Brit Wits: A History of British Rock Humor

By Iain Ellis

Humour, as much as any other trait, defines British cultural identity. It is 'crucial in the English sense of nation,' argues humour scholar Andy Medhurst; 'To be properly English you must have a sense of humour,' opines historian Antony Easthope. Author Zadie Smith perceives British humour as a national coping mechanism, stating, 'You don’t have to be funny to live here, but it helps.' Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten concurs, commenting, 'There’s a sense of comedy in the English that even in your grimmest moments you laugh.' Although humour invariably functions as a relief valve for the British, it is also often deployed for the purposes of combat. From the court jesters of old to the rock wits of today, British humorists – across the arts – have been the pioneers of rebellion, chastising society’s hypocrites, exploiters and phonies, while simultaneously slighting the very institutions that maintain them.

The best of the British wits are (to steal a coinage from The Clash) 'bullshit detectors' with subversion on their minds and the jugulars of their enemies in their sights. Such subversive humour is held dear in British hearts and minds, and it runs deep in their history. Historian Chris Rojek explains how the kind of foul-mouthed, abusive language typical of British (punk) humour has its antecedents in prior idioms like the billingsgate oath: 'Humour, often of an extraordinary coruscating and vehement type, has been a characteristic of the British since at least feudal times, when the ironic oaths against the monarchy and the sulfurous ‘Billingsgate’ uttered against the Church and anyone in power were widespread features of popular culture. Rojek proceeds to fast forward to 1977, citing the Sex Pistols’ 'Sod the Jubilee' campaign as a contemporary update of the Billingsgate oath. For Rojek, the omnipresence of British caustic humour accounts for why the nation has historically been more inclined toward expressions of subversive rebellion than to violent revolution. 'Protest has been conducted not with guns and grenades, but with biting comedy and graffiti,' he observes.

As an outlet for venting and as an alternative means of protest, Brit wit, not surprisingly, has developed distinctive communicative patterns, with linguistic flair and creative flourishes starring as its key features. Far more than American humour, for example, British humour revels in colourful language, in lyrical invective, in surrogate mock warfare. One witnesses such humour daily in the Houses of Parliament, where well-crafted barbs are traded across the aisle, the thinly veiled insults cushioned by the creativity of the inherent humour. Such wit is equally evident throughout the history of British rock, where rebellion has defined the rock impulse and comedic dissent has been a seemingly instinctual activity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781841506715

Iain Ellis

Iain Ellis is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Kansas, a bimonthly columnist for PopMatters, and the author of Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists.

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STARTING POINTS

Chapter 1

MUSIC HALL COMEDY

The nationally distinctive—as well as universal—humor traits found in British rock music have their roots in traditions and art forms existing long before Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele offered up their Anglicized interpretations of rock and roll in the mid-1950s. Indeed, many prerock and nonrock sources have been as or more influential on subsequent national rock humor expression. Jerry Palmer, in his essay Humor in Great Britain, notes that the linguistic bent of much British humor is due to the nation’s general social and political stability since the Romans settled in 55 BC.¹ A largely consistent ethnic make-up and concomitant standardized English language usage have allowed for the unfettered development of a humor that abounds in intellectual twists of logic and rhetoric, nonsense, wordplay, and puns.

Britain’s first professional humorists provided an archetypal comedic figure that has flourished and mutated across the nation’s history: the fool. Popular from the eleventh century on, the fool (later referred to as the jester, village idiot, and much later, clown) combined a sly nonsense speak with flamboyant dance and dress to create a multi-faceted theatrical performance that often criticized, commented upon, or even insulted authorities. Moreover, the fool’s play-acting was both permitted and encouraged by the very patrons who were usually its target. A stock figure of medieval festivals and royal courts, the fool was the innovator of the comic mask, whether visual or oral. A rebellious misfit who was tolerated as a figure of fun yet listened to as a critic of insight, the fool often packed a satirical punch behind his exaggerated demonstrations of outrageous pranks, grotesque gestures, wild clothing, and coded innuendo. Not only are such practices evident in the subsequent history of British comedy, but they also provide some of the central features of rock’s wild joke-lore. The Slits and the Macc Lads, as well as Boy George and the Spice Girls, are diverse testaments to the adaptive longevity of the country’s fool tradition.

