Episode ninety-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I've Just Fallen For Someone" by Adam Faith, and is our final look at the pre-Beatles British pop scene. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "San Francisco Bay Blues" by Jesse Fuller.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

This double-CD set contains all Adam Faith's early recordings.

And Big Time: The Life of Adam Faith by David and Caroline Stafford is a delightfully-written, extremely quotable, and by all accounts accurate biography of Faith.

Patreon

This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?

Errata

I repeatedly mispronounce Faith's birth surname as “Nelham”. It was “Nelhams”, with an “s”.

I also say that "Milk From the Coconut" by Johnny Gentle made the top thirty. It didn't -- I got this from an unreliable source.

Transcript

Today we're going to take our last look at the pre-Beatles British pop world, and we're going to look at a record that's far more important in retrospect than it seemed at the time. We're going to look at Adam Faith, and a track he recorded called "I've Just Fallen For Someone":

[Excerpt: Adam Faith, "I've Just Fallen For Someone"]

As is normal for British rock and roll stars of the fifties, Adam Faith was a pseudonym, in this case for someone whose birth name is the subject of some debate -- the registrar seems to have got a bit confused -- but who was known as Terry Nelhams, a five-foot-five singer with high cheekbones, a strong chin, and a weak voice.

The crucial change in Nelhams' life had come at the cinema, when he had watched a film called Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Amazingly, I think we managed to get through the whole 1950s without mentioning Dean, but he was a massive figure in youth pop culture of the fifties, and his presence still resonated for decades afterwards. Dean only starred in three films, and only one, East of Eden, was released in his lifetime -- he died in a car crash while the other two were in post-production -- but his performance in the posthumously-released Rebel Without A Cause seemed to many teenagers of the time to encapsulate everything that they wanted to be.

And Terry Nelhams decided he wanted to be James Dean -- why not? He bore a slight resemblance to him. Terry was going to go into showbiz.

There was a problem, though -- in the Britain of the fifties, acting was something that was largely the purview of the middle classes, and Terry was firmly working class. He lived on a council estate and went to a secondary modern -- the schools which, in the fifties UK education system, were designed for people who were considered unlikely to succeed academically. There was no way he was going to end up studying at RADA or any of the other ways one got into acting.

So he decided that rather than become a film star, he would become a director. That was much easier to get into than acting was, in the British film industry of the fifties -- you got a job as a tea boy at a film studio, worked your way up into the editing suite, became an editor, and then became a director. There was a steady career path, and you had job security at every stage -- and Terry Nelhams was someone who always looked after his money. So that's what he did -- he got a job at the Rank organisation as a messenger, then moved across to a company that made commercials for the new commercial TV network ITV, where he was an assistant editor.

But while he was working at Rank, Nelhams had joined a skiffle group, the Worried Men