The Hepsters – not to be confused with modern Hipsters – were associated with jazz, both musicians and fans. It is worth noting, too, that Gillespie had already gained a measure of stardom at a time when Parker’s following was limited to musicians and other insiders; Parker was not even mentioned in a silly 1948 […]
Babs Gonzales, the hepster from ‘Oo-poo-pa-doo’
Babs Gonzales (1919-80) Bab’s Three Bips and a Bop (1946-49) recorded the earliest version of ‘oop-pop-a-da’ for Blue Note in 1947 (made famous later by Dizzy Gillespie). ‘Professor Bop’ 1949 & ‘be-bop Santa Claus’ 1954 (by Lloyd Williams) Babs Gonzales was a featured artist in Alan Freed’s ‘Rock’n’roll Ball’ held at the Saint Nicholas Arena, […]
1991 The Firebirds in concert
This is not a music site for rock’n’roll, there are plenty of those, but every now and then a performance or an interesting video clip deserves its place. This goes for this excellent performance from 1991 by the Firebirds, a group hailing from Bristol (it was released as a video in 1992). The concert took […]
The white street lights of the teddy boy era
Fittingly for a website name called ‘The Lone Lamp’, the subject of the type of street lighting found in Britain will get a notice here. The site’s readers will know that we refer to the original teddy boy era as ‘The Golden Era’, but perhaps ‘The Silver Era’ might have been more appropriate considering the […]
1972-87 Au Bonheur des Dames
The earliest bands of the 1970s rock’n’roll revival didn’t always have a dress code that chimed with the 1950s (think Sha-na-na in America, Memphis Bend and Showaddywaddy in Britain). In France a group called Au Bonheur des Dames (‘At the Ladies Pleasure’, the title of a novel by Émile Zola on a department store, go […]
1974 Cambridge teds
A 1974 Granada TV documentary ‘This is Cambridge’ investigating student life happily decided to devote a 3-minute section of the documentary to local teds. Little wonder, the presenter and codirector was Ray Gosling, old-time friend to the teddy boys. To the sounds of ‘tutti frutti’ at a dance hall played by the Bluebirds, Ray gushes […]