In its later reinvention as the clown, the fool has also enjoyed a long and influential existence at the heart of British comedy. Besides its tenure in the circus and pantomime, the clown character enjoyed great popularity in such nineteenth-century venues as the music halls. These largely working-class venues (usually pub adjuncts) featured an often risqué humor that integrated standard sing-along songs and much communal carousing and boozing. Showcasing sexual innuendo and acrobatic physical comedy in its low-life sketches and songs, the music halls developed into a vastly popular vaudeville scene during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Furthermore, the polka-beat rhythms, pun-filled rhymes, accentuated accents, and jet-propelled delivery that characterized many music hall songs are still evident in the music of such knees up British rock humorists as Ian Dury, Madness, and Blur. Some, like the Sex Pistols, have been open in recognizing and celebrating this heritage and of themselves as the inheritors of it. What people didn’t understand about the Sex Pistols is that we are music hall, Johnny Rotten comments in Julien Temple’s documentary film The Filth and the Fury;² the music hall standard, There’ll Always be an England, not only featured as the introductory song for the band’s recent come-back shows, but it is also the title of Temple’s most recent Pistols documentary.

Obviously, British rock humor cannot be traced to a single source or tradition, but the music halls offer a legitimate starting point. Historian Dave Russell, with rock music apparently on his mind, calls the music halls, a prefiguration of the mass entertainment business of the twentieth century.³ Many of the traits, methods, and identifications we now associate with subversive rock humorists were first formed and developed in music hall performers.

Music hall is an elastic term, referring to a section of the music/entertainment industry, to a style of performance, and to the building in which those performances took place. Although musical comedy dominated most bills, theatrical performances, comedy sketches, dancing, and juggling were all common to the halls. The first venues to be called music halls emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Catering to a mostly working-class, under-25, male clientele, these mostly transformed pubs were the precursors of the pub rock venues that have long flourished on the outskirts of the underground British rock circuit, and which enjoyed their heyday in the immediate prepunk years.

The early music halls, like the pub rock public houses, were raucous and energetic in spirit, and intimate enough for performer–audience interaction to be a key feature of the entertainment experience. These were places where working-class folks could escape from the hardships of work (and home) and find communal relief in upbeat and uproarious comedy. Located in cities and towns around the country, music halls united the emerging industrial working-class, offering them a site where they could celebrate their common interests as well as their social identities. As such, they not only forecasted future rock culture as a welcoming place for the nation’s youth rebels, but also for Britain’s class-conscious comedy culture.

As with the history of rock music, despite being initially developed to satisfy the pleasures of the working-class, music hall was not devoid of middle- and upper-class involvement, interference, and ultimately, control. Middle-class concerns over the subversive and/or salacious and/or decadent goings-on at some music halls led—as it did with rock music in the 1950s—to intervening censorship and legislative controls. Many were forced to shut down when a law was passed in 1878 demanding a certificate of suitability (along with an accompanying fee), while purity groups and the temperance society were ever vigilant in monitoring content that might upset middle-class sensibilities. Despite—or perhaps because of—such concerns, music hall activities became institutionalized and regulated, sapped of some of their primitive spirit but amenable to a broader, less working-class audience. Like rock and roll by the late 1950s, music hall had become accommodated by the late nineteenth century, its rougher and more regional burrs mostly filed away.

Perhaps because of establishment controls and perhaps because its comedic entertainment was never intended otherwise, music hall songs were neither radical nor revolutionary in nature, though they were not devoid of subversive implications. Dave Russell speaks of an occasional radical potential⁴ and of popular radical rather than socialist attitudes,⁵ but he largely sees music hall fare in terms of relief humor, its songs maintaining a certain space for the expression of working-class values and aspirations against external attack.⁶ Andy Medhurst concurs, seeing music hall as a carnival-like distraction, which, although highlighting hardships and testing Victorian propriety with its vulgar and ribald content, ultimately served as consolation humor. It addressed inequalities, but did not belabor them; instead, it celebrated hedonism through class-collective exhalations of identity self-sanctioning and self-esteem empowering laughter. Medhurst considers its most subversive aspect to be its implicit rebuttal of middle-class prejudices that stereotyped the urban-dwelling working-class as predatory animals or as joyless automatons.⁷ As such, music hall relief humor has much in common with the rube humor one finds in American blue-collar culture and in the country music that has descended from its own music hall equivalent, vaudeville.

