Awopbopaloobop ... it’s a rock’n’roll boom
NEIL COOPER September 08 2006

That's pretty much how rock'n'roll started – not with a bang, but with a guttural shriek of libidinous intent. As the opening line of the song, Tutti Frutti, as inimitably delivered by Little Richard, the phrase lent itself perfectly to John Byrne's TV drama series about a first-generation r'n'r band's late flowering revival beyond the chicken-in-a-basket cabaret circuit.
Byrne's Tutti Frutti was about the fallout of that initial musical explosion, in which emigre art student Danny McGlone returns to Glasgow from a decade in New York for the funeral of his brother and lead vocalist of beat boom veterans, The Majestics, Big Jazza McGlone.
It wasn't quite 20 years ago today that Tutti Frutti hit our screens, but, with a mere four terrestrial channels to play with then, it feels like it comes from a more innocent age. Originally shown in a graveyard slot on BBC1 opposite ageing-biker drama, Boon, its mix of pathos, intelligent fun and quickfire banter caught fire with viewers immediately. The pitch-perfect characterisations from its ensemble cast guaranteed that it, too, like rock'n'roll before it, captured a zeitgeist of second-hand nostalgia, loss and thwarted dreams.
This was no sitcom – the characters were swift with the wisecracks, but they were real, three-dimensional, living, breathing people. At a time of high unemployment and fragile dreams, the story touched a nerve.
Not only did it capture the affections of a generation, it became a springboard to fame for a group of actors who are now among Britain's best known – and most bankable. The series originally starred Robbie Coltrane as Danny and Emma Thompson as his sidekick sweetheart, Suzi Kettles; Thompson joined the cast a fresh-faced newcomer and left it a star on the rise, even getting her own (short-lived) comedy sketch show; Coltrane is now internationally recognised, among children, as Hagrid the wizard from the Harry Potter films, and among adults as Fitz, the redoubtable criminal psychologist from Cracker.
And it was not a Scottish thing; viewers all over the country, from the Home Counties to the ailing coalfield towns of the north east, fell in love with Tutti Frutti.
Now, in Byrne's stage adaptation for the National Theatre of Scotland, Danny, Jazza and all the other ageing rockers are here for one more comeback, with Tom Urie in the role of Danny; Dawn Steele, late of those other TV institutions, Monarch of the Glen and Tinsel Town, as Suzi Kettles; John Ramage in the Richard Wilson role of Eddie Clockerty; and Julie Wilson Nimmo, who played Miss Hooley in Balamory, as anice Toner. And what better place for The Majestics to rehearse than in The McLymont Hall in downtown Aberdeen?
It's one of those gloriously multi-purpose civic spaces town planners don't allow for anymore, but which looks like the sort of dive The Beatles might have played during their own formative Transit-van tours. Four nights a week The McLymont hosts the local karate club. Today, however, prior to the table tennis club moving in at 5.30pm, Byrne and director Tony Cownie are sitting running the Majestics actors through a tour-bus scene. In the hall outside, Steele sits over a big 1950s guitar, on which she runs through the chords of That'll Be The Day, one of a pocketful of classics played in the show.
"Heartbreak Hotel was the one that did it for me," Byrne twinkles through his distinctively distinguished moustache later on in a loud lunchtime cafe. His already muffled baritone is intermittently drowned out even more by the noisy scoosh of a coffee machine; it sounds like it was patented just after Tommy Steele walked into Soho's 2 I's coffee bar, where a very British take on rock'n'roll was born.
"I was 16," Byrne remembers, "and everybody I knew, on hearing Heartbreak Hotel, had their entire perception of the world totally changed.
It was extraordinary. It was like something from another planet. It was something you recognised immediately, even though you'd never seen it. You didn't think, that's weird, you'd just go awwww! Everybody did. It came from inside you as well. Nobody told you. You couldn't even see the guy. No-one told you what he looked like or anything. There was just this voice, and because Elvis is such a visual icon, it's difficult to imagine now what that was like.
"Until that moment," Byrne continues, "there'd been no popular records on the wireless. It was so unusual. Radio Luxembourg was the one. It played American music, and would play the top 20 on a Sunday.
"There were no clothes for the guys, either. You had to have suits made. There were no shops selling teenage styles and everything. We were still living in the dark ages after the Second World War. So hearing Heartbreak Hotel," he continues, utterly energised, "was wonderful."
Appropriately enough, Byrne has just finished re-reading Nick Cohn's history of the early days of rock, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.
Byrne was born in 1940, just in time for the invention of the teenager. " I mean, there's been plenty of pastiche. Since then you've had Showaddywaddy and what have you, and rock'n'roll is now regarded as a fun concept and a fun brand. But it wasn't about fun," Byrne insists. "It was about being excited about life and about rhythm. It made your life worthwhile. The world has changed so much since 1955, 1956, 1957, and all these people who came out. Before that there were crooners and there was popular music. It was enjoyable, but not revolutionary in any way, in the way that rock'n'roll turned everything on its head."

