’
describes ‘the person or company responsible for the physical organisation
and presentation of a concert or festival, which can be taken as the minimum
requirement for what a promoter does’, and this definition would certainly have
held true in 1950 (Laing 2003: 561). The promoter is also generally the person or
company that carries the financial risk in a live music event, putting up the money
for not only the artist’s fee but also other costs such as venue hire, production,
ticket sales and so on. The word ‘impresario’ was also in use to describe this role
in this period, although it was perhaps used more frequently with reference to
classical music and theatre. The two terms seem to have been used interchangeably
in Melody Maker when referring to the promotion of dance bands, jazz combos
and singers.10

8
  By 1948, three-quarters of all theatre seats in London and the provinces were owned
by A.S. Cruickshank and Prince Littler (Croft 1995: 212).
9
  They might also deal with artists directly, though this was unusual.
10
  Melody Maker used both the terms ‘promoter’ (e.g. 19 July 1947: 5; 3 July 1948:
2; 14 January 1950: 1) and ‘impresario’ (19 June 1948: 1; 14 January 1950: 1) to designate
 Getting Back to Business 15

Table 1.2 Live music events 1950

Enthusiast promoter State-funded Commercial

promoter promoter
Folk discourse George Webb’s No state funding for Kathleen Ferrier:
Dixielanders: Red folk worlds in 1950 concert at the Royal
Barn Public House, Albert Hall, 18 May
Barnehurst, Monday 1950
evenings in 1948
Art discourse Glasgow Cathedral Royal Philharmonic Jay Pomeroy’s
Choral Society Orchestra at Usher New London Opera
performing Handel’s Hall, Edinburgh, 27 Company: Tosca at
Saul, Glasgow August 1950 Cambridge Theatre,
Cathedral, 19 London, performed
December 1950 through October
1947
Pop discourse Amateur dance bands No state funding for Frank Sinatra at the
performing throughout pop worlds in 1950 London Palladium,
UK 10–23 July 1950

For the purposes of this book, we will make a distinction between three kinds of
promoter: the enthusiast promoter, the state-funded promoter and the commercial
promoter. In this model, the enthusiast promotes because they want to, because
they enjoy the music; commercial considerations are a secondary motivation if at
all. The state promotes live music via subsidy and for policy reasons – educational,
cultural, social and economic. The commercial promoter puts on concerts to make
money. There are noteworthy parallels between these three categories and the folk,
art and pop discourses discussed in the previous section. But if discourses are sets
of aesthetic and social values that define particular musical worlds, the three types
of promotion describe business organisations. To illustrate this, we can map live
music events onto a grid. In Table 1.2 we have done this for live music events from
1950 (or thereabouts).
The table above can be used to understand the historical dynamics of live
music promotion in Britain. It is worth noting that the examples may in fact fit
into more than one box, just as specific musical events can draw from more than
one discourse. George Webb’s Dixielanders occupy the ‘folk discourse/enthusiast
promoter’ box, for example, because the early British trad jazz movement drew
predominantly, but not exclusively, from folk discourse; Webb began promoting
his Monday evenings jazz nights at the Red Barn primarily as an enthusiast,
although as they became more successful over time, various members of the
band, including Humphrey Lyttelton and Webb himself, moved into commercial
models of promotion. Similarly, Kathleen Ferrier, who occupies the ‘folk

individuals responsible for the business of organising, presenting and financially backing
concerts and tours.
16 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

discourse/commercial promotion’ box, was one of Britain’s most successful

classical singers, but also incorporated folk songs into her concert repertoire.
The Glasgow Cathedral Choral Society was an amateur, enthusiast choir, but
its concert of Handel’s Saul featured the Scottish National Orchestra, which
received state subsidies from 1950 onwards. The gridlines of the table should
therefore be read as permeable rather than fixed, although the table remains
useful as a way of making sense of the different discourses and promotional
business models at play in any given live music event.
After the promoter, the second significant figure in the live music business
is the agent. According to Donald Passman, it is the agent who, in conjunction
with the performer’s management (if applicable), books the tour and ‘makes
the deals with the promoters (which includes the job of picking promoters that
will put on the show professionally and not disappear with [the] money)’ (2004:
354). The agent represents the artist and negotiates the performance fee, as well
as scheduling the artist’s touring itineraries and influencing decisions regarding
appropriate venues and ticket prices.
Passman is generalising from contemporary commercial practice. Historically
the role of the agent emerged as music-making opportunities changed. As a
performer in the mid-nineteenth century, Clara Schumann:

Rented the pianos and had them moved and tuned, rented the halls and provided
for lights and heat, had tickets printed and distributed, arranged for advertising
in newspapers and on posters – and then appeared, beautifully gowned in concert
attire, to play, as though this was her sole care. (Bowers and Tick, 1987: 269)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the music economy was such that, in
William Weber’s words, ‘the independent concert agent’ had become a more
dominant figure than ‘the self-managing musician’ (Weber 2004). The changing
role of the agent in the British classical music world is well illustrated in
Christopher Fifield’s study of the dominant classical music agency in Britain
in 1950, Ibbs and Tillett (2005).11 Its origins lay in a concert and music agency
opened by George Dolby above the offices of the music publishers Chappells
in 1858 (among other things, Dolby organised Charles Dickens’ 1866 reading
tour), and Fifield shows in illuminating detail how its activities evolved, as the
company organised rehearsals and repertoire, took on the role of ‘protecting’ its
clients from direct approaches from local music societies, sought to correct false
press stories, determined the distribution of free tickets, inflated tickets sales
for publicity purposes, organised recording sessions and broadcasts for visiting
artists from abroad, solicited concert programme retail advertisements for its
domestic artists’ latest releases and, in general, moved from being a nineteenth-

11
  The 1953–4 Concert Artists (Classical Music) Directory lists 13 agencies, all based
in London. At that point Ibbs and Tillett had 45 acts on its books. The next biggest company,
Harold Holt, had nine acts (Fifield 2005: 300–1).
 Getting Back to Business 17

century to a twentieth-century music business. Throughout this period, though,

‘the argument persisted about whether an agent should act as an impresario or
(as John Tillett strongly believed) as a service industry’ (Fifield 2005: 299).
George Dolby’s successor, Narcisio Vertigliano, who took over the company in
1880, had used it to develop child prodigies and performing stars. When Robert
Ibbs and Peter Tillett broke away from him in 1906, they followed a different
strategy:

Right from the start, Ibbs and Tillett’s unbending view was that they were
running a booking agency and artists provided a service to the client, whether
music club, choral society or concert organization, at the lowest possible price.
(Ibid.: 40)12

This was still company policy in 1950 (John Tillett duly turned down the chance to
act for Yehudi Menuhin), but whether this pre-war way of working could survive
was beginning to be questioned. Terry Slasberg, whose career in the classical
concert agency business began in the post-war period (with Ingpen and Williams),
suggests that it was at this moment that:

Music changed almost overnight and was never to be the same again. The
standard of performance had gone into orbit; and suddenly, also, there was
‘Presentation’. No longer were we treated to a mere musical event with
musicians appearing on stage in evening dress, playing, and then disappearing
into the night like spirits. The ‘Classical Concert’ had become ‘A Show’, with
performers worthy of the name of ‘Entertainers’. They were personalities who
began to be stars. (Slasberg 1993: 5)

For agents taking on such stars, they, rather than the people paying for them
to perform, were the clients (and their agents might also therefore function as
their managers). In the classical music world, then, the roles of agent, promoter
and manager can be confused by different accounts of who is whose client.
Understanding these roles in popular music practice is equally complicated. In
1950 (as now) it was not uncommon for a single person to work as manager,
agent, promoter, venue owner and, indeed, musician, often all at the same time.
The brothers Bert and Stan Wilcox, for instance, were the leaseholders of the
London Jazz Club on 100 Oxford St in 1950 and promoted shows at their own
venue as well as at others across Britain. The bandleader Geraldo managed his
own business affairs and also booked other bands in restaurants, hotels, holiday
camps and cruise liners. These are just two of many examples of professionals in

12
  It is interesting to compare the role of agents – or ‘concert caterers’ as they were
known in the late nineteenth century – in providing musical acts for working men’s clubs.
They also sought to provide a musical service at the lowest cost and saw the clubs as their
clients, but in this context were accused of exploiting musical labour – see Taylor 1972: 67–8.
18 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

