Denmark Street – The Tunesmiths of British Rock – Nostalgia Central

The popular music industry in the United Kingdom continued to develop in the early Sixties, with talented individuals working across all areas.

Billy Fury, for example, was far more than just a teenage idol. Not only was he an authentic rocker who made Adam Faith and Cliff Richard look pallid, he was also an able songwriter who provided much of his own material.

Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were producing some of the most aggressive sounds in rock’n’roll, and their leader co-wrote one of the all-time rock classics, Shakin’ All Over.

Helen Shapiro was also a gifted singer with a distinctive voice and a homegrown repertoire.

Studio technology was advancing, and the strange genius of Joe Meek (pictured at right) was flowering in a small studio off London’s Holloway Road.

Tin Pan Alley

Rock films showed an improvement over earlier efforts — The Young Ones (1961) and Summer Holiday (1963) were excellent examples of the genre, and it is indicative that the trad jazz fad, which seemed to sweep the whole country and was to have important consequences for the future, was a British phenomenon and owed little to the American commercial music business.

The most striking changes, however, came in songwriting and composition. Before the advent of rock’n’roll, music publishers and songwriters virtually controlled the record business by providing all the songs and, to a degree, dictating who recorded them. They also profited by publishing sheet music for songs which became hits.

In their own interests, music publishers were also expected to promote any recordings made of their copyrights and were thus involved from the conception to the marketing of a particular song in both disc and sheet music form.

This songwriting and publishing fraternity was collectively known as Tin Pan Alley (a term that had originated in the Twenties), and although no such actual place existed, it was commonly used to refer to Denmark Street (pictured above), a small thoroughfare off London’s Charing Cross Road where most of the leading music publishers in the UK were based.

Denmark Street pop

Even as late as the mid-sixties, Denmark Street was synonymous with the songwriting business, and only in the early Seventies, when most artists were writing their own songs and the industry became a vast international concern, did the Denmark Street era come to a close.

The birth of rock ‘n’ roll made little difference to the British music publishing industry, and essentially its method of operation remained the same.

As very few of the new breed of rock ‘n’rollers actually wrote their own songs, the raw material had to be provided by skilled tunesmiths whose ranks encompassed both older, established songwriters – such as Norrie Paramor (pictured at left) and Bunny Lewis – and newcomers like Lionel Bart who discovered they had a talent for writing in the rock idiom.

Bart quickly made a name for himself by writing most of Tommy Steele‘s early material in partnership with actor Michael Pratt (who would later star in the popular TV series Randall & Hopkirk: Deceased).

Born Lionel Beiglert in 1932, Bart was an ex-skiffler who treated songwriting as an enjoyable sideline to his main vocation: running his own printing business.

When Steele shot to fame towards the end of 1956 on the strength of Bart and Pratt’s Rock With The Caveman, Bart took it more seriously and, though musically untrained, produced further hits including Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be (recorded by Max Bygraves) and Cliff Richard‘s million-selling Living Doll.

Throwing off the covers

At the time, British pop stars like Marty Wilde, Michael Holliday, and even Tommy Steele often covered US hits to sustain their careers, and Cliff Richard was the first to eschew this facile practice in favour of original material.

All of Cliff’s early rock ‘n’ roll hits — Move It, Mean Streak, High Class Baby and Steady With You — were penned by Ian ‘Sammy’ Samwell (pictured at right with Cliff), who had been an original member of The Drifters, Cliff’s backing group (who became The Shadows).

Samwell was the first British songwriter to write songs that captured the true spirit of American rock, although he never built on his promising start.

The success of Living Doll enabled Cliff to broaden his appeal, and he chose subsequent material carefully.

Much of it remained British in origin – Marvin and Welch of The Drifters/Shadows supplied some of it, as did Samwell — but a significant proportion, including Travellin’ Light (#1 in 1959) and The Young Ones (#1 in 1962), was commissioned directly from a pair of middle-aged New Yorkers named Sid Tepper and Roy Bennett who had already penned hits like Twenty Tiny Fingers in the pre-rock era.

