Pop Scene

By Nik Cohn

One of the great things about pop is that everything happens so fast. It’s only a decade since Elvis first put on his gold lamé suit and wriggled and the whole ballyhoo began, and it’s still technically, if not financially, possible to assemble most of the major figures on one mammoth bill.

The recent New Musical Express Poll winners’ Concert at the Empire Pool, Wembley, did just this, cramming an A to Z history of British pop into a single Sunday afternoon, and, in doing so, putting on the most spectacular pop show there’s ever been. It was a good idea, but, in spite of its vast possibilities, it fell surprisingly flat.

Partly, it was because the Empire Pool is the last place on earth for a show like this. It takes a ten-minute haul uphill through the most zombie suburbs anywhere to get there, and when you do arrive, it’s vast and depressing, and seems empty even when it’s packed to capacity. I could imagine it being all right for Nazi rallies and religious conventions, but for a pop show, where you need direct contact with the artists, it’s a dead loss.

More important, the acoustics are bad beyond belief. Sitting in the third row, maybe five yards from the stage, I couldn’t hear a word that anyone sang all afternoon, but was so deafened by the instruments that I couldn’t sleep all night. The singers mouthed silently into their mikes, like goldfish inside a soundproof bowl, and the sound of screaming was thin and distant. Which may have added a surrealist note to the proceedings, but which killed the atmosphere stone dead.

But what really did the show in was sheer excess of star names. The Who followed Dusty Springfield who followed Herman who followed Cliff Richard, and so on, and by the time we got to The Rolling Stones and The Beatles we were already past saturation point. We all realized we were watching the greatest bill ever assembled, and we all realized that this was the summing-up of the whole British pop movement, and it weighed us down like responsibility – as if we were watching an act of history, not a pop show. When The Rolling Stones finally did come on, the screamer in the row behind me closed her eyes and groaned. ‘Not again,’ she said, ‘Please, not again.’

But if it was altogether too much of a good thing, there were still some classics in it – like Roy Orbison’s act. Orbison is, by standards, phenomenal. He doesn’t look much – unbelievably skinny legs, outdate toreador jackets, those perpetual small glasses – and his performance is non-existent. He just stands very still at his microphone and reels off hit after hit in a strong, changing voice, and a very fat man stands at the second mike and fills in the backings. It isn’t anything, but what Orbison does have is authority, and lots of it. More than anyone else in pop, he can hold his audience, raise their temperature and cool them down again as he likes. You get riveted by his white albino face and those big glasses, and at the end of two numbers he can put you wherever he wants you.

The other act that really made it was The Who. I’ve seen them many times before and they’ve never lived up to all the rave reports: they’ve seemed bored and basically ordinary. But this time they worked themselves into the stage and it all began to come alive. The climax came with My Generation, where Keith Moon’s drums came crashing down off their pedestal, nearly decapitating lead singer Roger Daltrey. Moon finished the last few choruses standing and keeping time on a single cymbal, while Pete Townshend gave the amplifiers a non-stop bashing with the end of his guitar.

Comedy hit of the show was undoubtedly Cliff Richard, who seems to have given up the old dreamy lover-boy image and turned into a bouncing three-week-old puppy. On his new hit, When Blue Turns To Grey, he went through a weird series of hops and jumps as if Hank B. Marvin was holding out a bone just too high for him to reach. On the other hand, he was smooth and professional as ever, and, since we’re obviously stuck with him, it has to be admitted that he plays perfectly to his audience.

Finally, The Beatles, for me the big let down. They don’t seem to have changed things in their presentation over three years. They look the same (except fatter) and songs, of course, are still brilliant, but like they seem desperately stale. If they’re bored they have every right to be and it’s asking too much to expect them to bound on-stage as if they were auditioning for Opportunity Knocks. But there was a feeling of anticlimax about their act, and I thought they have been wiser not to appear.

The last unreal touch was a kind of school prize-giving, with everyone trooping on off to collect cups for their efforts of last year. Guest of honour was Clint Walker, all cowboy Cheyenne Bodie, who is about the biggest man I’ve ever seen. As he made everyone else look like ten-year-olds, the illusion was complete.