100 SONGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, Pt.1

Bob Solly – who played many of them in David Bowie’s first band, The Manish Boys – celebrates the songs that inspired the British R&B boom of the early 60s.

If someone young and white from the British Isles had told you, at the beginning of the 1950s, that he wanted to be a blues singer, you might have dismissed him as being either foolish or deluded. At that time only a small percentage of Brits had actually come face-to- face with a black person, let alone heard authentic blues music. But most people did know about deprivation.

As if surviving a world war was not enough, the British experienced a high level of austerity in the aftermath. So-called war babies, the majority still in their teens by the early 1960s, had been subject to prolonged food rationing, inadequate living conditions and a complete absence of the lifestyle pleasures we now take for granted.

In those radio days of the early 1950s the BBC only delivered music that was considered to be safely within ‘public taste’. Even later, at the height of the rock ‘n’ roll craze, with the exception of mainstream singers such as Fats Domino and Little Richard, only a small proportion of American R&B performers entered our homes via the ‘wireless’.

Throughout that decade in Britain, public taste was rooted in conventional white pop. Rock ‘n’ roll didn’t dominate the Top 20, as many people believe. To list a few of the No.1 artists of that period - Doris Day, Slim Whitman, Pat Boone and Guy …

by Bob Solly
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