BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
American Rhythm & Blues In England 1962 – 1966
The Unseen Photographs of Brian Smith
ISBN: 978-0-9561439-4-5. Arts, popular music, photography. Softback. SIZE: 210 X 210mm. Pages: 180. • to be published Nov / December 2024
Today, anyone with a phone is a photographer. Moments are immortalized at … well, at a moment’s notice. More often than not in less than a moment.
Didn’t use to be that way. Once upon a time the owner of a camera had to purchase a roll of film that contained from 12 to 36 exposures and that film was expensive - each shot had to count. Few folks had their own darkrooms, so having the films professionally developed added to the cost. I’m sure plenty of readers of a certain age recall having several rolls of undeveloped film rolling around in desk drawers, sometimes for years. The owner’s phone, if they even had one, was an entirely separate device connected to a wire coming out of the wall in the house in which they lived.
Go to any concert today, be it in a small club or a huge stadium, and the crowd will be aiming their phones at the stage, either recording live video or snapping a series of what used to be quaintly called stills. Even the most casual fan will have a trove of photos of their favorite artists stashed in their phone.
This book, ‘Boom Boom Boom Boom—American Rhythm and Blues in Britain 1962-1966,’ is packed full of photos taken by Brian Smith, a music lover and blues enthusiast who also happened to love photography. Those photos, and Brian's story, narrated by Simon Robinson, graphically, and often poetically, illustrate the great cultural musical shift that occurred in Britain in the early 1960s. Brian attended every show he could during that exciting time when American blues acts were visiting, and local blues groups were springing up everywhere. And he took his camera.
Top: Little Richard and The Shirelles on the set of Granada TV's 'It's Little Richard'
Bottom: Backstage with Cousin Joe Pleasants, Brian Smith, Otis Spann and Muddy Waters.
Any clubgoer in the UK in the early sixties would know John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom’ - that song, along with others such as ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Working,’ ‘Big Boss Man,’ ‘Dimples’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ - was in the repertoire of the countless UK blues bands that emerged to meet the demand of music fans who wanted more than mass-produced pop.
Music was in the air wherever one went. On the radio, in coffee shop jukeboxes, record stores, and at parties where zealous fans would head for the turntable and deejay the evening with whatever blues and R & B records he or she might find. It was a time of enthusiasm, of exploration, of manic fandom, for as wonderful as music-making is, it is all the better for fervent listeners - it is the yin and the yang of the thing.
Below: Helen Humes
Brian Smith was such a fan. Born in Manchester in 1943, he saw Josh White in a variety show at the age of eight and, along with friends’ older brothers, attended jazz shows at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1954 and 1955, and it was those concerts that introduced him to live music. Shows that Chris Barber hosted, with guests Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Big Bill Broonzy. Lonnie Donegan was in Barber’s band and hosted a band within a band, Chris Barber’s Skiffle Group. Brian came of age in the Rock ’n Roll era, but it was through Donegan and Skiffle that he began to learn about the blues. As Brian himself says, ‘Lonnie Donegan was a major milestone for me. Essentially, I was a rock ’n roller in the Fifties, although Donegan, Barber, and Muddy were developing my other tastes alongside this. My first blues albums were Muddy At Newport and Howling Wolf, which I bought in 1961, 62. I very much came to blues via Rock ’n Roll and Donegan.’
Below: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, T-Bone Walker, Ginny Hawkins
Manchester was, and still is a major city, and venues such as the Manchester Palace, the Hippodrome and the Odeon put on pop and rock ’n roll shows starring acts such as Bill Haley, Frankie Lymon, the Platters and Charlie Gracie. Brian went to them all - he was mad about music.
He was also mad about photography, owned a Brownie 127 in 1954 and joined his school’s photographic society. On his eighteenth birthday he became the proud owner of an Ilford Sportsman, and inevitably, and very fortunately, his two passions became interwined.
Brian became known to club owners as ‘the fan with a camera’ and he and friends hit shows in Leeds, Birmingham, Halifax, Rochdale, Nottingham, Newport, Blackpool, Sheffield and London, always with his camera.
