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Inspired by BBC2's Culture Show, which showed a snippet of it yesterday evening, here is this Sunday's video. It features a 14-year-old Jimmy Page playing skiffle. A couple of weeks ago, writing of The Zombies and the 1960s, I asked:
How was it that in the middle of that decade geeky grammar school boys suddenly found themselves able to write and perform music like this?
As Mark Kermode's report for The Culture Show made clear, one of the answers is that the skiffle boom had taken place a few years before. Note too Huw Wheldon's act as a sympathetic but bemused headmaster. YouTube says this clip comes from "The Huw Wheldon Show", but I suspect it is really taken from his BBC arts programme Monitor.
The clip may have come from a children's programme called 'All your Own' that Weldon compered during the mid/late 1950s. This would be well before Monitor if memory serves me.
ReplyDeleteThis clip was recorded in 1958
ReplyDeleteCheck out Pete Frame's "Restless Generation" for all the 1950's Brit Jazz/Skiffle/Rock N Roll history you'll ever need.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, as a scholar of skiffle, I can tell you that Page's outfit are a mark two Skiffle combo as the washboard and tea-chest bass have been replaced by the drumkit and upright bass, albeit brilliantly homemade, respectively.