Episode 48: “Rock With the Caveman” by Tommy Steele

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Rock With the Caveman" by Tommy Steele, and the birth of the British rock and roll industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one's on "The Death of Rock and Roll" by the Maddox Brothers and Rose, in which we look at a country group some say invented rock & roll, and how they reacted badly to it 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 Steele's rock and roll material, plus a selection of songs from the musicals he appeared in later. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll, including Steele's. Much of the music is not very good, but I can't imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and covers Steele from the skiffle perspective. Fings Ain't What They Used T'Be: The Life of Lionel Bart by David & Caroline Stafford gave me a lot of information on Steel's songwriting partner. Steele's autobiography, Bermondsey Boy, covers his childhood and early stardom. I am not 100% convinced of its accuracy, but it's an entertaining book, and if nothing else probably gives a good idea of the mental atmosphere in the poor parts of South London in the war and immediate post-war years. And George Melly's Revolt Into Style was one of the first books to take British pop culture seriously, and puts Steele into a wider context of British pop, both music and art. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk a little bit about the Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was an early example of a hominid -- a missing link between the apes and humans. Its skull was discovered in 1912 in Piltdown, East Sussex, by the eminent archaeologist Charles Dawson, and for years was considered one of the most important pieces of evidence in the story of human evolution. And then, in 1953, it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, and not even a particularly good one. Someone had just taken the jaw of an orang-utan and the top part of a human skull, and filed down the orang-utan teeth, and then stained the bones to make them look old. It was almost certainly the work of Dawson himself, who seems to have spent his entire life making fraudulent discoveries. Dawson had died decades earlier, and the full extent of his fraud wasn't even confirmed until 2003. Sometimes researching the history of rock and roll can be a lot like that. You can find a story repeated in numerous apparently reliable books, and then find out that it's all based on the inaccurate testimony of a single individual. The story never happened. It was just something someone made up. [Excerpt: "Rock With the Caveman", Tommy Steele and the Steelmen] We talked a little while ago about the skiffle movement, and the first British guitar-based pop music. Today, we're going to look at the dawn of British rock and roll. Now, there's an important thing to note about the first wave of British rock and roll, and that is that it was, essentially, a music that had no roots in the culture. It was an imitation of American music, without any of the ties to social issues that made the American music so interesting. Britain in the 1950s was a very different place to the one it is today, or to America. It was ethnically extremely homogeneous, as the waves of immigration that have so improved the country had only just started. And while few people