For most listeners around the world, the "dawn" of British rock & roll didn't take place until
the Beatles started to make their first records. Even for those who grew up in the U.K. at the time, the true dawn of British rock often isn't considered to have taken place until the late '50s, when the first credible homegrown singers in the idiom emerged, like
Cliff Richard and
Billy Fury. In fact, however, British rock & roll -- or, perhaps more accurately, the influence of rock & roll in British pop music -- was starting to be heard as early as 1953, when bandleader
Ted Heath covered
Bill Haley's "Crazy Man Crazy" (included on this CD). This intriguing 31-track compilation offers a wealth of pre-
Cliff Richard & the Shadows recordings that, if not exactly rock & roll, showed British pop musicians trying to do something with the form. As it happened, they more often than not ended up sounding like rather staid swing jazz bands trying to broaden their appeal by putting a rock & roll or R&B song in their set without gaining any true grasp or appreciation of this newfangled music that had originated on the other side of the Atlantic. It wasn't really until
Tommy Steele's late-1956 hit "Rock with the Caveman" (also included here) that any British performer made a reasonable approximation of authentic rock & roll sounds, and even that hit was something of a clumsy novelty. But while this is by no means something you would put on the order of the later British pioneers like
Richard,
Fury, and
Johnny Kidd, let alone jump blues and early rock & roll bands rocking the urban centers of the United States, that doesn't mean that this isn't a fairly enjoyable compilation on its own musical terms, if something of a crass guilty pleasure. Though many of these efforts to spice up what's essentially fairly square jazz-pop music with a bit of rock & roll (or at least do a rock & roll song with a jazz arrangement) sound a little unintentionally funny, much of them do have a somewhat appealing naïve energy, like that of performers suppressing a grin while they exploit a passing fad. Of course, that passing fad, both in the U.S. and U.K., turned out to be the most popular musical style of the 20th century, relegating these early somewhat exploitative attempts to mimic it to the dustbins of history. This compilation is a small revelation, however, in exposing how the roots of the music's foothold in Britain ran much deeper and earlier than is commonly assumed, almost amounting to documentation of a missing chapter in rock & roll history. Yes, there are some awfully stiff covers of early rock & roll hits on board, like
Gale Warning's
Mae West-ish take on "Heartbreak Hotel." But really, some of these tracks aren't bad by any standards, like
Steele's credibly swinging "Doomsday Rock" and
Tony Crombie & His Rockets' credibly pounding "Rock Shuffle Boogie," while
the Goons' parody "Bloodnok's Rock 'n' Roll Call" (an actual number three U.K. hit in 1956) remains pretty funny.