Like rube humor, music hall comedy stressed regional accents and vernacular slang, both code signifiers of authenticity, social class, and geographical identity. Exaggerated to levels of self-parody, pseudo-cockney songs were a particularly popular subgenre. James Fawn gently satirized the state’s impositions on the personal freedoms of the common man in the syllable-challenged Ask a P’liceman, whereas George Formby Sr. set the precedent for the northern pride self-deprecations of his son through his Lancashire loon persona of John Willie. As with George Jr.’s work, audiences were lured into laughing at the character, but, whether in songs or sketches, it was always that character that got the last laugh. One of the more popular vernacular songs of the music hall era was the cockney-inflected Henery the Eighth; later revived and given a northern makeover, this song was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1965 for the ultra-Mancunian Herman’s Hermits. Sometimes dialect was employed for more subversive class purposes, as with Joe Wilson’s No Work and The Strike. Set to traditional tunes and sung in northern pit dialect, both songs endorsed working-class rights and satirized boss exploitation using a superiority humor more common within folk music traditions than within music hall.

Some historians have also called attention to women’s involvement in music hall entertainment, perceiving subversive elements in their proto-feminist performances. Colin MacInnes points out that although music hall audiences were predominantly male, women made up about 50% of the on-stage acts.⁸ Marie Lloyd, Vesta Villey, and Gertie Miller were all working-class women who rose to become national stars of the music hall circuit. Villey was the premier male impersonator of her day and her parodies of male foibles were both incisive and theatrical in nature. Marie Lloyd was a legendary singer of the stage; her speed-dialect songs about marital problems and romantic disappointments were—like Villey’s—unambiguous about who the victimizer and who the victim were. Through squinted eyes and an imaginative leap, one can re-see the likes of Lloyd a century later in vernacular pop wits like Lily Allen and Kate Nash.

Among the many parallels between the subversive humor of music hall and rock music, perhaps the most pronounced is their common predilections for sexual titillation. Just as sexual innuendo tested the interpretive skills of the censors during the early rock and roll years, so sex—more than any other topic—(a)roused the critics of music hall. Marie Lloyd’s suggestive stage antics demonstrated that such concerns were not solely in the lyrical realm, either. Forerunning the lewd playfulness of The Kinks and The Who were music hall tricksters like John Stamford, whose Turn off the Gas at the Meter was sufficiently crafty to, on the one hand, irritate the professional censors, but on the other, circumvent their censoring reach. The song’s chorus lines, Every night he would go/To the regions below/To turn off the gas at the meter, made little (but sufficient) pretense to being a domestic chore description.⁹

The emergence of film, radio, and the gramophone in the early decades of the twentieth century accounted largely for the decline of music hall as a style and institution, but the essence of its humor has continued through succeeding forms and forums, of which rock music is but one. The Crazy Gang, Frank Randle, Frankie Howerd, Max Miller, Arthur Askey, Norman Wisdom, the Carry On team, Benny Hill, Hylda Baker, Les Dawson, and Ken Dodd are just some of the nation’s comedy greats that drew from and perpetuated the techniques, topics, and tenor of music hall into the twentieth century. Another, George Formby, became a national icon of film and popular music during the three decades before rock and roll arrived. Hailed as the Emperor of Lancashire, Formby—though his songs and movies were regional in inspiration—was beloved nationally, and his mockery of the pretensions of the upper-classes—be it their actions, accents, or arrogance—struck chords of unified dignity and empathy in common men and women.

George Formby

With the emergence of jazz and the rise of Hollywood at the turn of the century, Britain’s popular music consumption became (largely) American. Though the indigenous folk music of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales continued to flourish in regional pockets, and music hall entertainment, though in decline, was far from dead, the influx of jazz-oriented sounds from the US transformed Britain into a second home for big band jazz, turning many of its once indigenous music halls into American-styled dance halls. By the 1930s, although Britain had developed its own burgeoning big band scene, most of its acts were little more than pale imitations of their American counterparts.

Overall, Britain contributed little in the way of innovative popular music during the first half of the twentieth century; understandably, it was rather more busy dealing with prewar and war-time responsibilities, which hit rather closer to home than they had in the US. Indeed, the music that was performed or played through the monopolistic BBC radio channels was largely utilitarian in purpose, there to serve as relief for the troops and a nation under threat from beyond. As the forerunners of rock were starting to line up on the US side of the Atlantic, a UK youth looking for new energies had no alternatives but to look west and learn. Yet, despite this all-encompassing American dominance, Britain offered a few bright sparks that neither sounded American nor looked like Hollywood stars, the most shining of which was George Formby, the premier musical comedian of his era.

