CHAPTER one
The A48 to Bridgend from Cardiff town centre takes you right through Ely. A Cardiff outpost, it was once farm- land, with a well-used racecourse right in the middle which brought the crowds from Cardiff, at least until the war. The war changed everything, of course, as it did everywhere else. A whole generation of miners and their eldest sons were sent off from Cardiff docks to become heroes. American troops poured in through the same route soon after and set up camps around Butetown and Grangetown. The war didn't mean much more to them than an extended holiday - lots of good times with the local talent. A couple of pubs around the dock area became positively famous for their live entertainment, U.S. style.
After the war the lads came home and Vera Lynn celebrated, almost non-stop, together with Frankie Laine and a few other unmentionables. When the first official chart was published by "Melody Maker" based on singles' sales, Vera had no less than three hits, mingled in with enough post-war ballad-style schmaltz to put you off maple syrup for ever. To the teenage generation for whom the war had come too early, who were now just beginning to flex their youthful muscles in the early fifties, there just had to be another way of life, one that they could call their own. Thank god for James Dean, Marlon Brando and Proplus vitamins, loaded with quite legal amphetamines for that added zip. A landmark for teenage liberation was a Brando film released in the early fifties called "The Wild One" which was banned in Great Britain after warnings of all the trouble it had caused during showings throughout the rest of the world. It seemed that kids were just going crazy when they saw it.
The tide couldn't be stopped by officialdom, however, and the film eventually found its way into a private cinema club in St Mary Street, Cardiff. It was the club's best week for enrolment for years. Packed, youthful audiences from areas like Ely and Penarth scraped together all their savings to sit and watch with bated breath for utterances from their new god. When asked, 'What are you rebelling against?' in the film, Brando replied, 'What have you got?' and brought the house down, time after time. It was the beginning of a whole new age. There was a little Jewish tailor in the back streets of Cardiff, who, it was soon discovered, was quite happy to take in trousers until they were so narrow you had to contort your foot to get them on. Suddenly he was inundated with customers.
Penarth, a sleepy little suburb of Cardiff with a pebble beach of its own and a reputation hitherto for peaceful middle class retirement years, suddenly gave birth to ultra-cool motorbike gangs. The younger kids propped their pushbikes against lampposts and posed, close to the motorised brigade, hoping to catch some of the female attention they attracted. One of these was Paul Barrett, born in 1940 and learning the art of cool, James Dean style, by the age of fifteen. He discovered rock 'n' roll when he saw a clip from "Rock Around The Clock", bought every Haley 78 he could find, and hung around with a staunch rock 'n' roll crew in Penarth.
The rockers of Penarth and Ely were actually quite friendly - they all had the same heroes and background. Try coming in from another district and you soon found out your mistake. Back to Ely Racecourse Youth club, famous in its day and still talked about by those in the know. There was no Ely Racecourse after the war. Ely had become a vast, l80-acre estate of the grey boxes, a giant suburban wasteland. There was a little greenery left rambling graveyards which would become favourite spots for boxing matches run by the local kids,
(including Michael Barratt, who was no mean fighter) and some woods where the occasional body was found, adding to the general excitement of suburban city life. The local schools did their best to keep the kids off the streets at night by running youth clubs -for boys only at first, with useful classes like woodwork and electrical maintenance to occupy and improve the mind. Later girls were allowed in once a week for dancing classes - it was usually the best attended night of the week - and it was on one of these nights that 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' hit the turntable, disguised as a foxtrot. You can still find old rock and roll records with labels declaring them to be ideal for certain ballroom dances like the foxtrot. The kids danced that night, but it never even remotely resembled anything clas- sical. Fingers snapped, feet moved, and the record was never allowed to leave the turntable. To the young teen- ager of Ely this was something new, exciting - and, more importantly, while still straining under the shadows of their elders still obsessed with the war and its aftermath, it was their own.
Rock and roll had come in from America, through the docks and out into a select few Cardiff record shops via the dockside pubs. A well known figure of the time was the manager of Spillers, the record shop, where queues formed to hear new releases, blasting out from the counter dansette at 4 p.m. every Friday afternoon. Another influential personage was Johnny Blain, who started and ran the famous Ely Racecourse Youthclub during the fifties, until in 1958 the local council decided that moral damage was being wreaked on the youth of Ely by its presence. Local vandalism was the excuse quoted at the time, although private theorists wonder if Johnny's re-portedly left-wing tendencies had anything to do with it. The club re-opened after just a nine-month rest, however perhaps the local council despaired of the vandalism statistics even more during it forced absence, who knows.
