Reviews

First a confession - I love lists. I compile them for my record, tape, DVD and CD collections. In the fifties the 'hit parade' was that – the guide to what was happening and what mattered in popular music. So a book covering what lay beneath the Top 20 charts between 1954 and 1961 must appeal to anyone with an interest in the groundbreaking and bone-shaking music that still matters for old rockers sliding down the razor blade of life. Data from 'Disc', 'Melody Maker', 'Record Mirror' and the 'NME' has been analysed by the author; these publications were our weekly shots of stardust and the Big Beat's progress. At first sight there appears to be too much nerdy information. Perhaps you don't really need 422 pages of details from long ago. But if you want to find out more about the context of popular music in the fifties, then this should satisfy any appetite. There are lists of the artists themselves, for each week of the seven years covered and by song titles. So if you ever wondered how close that great track by Ronnie Hawkins, 'Mary Lou', came to charting you will know which week in 1959 it nearly made it! Perhaps you don't really want to know how close Doris Day's 'Ooh Bang Jiggilly Jang' was to being a hit in 1955 – love that title! There are loads of one-hit wonders; the sublime version of 'Sea of Love' by Phil Phillips entered the charts on three occasions in 1959. And there's plenty more where that came from. Each artist has a couple of lines to provide context. For example, Thomas Wayne's superb cut 'Tragedy' bubbled under for 2 weeks in '59; it's good to be reminded that he was Johnny Cash's bass player's brother and that ironically he died tragically in a car crash in 1971. Then there are the cuts you never heard at the time. The BBC aired little rock n roll so we struggled with tuning into Radio Luxembourg or found a good local juke box caff. It is intriguing why some classic rock cuts were slow burners before streaking up the charts. Clearly big US hits which got releases here might still be difficult to hear unless you had a clear signal from Luxembourg or a very efficient local record shop. Chuck Berry had three UK hits in 1957-'58 but five others only bubbled under. In 1956, Carl Perkins' 'Honey Don't', The Cadets' 'Stranded In The Jungle' and Big Joe Turner's 'The Chicken And The Hawk' were all released here on London-American. None even bubbled under! These fifties rockin' misses would make an excellent radio show - perhaps a series! Of course, Elvis Presley was the great exception. His singles all spent just one week outside the Top Twenty before zooming up. British acts with plenty of publicity on stage, TV and radio might have been expected to spend less time getting into the charts. Billy Fury, Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, Tommy Steele and John Leyton all bear this out. Finally, this was the age of varied tastes – jazz, skiffle, balladeers, crooners, big bands and, of course, the Danish Singing Dogs who sold a million in 1955! Contemporary publicity shots are sprinkled through the tome. The near misses include The Singing Nun, The Cowboy Church Sunday School, The Big Ben Banjo Band, Crazy Otto and Wardell Gray (did he practise in the bath?). More explicitly in it for the laughs were Stan Freberg and The Goons. As for the Two Bills from Bermondsey, the jury's out. This is a book for browsing, where the famous rub shoulders with the obscure and forgotten; as a reminder of an era when the single record was a potential passport to stardom, this is ideal. Equally, it offers many delights for the vinyl equivalent of the trainspotter. Of course, it was a long time ago but the music's still largely available; so why not immerse yourself and bubble under for a while! -- Barry Holley, Now Dig This (May 2019)

Britain in the 1950s was a fascinating place for the popular music fan: skiffle, rock and roll, Radio Luxembourg (rather than staid old Auntie Beeb) and the Top Twenty all offered plenty of excitement. The Top Twenty, first published by New Musical Express as a Top 12 in 1952, was a not-necessarily-accurate indicator of the country's most popular discs, but what about those records that didn't quite make it? Many great recordings seemed destined for the chart, only to fail at the last hurdle. Colin Driscoll gives those discs their due credit in Hits That Missed, a detailed and impressive work of research that reminds us of just how close some jazz legends came to gaining chart status. There was no official UK Bubbling Under Chart, so Driscoll has developed his own, based on the Record Mirror