They also worked in a similar capacity for Elvis Presley, with whom Cliff shared the same London- and New York-based publishing company, Hill and Range.

Songwriting success

By 1961, artist-oriented rock’n’roll had given way to a more contrived orchestral approach, and the British songwriter (and arranger) really came into his own.

Unlike the crack American songwriting teams (Pomus/Shuman, Leiber/Stoller, Bacharach/David), who seemed able to churn out a string of hits to order, British songwriters proved commercially fallible; they did, however, produce some good individual efforts.

When EMI launched the career of the teenage Helen Shapiro in 1961, it was on the strength of a song called Don’t Treat Me Like A Child, written by British writer John Schroeder.

And when Shapiro went on to score three more Top Ten hits with Don’t Know and Walkin’ Back To Happiness (co-written by Schroeder with lyricist Mike Hawker) and Tell Me What He Said (John Barry), it was considered nothing short of sensational.

Ironically, her career nosedived only when she began recording American material toward the end of 1962.

Easily the most consistent British songwriter of the period was Johnny Worth (pictured at left), who notched up seventeen hits between 1961 and 1963.

A Greek-Cypriot in origin, he was born Yanis Skordalides in 1929 and changed his name to the more manageable Johnny Worth when he began his musical career as a dance-band crooner in the early Fifties.

The advent of rock’n’roll opened up new opportunities, and in 1958 he joined a vocal group called The Raindrops (pictured below with Tommy Steele) and took an interest in songwriting.

Appearances on Drumbeat, BBC Television’s lacklustre rival to Oh Boy!, led to a friendship with another resident artist, Adam Faith, who took Worth’s song What Do You Want? to #1 in December 1959.

Its success prompted Worth to leave The Raindrops and concentrate on full-time songwriting. His talent proved durable; forming a close alliance in the studio with the arranger John Barry (himself a promising songwriter), Worth penned a succession of hits for Adam Faith, including Poor Me (#1 in 1960), Someone Else’s Baby (co-written with Perry Ford), which reached #2 in the same year, How About That?, This Is It and Don’t You Know It (all 1961), and Don’t That Beat All in 1962.

Continuing Worth

Working under the pseudonym Les Vandyke, Worth also wrote three straight hits for Eden Kane —  Well I Ask You, Forget Me Not and Get Lost — as well as Ain’t That Funny, a Top Ten success for Jimmy Justice in 1962.

Worth was consistently successful because he tailored his songs to specific artists (notably Adam Faith and Eden Kane) and worked closely with their arrangers (John Barry and Johnny Keating) to ensure their concepts fit his songs.

Other contemporary British songwriters, like the team of Bill Crompton and Morgan Jones, were less consistent, however, and managed only the odd minor hit despite having many of their compositions recorded.

Songwriting was just one of the vocations pursued by the multi-talented Trevor Peacock (pictured at right), who was also a playwright, teacher, singer and actor (he would later star as Jim Trott in The Vicar of Dibley).

Brought into the business by his mentor Jack Good during the days of Six-Five Special, Peacock wrote minor hits for Michael Cox, Joe Brown and Billy Fury, and in 1962 wrote his best-known song, the wry Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter.

Originally recorded by actor Tom Courtenay, it became a million-seller for Herman’s Hermits in 1965.

Successful Shadows

Like Cliff Richard, The Shadows used original material by British writers. Their two biggest hits, Apache (1960) and Wonderful Land (1962), were written by Jerry Lordan, who also wrote Diamonds, a #1 hit for ex-Shadows Jet Harris and Tony Meehan.

Michael Carr (a veteran who wrote Red Sails In The Sunset in the 1930s) gave them two hits, Kon-Tiki and Man of Mystery, while their record producer, Norrie Paramor, wrote The Savage, another Top Ten hit for them in 1961.

In 1963, of course, Beatlemania opened a new age and made the previous epoch seem prehistoric by comparison. The small world of British popular music, based in London and dominated by a few individuals who all knew each other, was hit by a new wind blowing from the provinces and the northern cities.

The world of British songwriting would never be the same again.