No one can really say when rock’n’roll was invented. You could say March 1951, with the release of Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. Or maybe July 1954, when Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black stopped messing around between takes at Sun Studios and started hammering through That’s All Right, which became the future King’s first single.
But the year rock’n’roll really became rock’n’roll was 70 years ago, in 1955: the year Little Richard burst on to the world with Tutti Frutti; the year of the first riot at an Elvis show; the year of Blue Suede Shoes and Maybellene; the year of Bo Diddley singing his own praises. In the US, Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley & His Comets was the biggest record that year. In the UK, its presence on the soundtrack of the teensploitation movie The Blackboard Jungle reportedly sent teddy boys into rampages of cinema-smashing.
In fact, 1955 was at the centre of such a huge pop-cultural moment that if you are over 40, you almost certainly grew up with rock’n’roll as a constant background in your life. In the 1970s, groups such as Stray Cats, Showaddywaddy, Matchbox and Darts were Top of the Pops regulars. Shakin’ Stevens was the biggest-selling singles artist of the 80s, and many other rock’n’roll revivalists had hits. Punks covered old rock’n’roll songs – and punk’s rock’n’roll mutation, psychobilly, was one of the biggest youth cults of the early 1980s. Even after that, contemporary hits such as George Michael’s Faith or Girls Aloud’s Love Machine made reference without descending into revivalism. KT Tunstall’s Black Horse and the Cherry Tree used the Bo Diddley “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm.
But today, the genre is in danger of disappearing. “There’s nobody, apart from the offspring of existing rock’n’rollers, to take the place of the people who are dying off,” says John Hopkins, who edited UK Rock’n’Roll magazine until he was forced to close it earlier this year. He cites Rockers Reunion, in January, the first big rock’n’roll all-dayer of the year. “My reviewer made the point that everybody seems to be on sticks and Zimmers.”
It’s not as though pre-Beatles pop has disappeared. Lana Del Rey has built a career on it. Laufey’s neo-bossa-nova and jazz-pop ballads are huge. Stephen Sanchez’s global hit Until I Found You might as well have been a lost recording from 1958. In the UK, George Ezra and Jake Bugg have borrowed from it, occasionally straying close to rockabilly, as Ezra did on Cassy O’. And vintage soul, of course, pops up everywhere. But rock’n’roll, in the sense a teenager 70 years ago would have understood it? Not so much; certainly not in the UK. When you hear the words rock’n’roll these days, they tend to mean presenting as rough and ready, summoning not greased quiffs, but theme bars with tattooed bartenders and Guns N’ Roses on the jukebox.
The only place the old rock’n’roll values still flourish, Hopkins says, is in what is referred to as the “fluffy” scene – in effect, cosplaying 1955. “But it’s just the same 20 bands doing the same 20 songs every week, and they’re not bothered about innovation. That’s a nice social event, but it’s not music.”
How can this have happened to one of the most energetic, boundary-pushing styles of music in history? Observers say that, as the spotlight has gradually moved away, the rock’n’roll scene has hardened, and arguably cut itself off. “There are some strong rules in rock’n’roll and rockabilly about what you can and can’t do,” says Rupert Orton, guitarist with the Jim Jones Revue, who played an ultra-high-energy, punked-up variant on rock’n’roll in the 00s. “But in a very slow way, it metamorphoses.”
Orton remains active behind the scenes – he books the annual Red Rooster festival, which gives due prominence to rock’n’roll – and makes the point that rock’n’roll, like so many enduring subcultures, has long been an overwhelmingly working-class pursuit. As a writer and editor, I know that means traditional media will have less interest in it. Also, the hardcore rock’n’roll scene seems to reject outside interest – I contacted the organisers of several rock’n’roll weekenders for this piece, and none replied. “They are very insular,” Hopkins agrees. “When I started on the magazine, I went down to an event and I felt like an alien. It was very difficult to get to know people.”
To give an idea of how marginalised rock’n’roll in the UK now is, consider one of its brightest young sparks. Dylan Kirk, from Kent, is 25, and his band Dylan Kirk & the Killers are hotshots on the rock’n’roll circuit, playing weekenders and clubs. He plays between 30 and 40 shows a year. When we speak, he is looking for a new job to replace the one he has at a Wetherspoons. This is not a world where the big break is just around the corner.