Top Ten lists of local best-sellers submitted by up to 50 record stores from around the country. By allocating points to each record that appeared in these charts he's identified hundreds of discs that sold well on a local basis but never quite well enough to win a place in the prestigious Top Twenty (some did eventually make the national chart and Driscoll identifies these). He explains his process clearly in the first few pages, before devoting the rest of the book to lists of the artists and songs that bubbled under, some for weeks on end, some for just seven days. The Artists A-Z list takes up most space: it offers short pen-portraits of the artists and is well-illustrated by publicity photos, advertisements and record covers. Driscoll then adds lists including the artists with the most records on the chart, the artists with most weeks on the chart (Frank Sinatra heads both of them), the records with most weeks on the chart and a chart for each individual week from June 1954 to March 1961. For a numbers geek like me, the data is fascinating. Take the artists with most weeks on the Bubbling Under Chart: Sinatra leads the list with 96 weeks, Ted Heath managed 45, Gerry Mulligan had 39, Louis Armstrong 37 and Kid Ory's Creole Jazz Band reached a total of 16 weeks. As far as individual releases are concerned, Ella Fitzgerald spent 13 weeks on the chart with Pete Kelly's Blues, the MJQ managed 12 weeks with the Milt Jackson Modern Jazz Quartet EP, and George Lewis & His New Orleans Music stayed there for nine weeks with Mama Don't Allow It. Of course, jazz performers (even if you wish to include skiffle and blues acts in their number) are a minority in the chart. Most entries are by the pop musicians of the decade – some famous, like Johnnie Ray, many lost in the mists of time, like Johnny October or Myles O'Connor. Dig into the pages, however, and plenty of jazz musicians reveal themselves and offer up snippets of information with which to dazzle or tease friends and family. When did Kai Winding bubble under? Who joined Jimmy Deuchar on his lone chart entry? Which Charlie Parker album (yes, album) sold well enough to gain success for 2 weeks? What James Moody single managed to leap in for an entire week? Colin Driscoll has the answer to all these – and more. -- Bruce Lindsay, Jazz Journal (May 2019)

Colin Driscoll's time and patience has really paid off. He's researched heavily and now produced studiously over 400 softback pages of fascinating facts, pop positions and interesting indexing in respect of those vinyl records that other chart books cannot reach i.e the bubbling under. Since, ahem!, chart records began music formats have changed many times, from cylinder & sheet music onto vinyl, tape, cd and downloads. Driscoll's period is specific though, 1954-1961, so for the first time anywhere we can discover how close hundreds of songs were to becoming fully-fledged hits. Crazy Otto and Cozy Cole mix with various Millers and Mills, and although all genres are covered, this period included jazz and big band sounds at a time when star conductors and their large orchestras ruled – positive swings, using left and right. As you might expect, there's Driscoll's reasoning explained in good depth on how this book came out, chart compilation and much detail with B&W photos illustrating these forgotten 45s and much missed near hits. Many organisations have produced Top 40-type charts over the decades... NME, Record Mirror, The British Market Research Bureau and several others along the way, but Colin Driscoll has performed a miracle of accuracy in putting everything in its rightful place in this unique page-turner of a music reference book. Highly recommended. 10/10. -- Mark Watkins (Dare Radio), markwatkinsreviews.tumblr.com (June 2019)

Just prior to the explosion of the British beat boom of the very early 1960s (and as a regular listener to Radio Luxembourg and other radio stations that didn't all constantly play records by dance bands, crooners, warblers and novelty acts) I began writing down details of records and artists I had heard and liked in school exercise books. Alphabetically of course! Noting names, song titles and record labels. I loaned a friend's older brother one of my handwritten books and he returned it with additions (in red biro) on artists I had never heard of on U.K. labels such a Vogue, London, Oriole, Melodisc and others. They were, I found out black American artists – blues, rhythm and blues and jazz artists who had records issued here. The titles sounded much more interesting than the teen idols and balladeers still filling