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 |  Sujet: Rockabilly in the daily telegraph ! Lun 24 Sep 2007, 02:18 | |
| Source :  Boogaloo's back
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/09/2007If you thought pop began with Elvis, think again –
a host of bands and DJs are getting down to the sounds of the 1940s and '50s.
Thomas H Green reports Sounds of the past: Kitty, Daisy and Lewis * => Listen: Hear Kitty, Daisy and Lewis playing 'Ooo Wee'Here's a turn up for the books. It's Saturday night in Madame Jo Jo's, a central London nightclub, and the dance floor is heaving, primarily with young women, to obscure 50-year-old records by the likes of Buddy Griffin and his Orchestra and Junior Dean and the Avalons.
Sounds of the past: Kitty, Daisy and Lewis
This isn't a rockabilly crowd – these are just fun-seekers out for a night on the tiles.
Bored with house, hip hop and R&B, they're letting rip to boogaloo songs of the 1940s and '50s. DJ Keb Darge has held a Friday-night residency here for 13 years, playing funk and soul. However, his new night, Lost and Found, is very different, spinning discs from the era immediately before rock and roll.
"I've been sneaking them in at the end of my set for years," says Darge.
"They always emptied the dance floor, but, the week after Walk the Line came out, everyone was asking, 'Have you got any Johnny Cash?' I'd say, 'No, but I've a thousand records just like him.'
It wasn't long before he persuaded the club to give him Saturday night.
Darge isn't alone in pushing this music. Respected DJ Andrew Weatherall is putting out a mix CD, Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi, focusing on the rawer, swampier end of things, and retro-rocker teenagers Kitty, Daisy and Lewis offer A to Z: the Roots of Rock'n'Roll, whose subtitle sums up the multiplicity of styles on offer: "Boogie Woogie, R'n'B, Western Swing, Jump Blues, Swing, Jazz, Rockabilly, Blues, Country and Western".
Before the Second World War, US pop music meant big-band swing, but afterwards there wasn't enough money for such set-ups.
Returning GIs had cash to spend, though, so juke-joints popped up wherein thinned-down bands would perform, making up for their lack of instrumentation with punchy rhythm sections and sassy lyrics full of double entendres.
American folk forms were rowdily mutating, coalescing in noisy bars to become rock and roll. "Jump blues" is probably the best term to describe the era.
"Most people have never heard of it," says Darge. "There's a big rockabilly scene, but it suffers from the problem of not wanting outsiders, snobbishness about dress codes and so on. I was the top Northern Soul DJ in the early '80s and I got sick of that nerdiness, I just like seeing people switching on to the music, and I think that's why so many girls like it, the fact that it's not blokey, geeky or macho."
Darge's unlikely fellow fans include Paul Weller, Portishead DJ Andy Smith, and ex-Jurassic Five turntablist Cut Chemist, with whom he's compiled the opening Lost and Found collection. The extraordinary thing about the disc is the way modern bands, such as Omar and the Stringpoppers, Jack Rabbit Slim and the Planet Rockers, blend seamlessly with old ones.
"We had this Glasgow band, the Bottleneckers," says Darge, "They wouldn't use our sound system, but had their own old '40s speakers and amps. The sound was so warm and lovely you'd swear you were in a club in 1952."
Where Darge is a 50-year-old soul boy who overcame his prejudices, Weatherall, revered in dance music circles for his fearsomely catholic palate, was a convert aged 10. "The first time my loins tingled where music was concerned was with rock and roll during the mid-'70s revival," he says. "The only electronic music I listen to now is for dancing – other than that, I immerse myself in the music represented by [his new CD]; I get the same feeling from rock and roll as techno."
His latest musical ventures bear witness to this: Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi is actually a compressed version of the opening DJ set at his now defunct Wrong Meeting night, where he spent two hours working his way from bluegrass to electro.
"The idea," he says, "is for someone at the start to be dancing to rockabilly, then suddenly find themselves dancing to the techno of Underground Resistance."
Darge and Weatherall come at jump blues from very different perspectives, but both realise it's a rich seam for DJ musicologists, especially as soul and funk are finally mined dry. It used to be a blithely accepted view that modern pop music began with Elvis in 1955, but a subtle re-evaluation is occurring. Before it fully defined itself and led to the teen revolution, rock and roll was multi-faceted, finding its feet in a gloriously raucous fashion.
Most importantly, it's still great to dance to half a century on. As Weatherall says, "There's no difference. Dance music in the '40s and '50s and dance music in the '90s and '00s both have the basic element of the swinging 4/4 beat and both have the same result – dancing, sex and foolish behaviour."
'Lost And Found: Rockabilly and Jump Blues' (BBE), 'Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi Volume 1' (Soma) and 'A to Z: the Roots of Rock 'n' Roll' (Sunday Best) are all out now. |
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