Everyone remembers the week "Rock Around the Clock" came to town. It ran to packed houses in Ely for a week in 1955 before moving over to Penarth, where kids took the local train from Ely almost like camp followers, and danced in the aisles every night their pocket money let them. Those who couldn't get in caused riots outside. "Blackboard Jungle" followed hot on its heels and the local connoisseurs just couldn't get enough. To them it wasn't so much a pointer to a kind of life-style, but more a confirmation that the one they were developing for themselves was all right. Drapes were well in by then, although you didn't have to own a drape jacket to be a rock 'n roll fan - teds picked up on rock tn' roll pretty fast, but so did a lot of other cool kids. Fashion wasn't so inextric- ably bound with music then as it is now, what ever the magazines might say. As long as you held your head up and strutted right, it didn't matter about the three quarter- length coat. By the late fifties, rock and roll fans from Penarth and Ely who spotted teds at their gigs dis- missed them as 'boy from the valleys' - miners' sons who hadn't heard about the passage of time. In 1955, '56, however, if you could afford it, you got yourself a pair of brothel creepers, or a set of drainpipes.
Some of the kids from those years are still around now, having survived and even made a name for themselves, like Dave Edmunds, Andy Fairweather-Lowe and other musicians known to pundits as the top keyboard players or guitarists of today. Some might not like to be reminded now of their early roots, while others still live just a few miles from their original birthplace and sit weeping fond tears for their youthful exploits, tamed as they now are to respectability by the trials of parenthood, mortgages and weak livers.
Some still bear the scars of their wild youth, like Nicky Still, an Ely boy for whom attending the Racecourse Youthclub once a week was a vital part of his development - along with lounging around coffee bars, going to the Embassy Skating Rink and waiting outside until the dancing began, draped around his white-walled 200cc Triumph Tiger Cub. He was a fan at- ical follower of American rock tn' roll artistes. He remem- bers seeing Dave Edmunds for the first time, who was to be a major influence on the lives of rock tn' roll musicians in the years which followed. Nicky was standing in the local youth club, which had begun to promote live music by then, when a small, blond boy came on stage carrying the most incredible guitar he had ever seen.
He held it up to his ear and tuned it to perfection. Then his band came on and played - in Nicky's opinion they were the best thing around Cardiff at the time. Later that night Nicky went out to his motorbike to take his girlfriend home, and found the young musician standing, guitar in hand, gazing in rapture at Nicky's bike. The two stood awkwardly for a few moments, Nicky gazing at the guitar case and Dave unable to tear himself away from the bike. Eventually Nicky offered to take Dave home - the rest of the band had left long before without him - on a promise that Dave would tell him where he got his guitar when they arrived at the other end.
Leaving his girlfriend stand ing in the rain outside the youth club, Dave and Nicky roared off into the night - and so began an acquaintance- ship which was to last for many years. Dave got himself a bike in the end, although Nicky never did manage to get a replica of Dave's guitar, which he'd bought from an American sailor down by the docks, but the two joined forces in a band called the Raiders in the late fifties, which for Dave was just one episode in a long musical career which was to lead him to fame and furtune. For Nicky, rock and roll was his obsession and although he and many of his contemporaries haven't achieved major sucess, most of them are still playing and listening to the music -it's more fun to earn your living that way than working in the local car factory (if your're lucky).
The rock and roll band which made a name for itself around Cardiff during the fifties was the Alleycats - banned from the many group competitions held in the local dance halls because they weren't a genuine skiffle band, which was a popular musical style of the era, being less awesome and incomprehensible than big beat and its practitioners. They had a washboard, but the local organ- isers weren't to be so easily fooled. They fought against the advent of rock and roll bands in their venues for as long as they could, until realisation finally dawned that, in Cardiff at least, it was here to stay. The Victoria Ball- room was the first place to run a rock and roll night with a live band, followed closely by the City Hall. The Embassy Skating Rink bowed to the youthful pressure of enthusiastic bikers who hung around their doors at night and started jiving sessions from 10 p.m. after the skaters had left. Jiving was - and still is - a huge part of the
enjoyment of rock and roll music. Everyone had their own special style, practised either at home or in youth club dancing classes, which began to run jive competitions. Ely Racecourse Youth club, of course, was the home of live rock and roll from as early as 1956, and by the late fifties rock and roll bands were actually travelling from the other side of Cardiff to play this prestigious venue. Two other venues opened in Ely which were to become important landmarks on the local scene. The first was a large hall adjoining the Church of the Resurrection, an imosing red brick construction which were to become important landmarks on the local patch of greenery at the side of a quiet Ely road, now more frequently echoing to the sound of wedding recep- tions than rock bands, although it still promotes occasionally. St Davis's Hall is the other important Ely venue- nostalgically remembered by almost every rock and roll band who can date their history back that far.