Rock'n'roll is everywhere in Byrne's work, from the audacious splashes of colour that sprawl across his drawings and paintings of crepe and drape-clad street-corner hangers-out, to their flesh-and-blood onstage manifestations. This isn't just exclusive to Tutti Frutti; it is also there in Spanky and Phil, the sharply dressed likely lads who epitomised the art school/rock'n'roll dichotomy of a post-war generation with ideas above their station in Byrne's defining work, The Slab Boys. It was Tutti Frutti, however, that brought home that sense of a generation being caught out after year zero moved on without them. Coming in the midst of late 1980s Thatcherite Britain, the petit-bourgeois shyster that was The Majestics manager, Eddie Clockerty, embodied the prevailing orthodoxy of the clueless small businessman in toe-curlingly hilarious microcosm.
At the same time, in theatre, the commercial sector was already being taken over to some extent by the rise of the rock'n'roll musical. It was Buddy that set the template for a slew of dot-to-dot sketchbook biographies punctuated by copycat renditions of the hits guaranteed to have audiences in search of some legitimised nostalgia dancing in the aisles. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this (three of the Tutti Frutti cast have appeared in David Cosgrove's musical fantasy Three Steps To Heaven, concerning the fateful plane trip made by Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper), and while there is some irony in it being adapted into a stage show, Tutti Frutti is made of deeper, cleverer stuff.
"The director described it to me as Greek tragedy," Byrne says of Tony Smith, the man who brought Byrne's vision onscreen. "He said, any violence there is happens offstage, and I thought, you're the man for the job."
Many of the bands The Majestics were modelled on can still be found today, flogging their guts out on the package-tour revivalist circuit. In this way, Byrne maintains that Tutti Frutti "isn't that far-fetched".
Byrne himself, however, never formed a band. He had a guitar, as everyone who'd bridged the gap from skiffle to rock'n'roll had, and he could vaguely sing in tune. "It never occurred to you that you could be a film star or a pop star," he says. "We were the outsiders. The great unwashed. At that time as well, there was no style. Teddy Boys stood out like a sore thumb, not because of any idea of violence, but because they were in love with life and in love with clothes."
Referring back to the seismic impact of Heartbreak Hotel, Byrne points to the iconic figure of popular culture that Elvis Presley has become. "Think of all the art that's been done on him," he says. "Claims that have been made for the British art scene or whatever, they don't amount to a hill of beans compared with that guy. He was extraordinary. A phenomenon. I haven't discovered anything else that's had the same impact," Byrne says, even after half a century clearly still reeling from the blast.
"We're too self-conscious now," he observes. "We know everything, and we've seen everything, so what you rely on now is recognising the fact that we're all the same. You have the same dilemmas, and the same messes you fall into, the same troubles. You have the same emotions and the same foolishness that overcomes us all."
In the early days of rock'n'roll, the things that mattered were just being discovered. "There's clothes," Byrne ticks off. "There's music, which is rock 'n'roll. There's love, which is love. And there's life, which is children. Then there's death," he concludes, wiping his moustache as the coffee machine screeches into life once more. "Life, death, love, rock'n' roll," John Byrne says, taking stock as he makes his way back to the McLymont Hall. "After that, what else is there in life?"
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom!

Tutti Frutti, His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, September 21-30; touring to King's Theatre, Edinburgh, before opening in Glasgow next year.

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