Following hard on the heels of Merseybeat was the harder, bluesier British Beat Groups. In 1964/5 it seemed that there was another great band coming out every single week.
I liked some of the more obscure ones like the Downliners Sect, Birds, Undertakers, Others, Measles and Paramounts.
If you want to read the history of Rock Music through the eyes of someone who was there – from 1905 to now – he lived it. He was there at and in every major event. He was the man with no name.
This is a list of my favourite tracks from the sixties Beat Boom of1964. There were some great bands.
This is when Britain ruled the world. Our Music dominated. We took the States by storm and there were hundreds of great bands. My favourites were the Downliners Sect!
This is another extract from the book Rock Routes. I bet you would add a few tracks to this and maybe take a couple out. But that’s the fun of it!
Along with the advent of the British Blues groups came the Mod bands. The were led by the Who and Small Faces but there was soon a lot of cross-over. The Stones, Yardbirds and Kinks were rapidly absorbed.
The Mods were into purple hearts and modern art design with the Union Jack being a favourite motif. All the Mods in my place seemed to be small, cocky and chirpy. The Rockers were bigger and meaner. There were lots of fights and aggro.
Then there was the language. Every tribe has to have its coded words so that everyone else was excluded from the ‘In-Crowd’. You could just be a number or if you were ranked highly enough you could be a Face. The Who started out as the High-Numbers and the Smallfaces were little guys with high status.
The Mod Bands were producing great original sounds. The Who started off with ‘I Can’t Explain’ with its heavy riff, the Kinks got in on the scene with ‘You Really Got Me’ and the Smallfaces with ‘What You Gonna Do About It’. Their albums were filled with the sort of R&B tracks that the kids were into with James Brown covers and Martha and the Vandellas. The strange thing is that I do not remember any of them doing any reggae covers though the Ska and Bluebeat were really popular.
It didn’t take long for the whole Beat scene to merge together. I don’t know what the States made of it all. It looked as if the Mersey, Blues and Mod bands were all merged in together as the British Invasion. They probably didn’t make the same distinctions as there were in England.
