BILL HALEY AND THE COMETS – “Rock Around The Clock”
I can’t stop tapping my toes.
Is that because I’m enjoying “Rock Around The Clock”, though? Or because the way to move to rock and roll has got wired into my reflexes? This is the first song in Popular that I can’t remember not knowing, after all.
(My toes are still tapping to the song I am listening to right now, which is “Don’t Go” by Awesome 3. I like it better than “Rock Around The Clock”: it’s less shopworn for one thing, but also more comforting, closer to my idea of what pop is. A warning to new readers: Popular is written by somebody whose general belief is that pop music has improved with each decade it’s been around. This project may make me change my mind – we’ll see.)
I’ll try to be dry about the record, then. It’s obviously the Comets that make the performance – Bill Haley starts it with gusto but begins to run out of breath after about a minute, an old trouper already being left behind by rock and roll even as he was cynically cashing it into life. He promises that when the clock hits 12 he’s going to rock around it all over again and you can hear that his fingers have slipped off the baton – it’s an outright lie, he just wants a sit-down.
But the Comets! I don’t know anything about the Comets but they sound like they were having a lot of fun. Listening to it closely the drummer steps smartly out of history, his snappy fills at the end of each line bursting with good humour. Like the jokey little diving notes at the end of the guitar phrases, and the punchline ba-boom of the ending, it’s all very light-hearted, not that far away from Alma Cogan to be honest. Of course there is a difference – it’s the difference between the fixed smile of a hostess and the relaxed grin of a guest – but if the song was ever charged with a rebel energy, none remains today.
And even though this is something new at No.1 (it had been a minor hit earlier in the year; this was a re-entry) it’s also part of a trend: the records at the top of the chart had been getting sparser and sharper since the soupy days of 1953. “Rock Around The Clock” didn’t come out of nowhere.
Still though, you can understand how shockingly basic rock and roll must have sounded. The see-saw might have been tipping away from the tidy complexity of early-50s pop, but fat old Bill gave it a fairly decisive push. The indistinct pop market of the time – I’ve been imagining well-scrubbed young men buying ballads and roses for their best girls, but it might have been their fathers or mothers or grandmothers even – becomes something more focussed, familiar and celebrated. Not overnight, though. For now, rock and roll is a fad. And “Rock Around The Clock” is a fine, exciting pop record. And the toes keep tapping.
7
On the ‘live from the Old Mill’ dance portion of CHFI’s Saturday night oldies show, this is always the first song, or if it isn’t I’m sure it’s in the mix. It’s catchy, makes you want to dance and almost everyone likes it. I have no idea who bought it first either, though I can imagine only the most grouchy people hating it. My mom got it for her birthday when it came out and she and her friends danced to it a lot.
Not many people bought it on its first release in early 1955 – it peaked at #17 on its initial run – but it went to number one at the end of the same year after The Kids went to see Blackboard Jungle, tore the cinema seats up, etc.
As I recall the song was co-authored by a sixtysomething veteran and the label on the original 78 (which my mum still has) identifies it as “(Foxtrot)”!
TOTPWatch: Bill Haley & His Comets performed ‘Rock Around the Clock’ on Top of the Pops on two occasions;
28 February 1974: Also in the stidio that week were; The New Seekers, John Christie, Hudson Ford, The Wombles and Paper Lace. Dave Lee Tracis was the host. No copy survives.
11 April 1974: Also in the studio that week were; Mud, Slade, Mugo Jerry, The Wombles and ABBA. Noel Edmunds was the host. This edition still exists.
Light Entertainment watch: Bill Haley was claerly on tour in the UK in 1964. None of these programmes survive;
THE BEAT ROOM: with Bill Haley and his Comets, Peter and Gordon, Zoot
Money and the Big Pill Band, Sally Kelly, The Wranglers (1964)
READY STEADY GO!: with Adam Faith, Bill Haley and his Comets, Doug Shelton, The Roulettes, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, Rita Bartok, Tony Jackson and the Vibrations (1964)
THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS: with Brian Matthew, The Searchers, P. J. Proby, Bill Haley and the Comets, Tom Jones (1964)
One seventies performance does exist, though;
WHEELTAPPERS AND SHUNTERS SOCIAL CLUB: with Bill Haley and the Comets (1974)
Sorry, run that past me again – Bill Haley and his Comets on the Wheeltappers and Shunters?! “Best of order please around the room!” Colin Crompton and Bernard Manning? Ye gods, what must they have thought?
That’s right! And what is more I was watching it this morning;
http://www.networkdvd.net/product_info.php?products_id=960
Colin Crompton complains that Bill Haley hasn’t combed his hair properly and asks the crowd not to hand jive, as the deaf barmaid thinks that they are ordering rounds. Also doing turns that week; The Three Degrees, The Krankies, Brandi De Frank, Martyn & Sylvia Conyot and Ronnie Hilton!
That’s three UK number one acts on the same bill! – plus the Krankies turning up on a Comic Relief-related number one video far into the future. That’s ITV weekend primetime circa 1974 for you. The road from Colin Crompton to Simon Cowell is a long one.
While waiting to see Springsteen at Crystal Palace in 2003, a bloke next to me in the crowd said he’d seen the surviving Comets quite recently – the guitarist may have been 80-ish and seated, but still played a good long gig. Come to think of it, Springsteen playing stadia in 2003 was about the age Bill Haley was playing the Wheeltappers in 1974. Not sure what that says about their careers or the history of rock’n’roll, but there you go.
Can someone confirm an episode of The Sooty Show which featured as guests, Throbbing Gristle, whom Sooty accompanied on his xylophone? I think it was the same episode when Sweep took John Stonehouse out with a large bar of Toblerone.
@8 Is this true? Genesis P. Orridge and Sooty? On (psychic, natch) TV? At the same time??
I dunno, but I do remember Sweep donning punk fashions and singing “Boredom”..
Sooty, Sweep & Soo – they don’t know what they want but they know where to get it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uELWyGST1zk
I agree with your final comment, Tom. It is pretty hard to dislike, and the idea of it being subversive in 2011 seems ludicrous. And yet, we all know it was!
I think I’ve heard it about a million times.
Poor Bill Haley…
DESERT ISLAND DISC WATCH (Up to 11/04/11)
John Watt, broadcaster (1956)
Cliff Richard, singer (1960)
Antionnette Sibley, ballerina (1974)
Lord Charteris, Former Private Secretary to the Queen (1990)
Clarissa Dickson-Wright TV Chef (1999)
Robert Mccrum, Journalist (2000)
Fay Goodwin, photographer (2002)
Stephen Frears, film director (2004)
Tom Jones, singer (2010)