the live music industry wearing several hats at once, a form of multi-tasking that
could be said to define this business sector.
There was also the complicating factor that the roles of manager, agent, promoter
and venue owner were organised differently in different popular music worlds.
The promoter and dance band agent Maurice Kinn thus noted in Melody Maker
his frustration at the discrepancy in expectations of variety artist agents, who, he
claimed, ‘do no more in general for their artistes than obtain the engagement’,
and the dance band agent, who ‘is expected to book the date, arrange the billing,
publicity, photographs, hotel accommodation, train reservations or coach bookings
and transport of instruments. In some cases dance-band agents act as accountants,
and in many instances financiers to their bands’ (18 June 1949: 3).13
There were no strict rules, formulas or entry requirements for a successful career
in the live music industry, and much of an individual’s success depended on how
they could innovate and carve out a unique professional niche for themselves. In
order to better understand what such a career looked like in practice, we will take a
closer look at three of the most powerful figures in British showbusiness at this time:
Val Parnell and the brothers Lew and Leslie Grade.
Val Parnell was probably the most powerful British live music promoter in 1950,
even though his area of promotion was primarily limited to music hall and variety.
Parnell began working at the age of 13 in the offices of Sir Walter de Frece’s music
hall circuit. When London Theatres of Variety took over de Frece’s venues, Parnell
stayed on to manage 10 provincial theatres for the company. According to Robert
Murphy, ‘finding he was unable to book top acts because of the competition of
the more powerful Moss Empires circuit, Parnell responded by booking a greater
number of acts for shorter turns, thus providing a show which ran faster than those
of his rivals. He was later to use the same “high-speed variety” technique – though
this time with big names – to revive the fortunes of the London Palladium’ (Murphy
2004). Through a series of acquisitions and expansions, the Gaumont-British Picture
Corporation eventually acquired not only the LTV circuit but also Moss Empires.
Parnell worked as assistant to George Black in managing the circuit and played a
significant role in ensuring the continued economic viability of music hall and variety
as it faced competition from the growth of the cinema industry. When Black died in
1945, ‘Parnell succeeded him as managing director of Moss Empires and director
of GTC in charge of their variety halls’, controlling an unrivalled network of halls
and theatres across the country (ibid.). By 1950, following his success with Danny
Kaye, he had established what was, for the moment, an effective survival strategy
for the provincial theatres on the Moss Empire circuit (which in the immediate
post-war period had been unsuccessfully relying on nostalgia for pre-war acts):
he took around Britain ‘an influx of American stars’ (Robinson 2007: 71–5). This
dependence on American acts was to play into the hands of his rivals, the Grades.

13
  Kinn went on to buy the ailing music paper Musical Express and Accordion Weekly
for £1,000 as it was about to go bust, and to relaunch it, with editors Percy Dickins and Ray
Sonin, as New Musical Express in March 1952 (Hutchins 2000).
 Getting Back to Business 19

Lew Grade and his brother Leslie entered showbusiness later than Parnell.14 Lew
began his career as a professional dancer, but left the stage to work at the Joe Collins
agency in 1935. His younger brother Leslie followed Lew’s career choice and the
two of them eventually formed their own agency, which represented acts on the
music hall and variety theatre circuit. Like J. Arthur Rank, the Grades made their
biggest advances by remaining cool-headed during the chaotic times of war, even
when Lew had to serve in the military – Leslie ran the agency on his own for several
years. According to their biographer Hunter Davies, one way of advancing was by
taking risks: when venue managers were reluctant to gamble on uncertain shows, the
Grades would ‘jump from being an agent, even an exclusive agent, into becoming
partly responsible for the show itself, acting as agent-cum-impresario. Having put
together a package, arranged the star and the supporting acts, Leslie and Lew would
then go to the theatre management and offer to share the show. The agreement was
usually to share all proceeds, 40/60 in the agent’s favour’ (1981: 83). This meant that
the Grade Agency paid for all the acts and publicity while the management only paid
the theatre’s overheads, but it also meant that the Grades reaped much greater profits
than agents who merely booked engagements.
The brothers displayed similarly aggressive tactics in their investments, and
through a series of astute acquisitions of competitors who struggled during the
war, they built up the Grade Agency until it was the second largest in Europe,
rivalled only by the Foster’s Agency, which had become the biggest by linking
up with William Morris in the USA, ‘which had always given them an enormous
advantage’ (Davies 1981: 120–1). Foster’s had dominated the agency industry for
so long with its film and theatre roster that it was blind to a growing audience
demand to see a new kind of public icon: the recording star. Leslie’s son, Michael
Grade, recalls how his father adapted to this shift in 1948:

Val Parnell used to book the Palladium and the Moss Empires circuit and
he was very, very thick with a man – because he used to play golf with him
– called Harry Foster. The Foster’s Agency was the big agency … who had
Danny Kaye and all the American stars who came through the Morris office,
straight to the Palladium and Lew and my father couldn’t break that thing to
get at the Palladium … Eventually a new agency built up in America called
GAC [General Artists Corporation of America] with a guy called Buddy
Howe, who had been a dancing act that Lew and my father had booked … And
he became the agent for all the new recording stars that suddenly emerged.
From Frankie Laine, Johnny Ray, Nat King Cole.15 All those people would
work through GAC. Because of my father’s relationship with Buddy Howe

14
  Bernard Grade, Lew and Leslie’s other brother, was involved in showbusiness, but
changed his name to Delfont and worked as an impresario rather than an agent.
15
  Grade and Davies both exaggerate the extent to which GAC monopolised the
representation of recording artists: the Foster’s Agency represented the Ink Spots, one of
the most successful recording artists of the period.
20 The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950–1967

they broke the Foster’s/Moss Empires – Harry Foster/Val Parnell golfing

cosiness – because Val needed these acts … And that’s how they got into the
Palladium. (Grade 2009)

As the Grades’ career demonstrates, the roles of agent, promoter, venue owner
and manager could overlap – being an artist’s agent did not preclude one from
promoting the artist’s shows as well (and if the agent happened to own a venue
where the show could happen, so much the better).