Towards the end of the fifties there was a minor revo- lution which was to affect the music scene almost as drast- ically as did the advent of cannabis and LSD in the sixties. It may not have been quite as mind blowing, bit it cer- tainly sorted out the men from the boys. It was amplification - bands finally went electric. It was only in a small way at first - Dave Edmunds' first amplifier was taken from a radio and covered by a large tomato box for maximum image, although the output would have been a modern-day joke - about 5 watts. Suddenly, however, you could actually hear people's musical mistakes when they played. The vast II-piece skiffle bands, where the most appalling musicians could hide themselves, were suddenly re- dundant. The rock and roll bands who knew their business, however, found amplification, the answer to a prayer. Now they could rock loud, hard, aggressive and fast.
The first amps, taken from radios, blew up regularly and Cardiff bands found themselves making frequent trips to London for new gear, organising the occasional London gig to cover their expenses. Motorbikes were sold, proper vans obtained by hook or by crook, and constantly tuned up in readiness for the long journeys a working band had to make. The biking scene faded suddenly during 1958 in Penarth after a horrendous accident involving one of the local gang leaders, Cisco. He ploughed into a couple of young kids while rounding a corner at a speed far exceeding anything sensible, killing both himself and the two chil- dren. At once the local tough bikers lost their bravado image, and their antics gradually ceased. There were other things to capture the attention and imagination of the Penarth teenagers, though.
Penarth's answer to the Alleycats was the Backbeats, a hard, driving rock and roll band with a reputation for being serious about everything they did, including drinking. Usually sporting immaculate silver lame jackets, they could play the best American rock and roll songs with conviction, and gigged regularly in Penarth, Ely and the dockland pubs where they were ready for any takers. Among their Ely fans was a young kid called Michael Barratt who used to ask them if he could come up on stage during their gigs at the Church of the Resurrection and St David's Hall to perform a couple of Chuck Berry numbers with gusto. They didn't mind - the way gigs went in those days, allcomers were welcome to join them for a good time. Sets were much longer than they are now - bands like the Backbeats would play until the audience dropped around them. It was party time - you went to a rock and roll gig to dance and enjoy yourself, whether you were a fan or a musician.
Although being a rock and roll musician set you slightly apart from your peers in the community, to the extent that you usually ended up with the best women at the end of the night, there wasn't the hugh barrier between musicians and their "fans" that there is today. Rockin' Louie, the Backbeats' frontman during the fif- ties, remembers being approached several times off-stage by the young Barratt - desperate for hints and advice about the way he danced and sang. Louie didn't have much time for the young Barratt then - it really didn't do much for his tough image to be seen fraternising with a young kid after exhausting shows and there was no way he could have known then that he would be spending seven years of his later life sharing a van, a stage and even a bedroom with Barratt, as one of the Sunsets behind Shakin' Stevens.
The Blackbeats were managed by local rock 'N' roll freak and shoe-string entrepreneur Paul Barrett, or 'Legs' as he was known by then - he has long legs, it's true, although rumour has it that it's not their unusual length that caused the stir around Penarth and Ely - it's more to do, apparently, with their strange hollow properties. Paul wasn't very involved with the amphetamine craze during the fifties - Drinamyl and Proplus were freely available from chemist shops, and many kids lived and died on them. "I never found they did all that much for me," confesses Paul now, "at least, never as much as the VP British wine!", Paul was a bemused youth falling in love with the music and discovering an alternative life-style around the Cardiff and Ely rockers which went almost unchallenged.
The biggest and most fanatical ted in Penarth was Sid Howell, superbly turned out in a black drape suit with the trousers rolled up at the bottom to reveal dazzling luminous socks. Sid once converted Paul's beautiful brown suede brothel creepers, and approached him in the local snooker hall flanked by a few muscle-flexing friends to request politely that Paul swop shoes with him. Paul gazed at Sids's shoes. They weren't much to boast about really; brown, tatty leather with a few holes. :Sorry, Sid, no can do" was the only response possible and must have been the one Sid was expecting. Because he immediately jumped high into the air and landed with his full and not inconsiderable weight on Paul's feet, flooring him. He still didn't get the shoes, though, as Paul rose and limped without complaint and with as much dignity as he could muster from the hall. Soon after that, Paul was at the Razzle Dazzle Club, held every Tuesday night in the Marina Ballroom, and a must for serious rockers. Sid was there too, gazing proprietorially at Paul, who had draped himself around a chair smoking a Gold Leaf, chewing gum and practising nonchalant cool.