the airways. Writing down stuff soon gave way to making up scrap books with charts cut out of the NME, the Manchester Evening News and occasionally Melody Maker. Yes, I was what is called today a 'nerd'. Since then charts, label listings, discographies and books containing data on records have always grabbed my attention. Its great to know that there were others about including the author of this tome Colin Driscoll. Cohn has completed a Herculean task in compiling a book on records that made the U.K. pop chart and 'bubbled under' as they used to say – records that made it or nearly made it into the charts. The U.K. charts had no 'bubbling under' records but Billboard had a 'Bubbling Under the Hot 100' chart from 1959 (I didn't even know there was a 'Hot 100' never mind 'bubbling under' records – the 'Hit Parade' was as good as it got here). Driscoll has complied this book by "ranking all the weekly returns using a simple marking system, (10 points for each dealers' No. 1, 9 points for each No. 2 and so on)", aggregating "the scores for the week and filtered out any current or former chart hits". His 'bubbling under chart thus includes the "pre-chart history of records which went on to become hits, as well as strong sellers with hit potential that never made it." These included any record which appeared on the charts published by Disc, Melody Maker, NME, Record Mirror or Record Retailer. There are further explanations at the start of the book on why there are differences in each publications' charts and why at times EPs and LPs are included – and there is an also a technical section with a detailed explanation of the book's layout. Split into sections starting with artists A to Z including details of artists who had the most 'bubblers'; the most weeks on the bubbling under chart; records with most weeks on the bubbling under chart; non hit records with most weeks at number one on the bubbling under chart; and 'bubblers' with the most re-entries. There is also weekly bubbling under charts; a song index and an album index. As you may suspect, the U.K. charts from 1954 to 1961 were overwhelmed by current popular artists, personalities, dance bands, and novelties - but deep in the data are blues and rhythm and blues artists (in the wider sense), vocal groups, rockabilly and rock and roll artists issued on an array of U.K. labels: London, Pye, Top Rank, Decca, Columbia, Coral,etc., by Fats Domino, Johnny Otis. Barrett Strong, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Larry Williams, Earl Bostic (very popular I might add), Rosco Gordon, Sonny Terry, Link Wray, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Cash, Chuck Willis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and many others as well as ska pioneer Laurel Aitken and some of our best U.K. rockers including Vince Taylor, Vince Eager, Billy Fury, Roy Young and many pioneering skiffle groups. Which proves the point that there was a lot more going on outside of the pop charts than many of us ever knew or thought. Of course there is significant information on the acts that dominated the U.K. popular music scene – Eve Boswell, Dickie Valentine. Alma Cogan, Doris Day, Jim Dale, Norman Wisdom and the Beverley Sisters etc, and there are lots of 'oddball' records – these grabbed my attention – the Big Ben Accordion Band's rendition of 'Rock 'n' Roll No. 1' (consisting of 'Rock Around The Clock', 'See You Later Alligator'. 'Blue Suede Shoes'. 'Rock Island Line', 'The Saints' and 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love'); The Cowboy Church Sunday School (cowboy singer Stuart Hamblin having undergone a religious conversion at a Billy Graham crusade made a record with the voices of his wife and kids speeded up to resemble small children!), the Ted Taylor Four's 1960 offering of 'Left Hand Drive' retitled 'M1' to coincide with the opening of the first stretch of the U.K. motorway network, and a 45 by future 'Coronation Street' star Betty Driver on Planet Records. A deeper delve into the data reveals a number of cover versions of U.S. rhythm and blues sides by U.K. artists such as comic actor Bernard Bresslaw's cover of The Coasters' 'Charlie Brown' and crooner Jimmy Young's cover of Sam Cooke's 'Chain Gang'. There are also loads of adverts from the U.K. music press of the era, plenty label shots of 78s. 45s (some really obscure labels) EPs and album covers. Brilliant research – not to mention mathematics – by Colin Driscoll. Music historians, U.K. music fans and the army of music nerds out there will want to check this out. -- Tony Burke, Blues & Rhythm (July 2019)