Kirk, inevitably, was introduced to rock’n’roll by his parents, then taught himself to play it on the piano. He even started playing because of them. “My dad was in the car one day and he said, ‘I’ve been in this pub that has a piano. We’re going to go down there now and you’re going to play it.’ I was too shy to sing, but that was the first time I played in front of anybody – just a little boogie-woogie.”
And who are his audience? Are there any kids present? “The people I’m performing to now were part of the rock’n’roll revival of the 70s and 80s. But there are young people, too, down to teenagers. I think most of the youngsters do treat it as a lifestyle – it’s not about the music, it’s about the fashion.”
Nevertheless, there remains the unanswered question: even if there aren’t lots of young musicians playing rock’n’roll, why has it disappeared so thoroughly from pop’s recipe book? “That’s a question I ask myself,” Kirk says. “I do find it strange that I don’t hear it.”
Perhaps rock’n’roll’s greatest problem, though, is that everyone thinks they know it, and that they can define it in one word: Elvis. Yes, people tend to know a few other songs – by Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry – but Elvis seems to be all they need. Witness the success of Baz Luhrmann’s hyperstylised biopic, and the way the entrails of his life continue to be picked over. There’s no other musical genre quite so associated with a single figure, one who has been dead for 48 years, and who is still – by an extremely long way – the most commercially successful rock’n’roll performer of the present day.
If the ageing of the fans is an issue for rock’n’roll, so too is the ageing of the music industry. For decades, record companies and recording studios were populated by people who had grown up with rock’n’roll, either as a formative experience or as a background noise. Now the producers who might have suggested a Bo Diddley backbeat or a twangy rockabilly guitar have retired, and the major label A&R people are more likely to be reliant on algorithms and data than personal taste.
Outside the UK, rock’n’roll is still a big subculture. Orton highlights the annual Rockin’ Race Jamboree in Torremolinos, Spain, which attracts up to 30,000 people for five days of rock’n’roll, roots music and related activities (Kirk will be at next year’s). “It’s really quite incredible,” Orton says. “There were kids there who couldn’t have been older than late teens. They looked as if they’d just walked out of The Wild One.”
Sweden, famously, has its raggare culture, venerating the 50s – there’s even the “rockabilly town” of Enviken, famed for its devotion to the past. Ask Spotify and it’ll serve you up a genuinely exciting playlist of Swedish rock’n’roll. But even there, apparently, it’s really only the kids of the revivalists who are continuing the traditions.
Still, as well as having birthed it, the US might yet save rock’n’roll. JD McPherson, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, came through playing rock’n’roll, before widening his range to other older forms of US music. McPherson noticed his audience getting younger, especially since he released a Christmas album a few years back. And when he DJs, he notices the old rock’n’roll numbers he began playing at the end of the evening to clear the crowds have started filling the dancefloor. He believes rock’n’roll can return.
“It has to be someone very good, who can utilise the rhythms and motifs of the music, but make it feel like right now.” And why might that happen? “It’s definitely happening with country music – with neo-traditional country,” he says, referring to artists such as Zach Top who are once again stripping country back to drums, bass, guitar, fiddle and pedal steel. And of course, lots of the country superstars – ones who are filling arenas in the UK now, such as Chris Stapleton – have strong seams of rock’n’roll in their music.
McPherson says he’s “a little long in the tooth” to get to arena level himself. “But I do think at some point something will happen. It has to be something real and it has to be somebody who really loves it. And maybe it won’t be called rock’n’roll at all. But when it happens, it will happen accidentally.”
Perhaps it could even come from the UK. Take the Bury-born, Elvis-indebted Elliot James Reay who, at 23, is earning millions of streams for his throwback tunes: he looks and dresses the part. The six songs he has released so far, once again, lean heavily towards pre-Beatles pop, rather than to true rock’n’roll – more Richard Hawley than Little Richard – but all it would take would be that one song, the one that’s more Hound Dog than Love Me Tender, and we’ll be there. After all, as Chuck Berry noted, rock’n’roll’s not hard: it’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it, any old time you choose it.
