Music Hall

Music hall

There is a comment (p. 51) in Ian MacDonald's classic work on The Beatles, Revolution in the Head, about how future pop musicians learnt music hall songs: “During the Fifties, parents still sang music hall songs to their children”. This solves a problem of chronology: so many critics have attributed the English part of English pop music (in an Afro-American style, essentially) to the music hall heritage, but the music halls were going out of business in 1920. They were replaced by “Variety” and the thrust was to bring in a more affluent audience which would spend more money both on tickets and on drinks. The working class were pushed out. So I always wondered how someone born in 1942 could ever have heard these songs.
MacDonald has supplied the answer. The songs were simple enough for the audience to sing along with them, at least in the choruses, and so people remembered them, and so they became part of a family stock of amusement, a heritage of the amateur. The most vivid account of this I have read is Ray Davies recalling that his family used to have parties where they sang all evening, presumably music hall songs to a great extent. That is where Ray Davies came from, everyone knows that. That is why he didn’t sound like an American. MacDonald is quite aware that this basis of collective song with its humour, eccentricity, boldness, and sharing, disappeared during the 1960s and was not there for children born after about 1960. It was the basis for the “English sound” but it was evaporating because its performance base had been got rid of around 1915 to 1925.

Cream covered “Your baby has gone down the plughole”. “it seems to have been written in 1944 by Elton Box, Desmond Cox and Lewis Ilda, under the collective pseudonym Jack Spade, though it’s possible that it’s older…” This is an example of many detailed problems of chronology. This song sounds a lot older than 1944, but it could have been a conscious pastiche. Anyway the style is pure music hall and this is something which an American band would never have dreamed of. It is not exactly Cream’s finest hour, more an album filler. This is just one of many bemusing problems of dating. “Maggie Mae” sounds like a music hall song to me, but it actually dates to around 1830, which is why it refers to Maggie being transported, a punishment which came to an end in 1840. It was an old song which people within the Folk Revival dug up in printed archives. It was then sung in folk clubs, the future Beatles hung out in every kind of club, they picked it up and remembered bits of it for the 1969 sessions for ‘Get back’. So when music hall started it used a style which was already familiar to the audience, so a style which was in many ways much older.
Complaints about British people reviving vanished styles of music need to consider what native traditions had simply vanished by the 1950s, so that research and revival were the necessary ways towards a better musical situation. Obviously innovation was also possible.
I purchased a pack of DVDs with about 14 hours of “Music hall and Variety” on film. It was almost all Variety – music hall had closed down before sound cinema came on the scene, so the film records of it show old performers or are re-creations. It was nostalgia even in 1935. The “Variety” is just terrible, no wonder it disappeared as the 1960s arrived.
Supposedly Ian Whitcomb recorded “Plughole” on his 1966 album “Ian Whitcomb's Mod, Mod Music Hall!”

MacDonald counts 187 Beatles recordings of which three or four have some music hall roots. The number which connects to “show tunes” is much larger. They recorded “Besame mucho”, however much we want to forget that it ever happened.
If you look at the wider realm of words in verse, poetry is just part of the realm of song. The exit of the music is the formative separation or exclusion. So recalling the history of English song is likely to recover part of the history of English poetry. I feel this but I can't be specific about it. Almost all the poetry which works has reacted powerfully to the loss of music, making up for it, and so no longer resembles song lyrics still embedded in music. Poems which follow song conventions seem ludicrous on the page, they are a clearly identified sub-world.