Lippman and Rau’s ’1962 American Folk and Blues Festival’ was not originally scheduled to play the UK, but was persuaded by local promoter Paddy MacKiernan and Melody Maker to play the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and it was at this show where Brian took some of his earliest photos of musicians. The bill included T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Sonny and Brownie, Shakey Jake and John Lee Hooker.
This show, and the ensuing publicity fanned the flames of the burgeoning blues scene in the UK, tours by American blues artists increased, blues clubs such as Richmond’s Crawdaddy, Hampstead’s Klooks Kleek and Manchester’s Twisted Wheel sprung up all over the country, magazines such as Blues Unlimited, R & B Monthly and The R & B Scene flourished. The R & B Scene, based out of Manchester and run by the legendary Roger Eagle, DJ and promoter at the Twisted Wheel, utilized Brian’s photos in every issue. (Complete disclosure here: I was very friendly with both Brian and Roger in those days - often hitch-hiking up to Manchester to stay in Roger’s one room abode, which was quite possibly the stinkiest room in show-business. A row of empty Johnny Walker bottles stood on the window sill, each labeled with a name. John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson etc. Brian and I were penpals for many years).
Chuck Berry
Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and Larry Williams
The list of American acts that appeared during that time, and were photographed by Brian is, quite simply, astounding.
Howling Wolf, Memphis Slim, Bo Diddley, Otis Spann, Hubert Sumlin, Don Covay, Chuck Jackson,
Hubert and The Wolf
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, T-Bone Walker, Sunnyland Slim, Muddy Waters, Clifton James, Sleepy John Estes, Hasmmie Nixon, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Walter Horton, Gary US Bonds, Big Joe Turner, The Shirelles, Roosevelt Sykes, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Fats Domino, Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Chris Farlow, Duane Eddy, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Bill Haley ... well, there is not the space to list 'em all.
Buddy Guy
Muddy Waters
And every week, it seemed a new English band appeared - the Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, The Animals, Georgie Fame, The Downliners Sect, The Spencer Davis Group, Alex Harvey, The Yardbirds. And, of course, the Beat Boom was going on simultaneously, the groups all kind of mingled together. And Brian was out there with his trusty camera - the ultimate fan, shooting them all. The blues guys still mostly in their prime, with a few like Sleepy John Estes and Mississippi John Hurt a few months away from the final curtain, and the English guys, on the cusp of the British Invasion, all set to introduce much of young America to its own art form, the blues.
The Rolling Stones with Duane Eddy
There was an urgent creativity in the air; it was a formative time, inspiration and imagination were part of every waking moment, or at least it seemed like that at the time. And Brian was out there, catching the moment.
The Spencer Davis Group
Millie Small
He married in the later sixties and while never losing his love for music or photography, his time was spent raising a family and working for the Inland Revenue service, although as the press release for the book says, ‘we won’t hold that against him’.
It was not until the eighties and the beginnings of the great reissue boom in fifties and sixties blues and R & B that an interest in his photos developed. It had never been a business with him and he was pleasantly surprised, and occasionally startled, to find his shots appearing in unexpected places, such as on LP and compact disc sleeves.
And now ‘Boom Boom Boom, Boom’ has collected together all these shots, and they tell the story of the blues in Britain in the early sixties, the visiting American heroes and the awestruck locals, the passion of the fans, and the exciting nascent years of British rock.
But that is not quite the all of it. What the book also points to is the reciprocal nature of the music, how the passion of the fans really created a market for blues in the UK. The enthusiasm of Brian, and his cohorts such as Roger Eagle, Neil Carter, Dave Clarke and counterparts in London such as Guy Stevens led to Pye Records promoting the Chess label acts such as Berry, Diddley and Waters, and then the beginnings of Island Records’ Sue imprint, which led to tours by Larry Williams, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. Inez and Charlie Foxx, Screamin’ Jay - all of whom were faithfully documented by the indefatigble Brian Smith.
‘Boom Boom Boom Boom’ is an exhaustive chronicle of that time, an archive of intimate yet historic moments when a culture was in flux.
These photos, along with Brian’s story, are truly the minutes of a revolution.
Screamin' Jay Hawkins and T-Bone Walker
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