Only one of the dances associated with 1950s rock’n’roll has the distinction of being British, the ‘hand jive’. In 1957 when filmmaker Ken Russell was a freelance photographer, he recorded the teenagers of Soho, London hand-jiving in the basement of The Cat’s Whisker coffee bar, where the hand-jive was invented by Leon Bell of Leon Bell and the Bell […]
late 50s England – open-air neighbourhood dance
Bit of a mystery here. A video clip of an unprovenanced 1950s daylight neighbourhood dance, somewhere in England, sometime between 1957 and 1960. It is barely 1 minute and a half on the YouTube video (running from 0:05 up to 0:49, and 1:00 to 1:19) but the quality of the film is amazing and really […]
1958 Lancashire Teds
‘Morning in the Streets’ a 35-minute poetic depiction in film giving an “impression of life and opinion in the back streets of a Northern City in the morning”was directed by Denis Mitchell & Roy Harris in 1958 by the BBC’s Northern Film Unit (although not broadcast until 25 of March 1959). The city in question […]
1970s Flying Saucers’ performances
1975 Vierzon, France 01.07.1976 Dutch tv pop show ‘TopPop’ 1978 St. Helier Arms, Carshallton, London
1965 ‘jan pehchan ho’ Mohammed Rafi
For those who saw ‘Ghost World’ (2001), one of the most interesting scenes of this excellent film was its opening scene which is simply a performance of the song ‘jan pehchan ho’ by Indian singer Mohammed Rafi taken lock, stock and barrel from an earlier Bollywood film ‘Gumnam’ (1965). ‘jan pehchan ho’ is a Hindustani […]
1958 Notting Hill Riots, London
Lasting less than a week at the end of the summer of 1958, the riots that erupted between Friday the 29th of August and Friday the 5th of September in London’s Notting Hill district proved to be a turning point not only in race relations but in perceptions of the teddy boys. Here’s a nice […]