Suddenly a rocker no one knew launched himself at Paul and started hitting him without mercy. Paul, caught with hands behind his head and legs entwined around the chair, could only start saying the Lords's Prayer. But an unlikely rescue was at hand - with just a few well-placed blows Sid laid the foolish attacker at Paul's feet. They may have been enemies, Paul and Sid, but neither would have stood by and watched the good name of Penarth be tarnished in battle. The Backbeats first approached Paul just to borrow some of his record collection, which was almost legendary. Seizing the, opportunity, Paul found out when their next gig was and decided that this would be the time to move in their direction. His entrance to the YMCA in Penarth at the following Backbeats' gig there must have been a sight to behold. Fully draped and all in black, with a new black trilby with white flecks, he sported a local beauty on his right arm, who he now recalls "must have looked like something off the top of a Christmas tree". Together they approached the management, demanding on behalf of the band that an immediate wage increase be implemented - the band were packing the hall regu- larly then, for a fee of just 6 pounds.
The besuited, middle- aged manager didn't wate much time in kicking Paul, his girl and the band straight out into the street. Undaunted, Paul booked a nearby hall for the following Saturday and advertised extensively. A disaster with the lights at the YMCA on the same night effectively ensured not only a successful night for Backbeats, but also the official position of manager for Paul The Backbeats played around Cardiff throughout the sixties, crossing paths with the teenage Michael Barratt many times - not only did he jump up on stage with the band frequently when they played the Church of the Res- urrection Hall or at St David's, but later, when he began to play in his own bands, he found himself support spots with his heroes. His apparent youthful hero-worship of Rockin' Louie was taken in good humour by all-Michael good-naturedly put up with the nick-name "Rockin' Louie II" from the Backbeats - perhaps seeing it as a compliment to his style.
For most people, though, the sixties brought their own kind of changes. The first real pop stars after the advent of amplification were The Shadows, and most local bands soon learnt to play in the Shads style, stroll and all. A few took as little notice of the style's trivial excuse for balls as they could - the Raiders and the Backbeats being notable examples, although the Raiders were playing a fairly flexible R & B by now. When the Beatles first started proving that you could listen to rock 'n' roll and play bingo at the same time, all but the truly diehard went out and sold their rock 'n' roll record collections. Paul Barrett recalls standing outside the Church of the Resu- rection Hall and hearing Eleanor Van Houten, a "goo-goo doll with far-out sounds" as the vernacular had it, defend- ing the Backbeats to a group of mods who were distinctly unenthusiastic about their sound. "The Backbeats are the best rock 'n' roll group in South Wales," she shouted. "They're the only rock 'n' roll group in South Wales," was the mods' prompt response.
Not that a true rock 'n' roll fan cares all that much about fashion. To him (or her) rock 'n' roll is the only life-style, the only music worth listening to. Not just because for many it had been the first real music of their teens. It's true that there are generations of people clinging to the music of their youth, keeping the likes of Des O'Connor and Max Bygraves in gravy. There must be a few rock 'n' rollers clinging to their youth in a similar fashion. But that doesn't explain the fact that there are now more rock 'n' roll fans than there ever were in the fifties, ranging from the elderly to the barely born. And Michael Barratt's era of awareness was the sixties, rather than the fifties. True, he had older brothers to guide his tastes and a slightly older generation to ape and follow -Rockin' Louie was eight years older than Mike. To him the warblings of The Beatles or the soul bands of the sixties can't have had much meaning. The people who were around him, and whom he most respected, were into rock 'n' roll exclusively.
It can't have been hard for a young Ely boy to follow the traditions of the kids who had paved the way before him just a few years previously. Flower power wouldn't have had much impact to a young working class lad, living on 186 acres of council estate in one of the rougher areas of Cardiff. Even in the mid- sixties when band after band "souled-out" - like Andy Fairweather-Lowe with Amen Corner, you could count dope-smokers in Cardiff on a few borrowed hands. Alcohol was still more palatable to most, and a good deal easier to come by. The scene was opening up considerably for the older kids then. A lot more people were picking up their guitars and playing tunes of one sort or another, to the accompanying clouds of cannabis or mist of LSD. Whereas ten years before it was something pretty special to have a boyfriend in a band, now you were pretty straight if you couldn't muster one up. Nightlife for Cardiff musicians centred around a GoTo 'Chapter Two'laundramat in the City Road, where you could get coffee out of a machine at any unearthly hour and meet a few kindred spirits. There were a couple of famous pie and chips joints where all the best speeded-up musicians could be found. A favorite pastime of this danger-loving period was to drive over Cardiff docks in fast cars with the headlights blacked out. From Butetown to Roath there are quite a few dock gates. If they're closed, you get across safely. If someone's left them open, you hit that water at speed. Fun.
