Soho Clubs

Cliff Richard and the Shadows

The mid-1950s were do-it-yourself time for young singers and musicians throughout the world. In the United States, depending on the region of the country, the options were joining an electric-guitar bar band that played country music or blues or singing doo-wop on a street corner. In England, from the moment Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” hit the charts in 1956, a would-be performer was more likely to play skiffle—a simple-to-play idiom based on American folk and blues songs, performed on guitar, broomstick bass, and washboard—which first emerged in jazz clubs. Every city had at least one such club, mostly in basements near the centre of the city; London’s Soho area had several, some named for the band that had a weekly residency: Humphrey Lyttleton’s Club was at 100 Oxford Street, Ken Colyer’s at Studio 51, Little Newport Street.

Donegan was a banjo player in Chris Barber’s Jazz Band and sang a few songs between sets, with Barber on bass and Beryl Bryden on washboard. His revival of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” was a surprising Top Ten hit in both Britain and the United States and inspired an entire generation of young Britons to pick up instruments, notably the Vipers, the Shadows, and the Beatles. The Vipers had fewer hits than Donegan, but their residency at the 2 I’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street in Soho helped to popularize a new kind of venue, where Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, and Adam Faith were among the future stars who made their professional debuts. This period in the development of British pop music coincided with the advent of the teenager phenomenon, which was described by Colin MacInnes in his journalism and novel Absolute Beginners (1959)