Born in Wigan, Lancashire, in 1904, George Formby grew up in the shadow of his father, who had been a successful actor and comedian in the Edwardian music halls. When, in 1921, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, young George began to craft a distinct persona that would serve him well for his subsequent 40-year career on stage and in film. The Formby image was the British equivalent of American country rube humorists like Uncle Dave Macon and Minnie Pearl. Inseparable from his banjolele (a hybrid banjo and ukulele), his was caricature humor, and his persona was that of the innocent underdog, a loser simpleton with a winning charm. Like the rube skits of American country music, Formby’s songs were self-mocking, modest realizations of cultural inadequacies. Also like rube humor, such self-effacing wit produced an inverse pride, a gritty resilience in the face of outside forces. The key basis and impetus for this apparently paradoxical identity was social class.

More than in the US, Britain’s rigid class structure formed schisms across the cultural landscape, separating rich from poor, leaders from laborers, region from region—essentially, upper-class from working-class. Formby’s humor spoke for the working-classes and did so through their localized diction and vernacular. Exaggerating his Lancastrian accent and littering his songs with northern colloquialisms and imagery, Formby created an unpretentious lad-on-the-street image that set itself against the serious and self-absorbed upper crust. Not surprisingly, his doggedly raw persona was reflected upon in the critical reviews he received from the press as he elevated up the British entertainment hierarchy. Elitist London critics were befuddled by his child-like antics and songs-of-the-everyday, whereas working-class folk—young and old, male and female—related with elation to his earthy authenticity and self-deprecating fool antics.

Although the bulk of Formby’s songs (he cut over 230 records) were comically inoffensive, even wholesome, a large number were risqué, even by the American jazz and blues standards of the time. Full of cheeky wordplay and double entendres, Formby continually tweaked the sensibilities of the staunchly conservative British establishment with saucy narratives that left little to the imagination. Though the overseers at the BBC deemed some of these songs N.F.T.B.B. (not fit to be broadcast), Formby’s fanatical mass popularity, coupled with his disarming innocence, kept serious censorship at bay. His most popular risqué number was When I’m Cleaning Windows (1936), which charted the various sights encountered by that particular tradesman while climbing up and down his ladder. Pajamas lying side by side, ladies nighties I have spied / I’ve often seen what goes inside when I’m cleaning windows, he recounts, followed by, Honeymooning couples, too / You can see them bill and coo / You’d be surprised at things they do / When I’m cleaning windows.¹⁰ Another song, There’s Nothing Proud About Me (1934), boasts of its narrator’s down-to-earth character, and again uses a working-class service job as the vehicle to some behind-the-scenes fun and frivolity: I’ve called to look at your front street doorbell / But I don’t mind if I overhaul you as well. / There’s nothing proud about me.¹¹ Phallic innuendo spices up other songs of apparent innocence, as titles such as You Can’t Keep a Growing Lad Down (1934),With My Little Ukelele in Hand (1933), and With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock (1937) might suggest.

These lyrical charms were not George Formby’s only comedic weapons, either. His comic timing and enunciation of dialect revealed a master at his craft, and his physical humor arrived au naturel, by virtue of a distinctly funny face and a graveyard-toothed grin. These he parlayed to good effect in the 19 films he featured in between 1934 and 1946, each of which served as platforms for George’s banjolele and singing talents, as well as for his good-hearted but accident-prone character. Though the movie plots were never less than predictable and their comedy largely slapstick fare, subversive elements pertinent to the times were often integrated into the action. Let George Do It includes a dream sequence in which our intrepid hero punches Hitler on the nose and addresses him as a windbag.¹² Such Chaplinesque topical humor went down well not only with the British fighting forces but with the allies, too. Besides receiving an OBE from his motherland for his comedic contributions in 1946, Formby was also honored with a Stalin Prize from the Russians in 1944. Hitler, though, was rather less celebratory, responding to Formby’s filmic slights by ordering that all banjos and ukeleles be burned.

