Hungry Freaks, Well-fed Entertainers?: Something Different in the Music Press

Glen, Patrick

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_2

Hungry Freaks, Well-fed Entertainers?: Something Different in the Music Press

Patrick Glen¹⁰

Chapter
First Online: 12 December 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music ((PSHSPM))

Abstract

This chapter considers how the music press accommodated new voices that were seen to represent youth in the late 1960s. It explains how music papers adapted to printing these new more ‘serious’ perspectives by looking at how papers in the past adapted to new styles and genres that were performed by different groups of people. It then evaluates the content of reports on young people who claimed to be ‘permissive’ or socially and culturally distinct from prior generations. Finally the paper evaluates how the music press’s late-1960s discussion of drugs gestated in the context of social anxieties about youth.

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Notes

1.
Audit Bureau of Circulation: NME (IPC Media).
2.
Audit Bureau of Circulation: Melody Maker (IPC Media).
3.
National Readership Survey (1967), 6.
4.
Keith Altham, personal interview (2009).
5.
Richard Williams, personal interview (2010).
6.
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1985): 3–4.
7.
David Toop, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016): 259. Toop explains Christopher Small’s term ‘musicking’, which puts emphasis on music being an event rather than an object. This idea of music as a collective group learning practice is explored in Seymour Wright’s thesis on AMM, ‘The Group Leaning of an Original Creative Practice: 1960s Emergent-AMM’ (PhD thesis, Open University, 2013).
8.
Derek B. Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 88. George McKay, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 73–86.
9.
Quoted in Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–50 (London: Quartet Books, 1984): 24.
10.
Quoted in Quoted in Godbolt, Jazz in Britain: 24.
11.
Alf Arvidsson, ‘“Mike” disc-courses on hot jazz: discursive strategies in the writings of Spike Hughes, 1931–33’, Popular Music History 4.3 (2009): 259.
12.
Quoted in Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic,’ 89.
13.
Matt Brennan, ‘“Nobody Likes Rock and Roll but the Public”: Down Beat, Genre Boundaries and the Dismissal of Rock and Roll by Jazz Critics’, Popular Music and Society 36:5 (2013): 561–564.
14.
Keith Altham, personal interview (2009).
15.
Gillian A.M. Mitchell, ‘A Very “British” Introduction to Rock ‘n’ Roll: Tommy Steele and the Advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll Music in Britain’: Contemporary British History 25:2 (2011): 219–221.
16.
Engelbert Humperdinck and Katie Wright, What’s in a Name? My Autobiography (London: Virgin Books, 2011): 30.
17.
‘Don’t Knock the Pop, Melody Maker 7 January 1967, 1.
18.
Keith Altham, ‘Tom Jones,’ New Musical Express, 12 March 1965 (RB, accessed July 2016). Tony Wilson, ‘Explaining Engelbert, Singer who Splits the Pop World’, Melody Maker 22 February 1969, 14–15.
19.
Wilson, ‘Explaining Engelbert.’
20.
Alan Smith, ‘Cliff’s retirement depends on his O-Level,’ NME 14 January 1967, 2.
21.
‘They’re Smashing,’ NME 24 July 1967, 61–62.
22.
‘From You to Us,’ NME 21 January 1961, 16.
23.
‘Proby Show Stopped,’ Daily Mail 1 February 1965, 5.
24.
Daily Mirror 2 February 1965, 2.
25.
‘Pop Fans Mob “Split Pants” Proby,’ Daily Mirror, 2 February, 1.
26.
Keith Altham, ‘P.J. Proby: I’m Still the Greatest,’ New Musical Express, 16 July 1965 (RB, accessed March 2015).
27.
Vicki Wickham, ‘Pop Guide to London,’ Fabulous 3 October 1964 (RB, accessed March 2015).
28.
Keith Altham, ‘Swedish Film Director Peter Goldmann tells about… TV-FILMING WITH THE BEATLES,’ NME 18 February 1967, 2.
29.
Keith Altham, NME Annual (London, 1966), 8.
30.
Keith Altham, ‘Dylan Press Reception’, NME, 13 May 1966 (RB, accessed July 2010).
31.
Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 17 August 1968 (RB, accessed August 2010).
32.
‘Jagger-Richard in Drugs Search’, NME, 25 February 1967, p. 5.
33.
Miles, ‘UFO and the Underground,’ International Times, 30 January 1967 (RB, accessed May 2016).
34.
