Mandalay

I've recently been reading 17 Watts? : the Birth of British Rock Guitar by Mo Foster. Through an entertaining assemblage of anecdotes from that initial post-War generation that went from Meccano to home-made pickups and amplifiers to filling stadiums in a single decade, it tells the story of the birth of our national obsession with guitar-driven pop.

The stories are great, but I think the best bit is the series of late 1950s back garden photographs showing nascent rock gods, aged 12, proudly cradling cheap guitars which are bigger than they are. Who could have guessed what riches the world would shower on some, or how badly it would end for others?

As I mention in my profile (over on the right there, next to the crow), I was born in 1954 and so never knew life in The Land Before Rock'n'Roll. Indeed, some of my earliest memories are rocking out, as only a 4-year old can, to Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele on seaside caff jukeboxes, to the deep embarrassment of my "proper" boomer sister, eight years older. My Dad had to endlessly improvise guitars for me out of sticks and rolled up newspaper -- anything would do, so long as I could go "Dang-a-dang, dang, DANG!" to that rocking music. I was an appalling little show-off.

But reading the book, looking at the pictures, and remembering the music sparked off some deep musical memories that had nothing to do with guitars. If you don't get your cultural history from Central Casting you'll know that culture is always a mixed picture, with huge time lags working their way through the system*. In the 1950s my Dad's generation were in their prime, and closer to their experience of the jungles of Burma and the beaches of Normandy than we are now to "9/11" and the Milennium Bug. To them, the "skiffle thing" was a passing youth fad, just "greasy kids' stuff" in the contemporary phrase.

Dad -- only 40 in 1958 -- had been a keen amateur drummer and motocyclist, but his musical horizons were fixed by big band swing and the sophisticated vocals of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Ton Up Boys, Little Richard and Chuck Berry simply disgusted him. He was a man of strong musical tastes -- he couldn't understand the appeal of anything that lacked polish, that invoked raw or mawkish emotions, or wasn't essentially Sophisticated Movie American in impulse. For him, it was a time of Italian-copy suits and Volare, the excitement of business travel to France on BEA Viscounts and Come Fly With Me.

But most of his generation were stuck in an older, music-hall groove. It was the twilight of the great age of novelty and variety acts -- I well remember harmonica bands and penny whistle acts on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, in between jugglers and the Tiller Girls. What played on the radio until about 1965 was intended to entertain this easily-pleased but easily-bored majority.

Although "rock" has carried all before it for 50 years, to the point where other musics now struggle for an audience, it's important to realise that at the time of its greatest original triumphs it was like those first tiny mammals, scampering around the feet of the dinosaurs -- strong on potential but low on visibility. I doubt the BBC Light Service played more than twenty "Rock'n'Roll" tracks in a week, even in the Great Age of Elvis.

It was also the Age of Dan Dare who, oddly,
crash landed on campus this week

What the BBC did play a lot of was songs and tunes from musicals, and a particular brand of British light orchestral music that has vanished from the world. The composers and players of this music are now forgotten men -- Ronald Binge or Eric Coates, anyone? And yet, if you grew up in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, their catchy, wholesome tunes were ubiquitous, in the arrangements of Mantovani and other popular orchestras. Thinking of the descending riff of Shakin' All Over, I found myself remembering with deep fondness the not dissimilar tune of Binge's Elizabethan Serenade, which instantly transported me back to a sunny, windy washday in Peartree Way, Stevenage, with my Mum pegging flapping wet sheets onto the clothes line.

And the radio in those days carried survivors from an even earlier age, like the Victorian pennies that would turn up in your change before decimalisation. Ancient-seeming music: the fifty years before 1960 seem to have been considerably longer than the most recent fifty years. For some bizarre reason, I found myself singing On the Road to Mandalay while I was away on holiday. Few things take you so thoroughly by surprise as stuff you didn't know you knew. There I was, swaggering around a French farmhouse kitchen, mentally kitted out as a Kipling-era soldier, singing in a faux-baritone,

On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder,
Outta China 'crost the bay!

Strange. I doubt this was as enjoyable to listen to as it was to do, but I made a mental note to look the song up when I got home, and perhaps learn the lyric as a party piece. Or maybe not. But I was surprised and pleased by this felt connection to the Land Before The Land Before Rock'n'Roll.

And when I looked up the song, I was very taken with its final verse, a rock'n'roll sentiment avant la lettre if ever I saw one:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea;

On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay!

Another time I must write something about Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads (the source of Mandalay), one of the great underrated masterpieces of English literature. But for now, let's all raise a thirst and sing together:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

Rip it up...

* If there is a system -- Discuss, with examples.