Beyond the screen, too, Formby was not averse to standing up for his principles. While on tour in South Africa in 1946, George and his wife, Beryl, raised the ire of the then National Party leader of that apartheid nation, Daniel François Malan, by playing to black audiences and openly embracing the adoring black children. When Malan expressed his outrage over their behavior, Beryl responded with some home-baked northern candor, telling him to piss off you horrible little man.¹³

Despite lacking the necessary good looks, youthful bravado, or teen spirit of romance to influence the first waves of American rock and roll, and perhaps too parochially English to fully translate too far from British shores, the legacy of George Formby can be seen far and wide across the British humor of the second half of the twentieth century. His saucy lyrical wit and social class consciousness vividly live on in the comedy of Benny Hill, the Carry-On films, and Monty Python, while his Lancastrian pride, edginess, and dialect are imprinted on any number of rock acts, particularly those hailing from the North of England, such as Herman’s Hermits, Freddie & the Dreamers, and the Macc Lads from the Manchester area, or The Beatles, Cilla Black, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood from nearby Liverpool.

A rare original for his day, Britain produced few other performers besides Formby capable of distracting the nation from its fascinations for, fantasies of, and addictions to American popular music. As such, between the 1930s and the 1950s he stood as something of an aberrant figure of national distinction, a lone homegrown superstar swimming against the currents of American cultural imports and influence. Formby’s provocative contributions to his own culture would not go unnoticed by his fellow Brits, though, who made him one of the world’s biggest stars during his 1930s heyday, then later paid tribute to him at his funeral in 1961 when more than 150,000 mourners recognized the man who had propelled and popularized working-class British humor into a distinctive brand, style, and aesthetic that future generations would inherit.

Chapter 2

THE FIFTIES

With the notable exception of Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle explosion he inspired, the youth music of 1950s Britain was largely devoid of national personality and distinction. Instead, the Brits looked westwards, finding in US rock and roll, R&B, and folk music an excitement, exuberance, and energy lacking on the homefront. Hungry for laughs and leisure amidst the austerity of the postwar years, British youth satiated their restlessness and frustration by vicariously living—or fantasizing about—the American dream. As had become increasingly apparent on the world stage became equally so in matters of popular culture: the eminence of the US coincided with the decline of British power and influence. It would take the arrival of The Beatles in the next decade for the special relationship between the two nations to constitute a reciprocal affair, at least in regard to matters of rock.

Despite Britain’s deficit in developing a viable youth rock culture during the 1950s, indicators existed that foreshadowed the subsequent if late arrival of a national rock and rock humor. These signals came mostly from beyond rock circles, in film, print, and radio forms. George Formby, of course, had provided large doses of sometimes edgy novelty humor over many decades prior, and his loveable Lancastrian charm had established identity factors of working-class and regional pride that would continue to course through the veins of British comedic traditions. However, by the postwar years, Formby’s wit had become worn, his appeal more nostalgic than new, more sentimental than subversive, and more attuned to an elderly demographic than to the emerging youth.

What young people wanted was expression that would challenge the old order, question establishment entrenchments, and offer new avenues for new artistic articulations. Whereas Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard provided American soundtracks for such freedom-seeking desires, certain homegrown performers from other fields offered comparable output with a more indigenous resonance. A resurgent British film industry coalesced around Ealing Studios after the war. Doggedly anti-Hollywood in content and spirit, Ealing comedies such as Passage to Pimlico (1949) and Whisky Galore! (1949) presented uproarious stories that reflected the nation’s postwar yearnings while challenging myriad manifestations of the social status quo. Invariably, at the core of their plot conflicts were young characters seeking—and realizing—change from the staid old ways of the conservative order.

Even more radical and youth appealing were the so-called kitchen sink dramas of the late 1950s. Mostly adapted from books written by left-leaning young provincial authors, angry young men films such as Look Back in Anger (1958), Room at the Top (1959), and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) proffered portraits of young males raging against their parochial confines and/or against the social class designations that imprisoned them. For like-minded young males across the UK (many of whom would later be in the vanguard of the British rock insurgence), these filmic (or book) rebels were inspirational role models with cautionary tales to tell.