Music Business and the Musicians’ Union

Live music may have been the primary source of income for the majority of
professional musicians in 1950, but the music industry as a whole was made up of
other interrelated sub-industries. The most important of these were broadcasting
(radio and now TV), song publishing, recording and royalty collection. All of
these will be explored in much greater detail in Chapter 6, which will focus on
the rise of the recording industry as it came to dominate the other music sectors
between 1950 and 1967. For the moment, we will simply describe each of these
core sub-industries as they looked in 1950.
Since its inception in 1922, the BBC had had a monopoly over British
broadcasting. No other radio company was allowed to broadcast from within the
UK and the BBC therefore wielded extraordinary power in the dissemination
of music. The BBC’s charter dictated that its broadcasting, including music
programming, was to serve as ‘a means of education and entertainment’, and it
was accused by the British press of not catering enough to public taste, despite
the fact that the majority of its music programming in the 1930s was ‘dance
music’ and ‘light music’ (Briggs 1961: 357–8; Nott 2002: 59–66). During
the 1930s, entrepreneurs circumvented the BBC’s radio monopoly by using
powerful transmitters to broadcast advertiser-supported programmes from
continental Europe aimed specifically at British audiences. The most successful
of these were Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandie, both programming
mainly popular music. During the Second World War, the American Armed
Forces Network further threatened the BBC’s control of the airwaves, and the
BBC itself changed its own programming policies to better satisfy the listening
interests of servicemen and women.
By 1950, the BBC had divided its radio broadcasting into three strands.
According to senior staff at the BBC, the Light Programme provided ‘best
quality and popular entertainment’ (Briggs 1979: 60); the general interest Home
Service was designed to ‘reflect the life and community in which we live …
the broad middle strand of the BBC’s broadcasting’ (ibid.: 63); and the Third
Programme was envisaged as broadcasting of ‘a high cultural level, devoted to
the arts, serious discussion and experiment, which would ‘provide an intelligent
alternative at peak hours’ to the Light Programme (ibid.: 66).
A Snapshot of Bristol in October–November 1962
A.H.R.T . 1962. ‘Star vanishes as fans swap blows’. Bristol evening Post, Tuesday 16 October.
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‘Entertainments’. 1962. Bristol evening Post, Saturday 31 October, p. 5.
‘Entertainments’. 1962. Bristol evening Post, Wednesday 7 November, p. 5.
‘Entertainments’. 1962. Bristol evening Post, Tuesday 13 November, p. 5.
‘Entertainments’. 1962. Bristol evening Post, Friday 23 November, p. 5.
‘Entertainments’. 1962. Bristol evening Post, Thursday 29 November, p. 5.
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‘Way back when in the West – a musical life’. Bristol evening Post, 14 July 2008. Available at:
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A Snapshot of Glasgow in October–November 1962

‘Alternatives to musicians’. 1962. Glasgow herald, 23 November.
Buchanan, G. 1962a. ‘Jazz bookings’. evening Times, 26 October.
Buchanan, G. 1962b. ‘On the town’. evening Times, 19 October.
‘Dance hall strike off’. 1962. evening Times, 30 November.
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MacDonald, I. 1962. ‘A new era for “Mr Music Hall”’. evening Times, 8 November.
‘McBain died in a minute’. 1962. evening Times, 1 November.
‘Now Elvis may sing in Glasgow’. 1962. evening Times, 23 November.
‘On with the dance – and the drinks’. 1962. evening Times, 19 October.
‘Origin in main hall’. 1962. Glasgow herald, 27 October.
‘Strike of musicians threatened’. 1962. Glasgow herald, 21 November.
‘Sunday drinkers go to town’. 1962. Glasgow herald, 8 October.
‘Teenage drinkers shock a provost’. 1962. evening Times, 19 October.
‘Two years for dance-hall stabbing’. 1962. evening Times, 25 October.

A Snapshot of Sheffield in October–November 1962

Bond, C. 2008. ‘Stringfellow on the club that made Sheffield swing in the ’60s’. yorkshire post, 7
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Boulding, T. 2009. Interview with Emma Webster, 29 June.
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‘Entertainments’. 1962. The Star, Sheffield, 5 October: 2.
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‘Entertainments’. 1962. The Star, Sheffield, 30 October: 2.
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‘Rhythmic King Richard rocks the audience’. 1962. The Star, Sheffield, 25 October: 2.
‘STUNG! That’s the box office after Mr. Bumble’s visit’. 1962. The Star, Sheffield, 14 November:
2.

The Rolling Stones: Richmond 1963

Dalton, D. ed. 1975. The Rolling Stones: The Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World. London:
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