Miles, ‘Miles Interviews Pete Townshend,’ International Times 13 February 1967 (RB, accessed May 2016).
35.
Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art Into Pop (Abingdon: Routledge, 1987): 1–11.
36.
Miles, ‘The Way Out is In,’ International Times 19 May 1967 (RB, accessed May 2016).
37.
Keith Altham, ‘Our Fans Have Moved With Us,’ NME 4 February 1967, 14.
38.
Keith Altham, ‘The Stones say “Too Late For Us To Reform,”’ NME 24 June 1967, 6.
39.
‘From You to Us’ NME, 4 February 1967, 13.
40.
‘From You to Us,’ NME 16 December 1967, 17.
41.
Alan Smith, We’re as Psychedelic as a Pint o’ Beer wi’ t’ Lads’, NME 18 March 1967, 4.
42.
Keith Altham, ‘The Young Hollie (21) and the Old Hollie (25)’ NME 17 June 1967, 3.
43.
Alan Smith, ‘With-it dresser Graham Nash so different to other Hollies,’ NME 22 July 1967, 8
44.
Alan Smith, ‘Move want to Start Riot,’ NME 21 January 1967, 14.
45.
Norrie Drummond, ‘Nothing Nasty Behind our Light and Colour Effects,’ NME 1 July 1967, 11.
46.
The Rave, Granada TV, 6 March 1967. ‘From You to Us,’ NME 18 March 1967, 4.
47.
John King, ‘Scene’s Wildest Raver,’ NME 28 January 1967, 2.
48.
‘MM Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 28 January 1967, 20.
49.
Andy Greym ‘Have the Beatles Gone Too Far,’ NME, Summer Special Extra 4.
50.
Chris Welch, Melody Maker, 21 January 1967 (RB, accessed June 2016).
51.
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978): 239–240.
52.
Richard Davenport-Hindes, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs (London: Orion, 2002): 82. Harry Shapiro, Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music (London: Helter Skelter, 1999) 86–89.
53.
Martin Cloonan, Banned!: The Censorship of Popular Music in Britain, 1962–1997 (Aldershot, Arena, 1996) 104.
54.
‘Think In,’ NME 14 January 1967, 7.
55.
Rave, August 1966 (RB, accessed January 2017).
56.
‘Manager bans Troggs from London Clubs’, Melody Maker 1 April 1967, 5.
57.
Chris Charlesworth, personal interview (2010).
58.
‘Don’t Knock the Pop,’ Melody Maker 7 January 1967, 1.
59.
Maurice Kinn, ‘The BBC and Drug Songs’, NME 14 January 1967, 8.
60.
‘Think In,’ Melody Maker 8 March 1967, 7.
61.
Keith Altham, ‘Scott Walker Hides Away in a Gloom-World,’ NME, 30 September 1967 (RB, accessed May 2017).
62.
Derek Johnson, ‘Well worth waiting for Scott,’ NME 2 December 1967, 8.
63.
‘From you to us,’ NME 16 December 1967, 17.
64.
‘MM Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 26 November 1967, 24.
65.
Norman Jopling, ‘Scott Walker: Scott 2 (Philips)’ Record Mirror 12 April 1968 (RB, accessed April 2017).
66.
Keith Altham, personal interview (2009).
67.
Keith Altham, ‘Keith Altham goes to the Love-In Plus’, NME 5 August 1967, 12.
68.
Nick Jones, Melody Maker, 27 May 1967, 4.
69.
Melody Maker 7 October 1967, 1. A.M. Harris’s complaint was reprinted in part when the Press Council had ruled in favour of Melody Maker. The complaint was not mentioned in the paper before the verdict.
70.
Andy Gray, ‘Jagger-Richard Sentences Cause Press Storm’, NME 8 July 1967, 10.
71.
Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (London: Yale University Press, 2010): 192. This is discussed in relation to sex and sexuality in Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 384–387.
72.
‘From you to us’, NME 15 July 1967, 10.
73.
Keith Altham ‘Sensational Rolling Stones’, NME 12 August 1967, 14.
74.
The Establishment Must Not Drive the Beatles Out,’ NME 15 March 1969, 3.
75.
Alan Walsh, ‘Brian, the Stone in the Headlines,’ Melody Maker, 12 July 1969 (RB, accessed January 2017).
76.
NME, 26 September 1970, 1.
77.
Richard Green, ‘Goodbye, Jimi,’ NME 26 September 1970, 2.
78.
‘Hendrix Blues’, Melody Maker 26 September 1970, 1.
79.
Melody Maker, 26 September 1970, 3–5.
80.
Melody Maker, 3 October 1970, 3.
81.
Melody Maker, 17 October 1970, 4.

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University College London, London, UK
Patrick Glen

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Glen, P. (2019). Hungry Freaks, Well-fed Entertainers?: Something Different in the Music Press. In: Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_2
Published: 12 December 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91673-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91674-3
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