While the angry young men films established the attitudes and class consciousness that future British rockers would soon adopt, the radio skits of The Goon Show were equally influential in the crafting of a subversive humor that has been consistently embraced by subsequent rock wits. Consisting of surreal scenarios, absurdist exchanges, wacky sound effects, and preposterous puns, Goon sketches were manic and unpredictable, anarchic and bizarre. Moreover, they contrasted with the more polished and popular adult programs of the era, such as Take it from Here. Conversely, Goon comedy was comedy for kids of all stripes, appealing to their imaginative spirits, fantasy instincts, and irreverent cravings. The starting point in an alternative comedy line that has stretched through Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s, Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the 1970s, The Young Ones in the 1980s, to, more recently, Spaced and The Mighty Boosh, The Goon Show is also a prescient precedent for British rock humor through the years. One witnesses it in the wacky films of The Beatles, in the surreal eccentricities of Syd Barrett-period Pink Floyd, as well as in the nonsensical noise blips of Super Furry Animals. John Lennon was an ardent fan of the show throughout its on-air duration from 1951 to 1960. He called it revolutionary and recognized its particular native appeal when adding, What it means to Americans I can’t imagine.¹ Listen to a few Goon skits and you can hear where John Lennon acquired his passion for puns and his predilections for the surreal and the absurd.

In the thrall of American rock humor though the Brits clearly were throughout the decade, outside influences like The Goon Show should not be underestimated regarding their contributions to what would soon be a more nationally identifiable rock humor.

AMERICAN DREAMING

As noted, to speak of British popular music in the 1950s is something of a misnomer as much of it was either American in origin or, at least, in derivation. Moreover, homegrown contributions to the rock and roll revolution paled in comparison to their US counterparts, this best summed up by rock historian Charlie Gillett, who pithily opined, Almost all of the British rock ‘n’ roll records through to 1962 were shoddy.² One might label these pre-1962 years as B.B., or Before Beatles. Mostly inferior facsimiles of US imports, British rock and rollers of the 1950s contributed few musical innovations, and by the time The Beatles and Rolling Stones were learning their chops at the close of the decade, neither band were looking to the likes of Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, or Adam Faith as primary inspirations.

As Britain’s handful of native early rockers experienced their teething problems, the youth culture was coalescing around American rock and priming itself for the future. With postwar peace and prosperity emerged the teenager, and with the teenager developed an attendant consumer society intent on putting the austere, cash-strapped years of World War II and the Great Depression behind it.³ The new boom brought increased leisure time and disposable income to youths, and they were intent on spending both. Rock music—alongside such auxiliary industries as media, entertainment, and fashion—became the locus of teenagers seeking their own identities and generational differentiations. A generation gap soon emerged out of the new social and socializing conditions, such that as young people adopted their own music, clothes, hair, and slang, their parents perceived an alien breed emerging, and a rebellious one at that. For teenagers, rock served as a vehicle not only to resist isolation and boredom, but also to question authority and rules. For adults, rock represented crass American mass cultural imperialism and vulgar (body) language. Or worse, it was seen as the facilitator of promiscuity and juvenile delinquency.

British youths’ American dreaming fast became adults’ worst nightmare and the anecdotal evidence of the role of rock music in this youth rebellion was—thanks to a sensationalist media—everywhere. The teddy boys, with their Edwardian garb and crude street slang, were singled out for scrutiny and condemnation, demonized as thugs who hung out in public spaces looking for rumbles. Their idolization of harder American rock rebels like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent indicated to adults that the sources of incitement for juvenile delinquency were external as well as internal, as did the riots that ensued when the US rebel films Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rock Around the Clock (1956) were first screened in the UK.

Lacking the deep (pre)rock traditions, influences, and industry infrastructure of the US, young, aspiring British rockers were incapable of producing equivalent music or of providing much presence or competition on either the US or UK charts. British rock was still in its infancy—or gestation period—and it would be a good few years before young rockers like Lennon and McCartney would learn to rock with the big boys, never mind develop their own unique identity in the process. Indeed, the only significant homeland forerunners that future Brit rockers could draw upon from 1950s popular music were the skifflers.

Despite being a predominantly British phenomenon during the 1950s, skiffle actually originated in the US 50 years prior. A fusion of black folk blues and jazz styles, skiffle mostly existed as an underground form in the US and was often played at informal rent parties and small gatherings. Usurped by swing and R&B in the 1930s and 1940s, skiffle largely disappeared from the American musical landscape. It was restored in the UK during the trad jazz revival that gained much popularity in the early 1950s. Playful and upbeat, and driven by acoustic guitar and various make-shift rhythmic instruments (washboard, tea-chest bass), skiffle was often played in brief interlude sets by the main jazz bands on the bill. This is how the genre’s most famous practitioner, Lonnie Donegan,