Credit: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad
It’s easy to forget that before the 1950s’ rock and roll explosion, there really wasn’t a teenager.
Not even entering the popular lexicon til the previous decade, the new and emerging demographic of young people lacking responsibility, enjoying unprecedented spending power, and free to rebel against the generation gap alienation via the post-war economic terrain at their disposal.
Before long, rock and roll arrived like a flash bang to score such cultural upheaval, record labels and film studios falling over themselves to capitalise on the teenager’s deep pockets.
This was a potent US phenomenon. As the Brits were still stuck in the grey lumber of austerity and the War’s smouldering ruins, America glowed from across the Atlantic as the Mecca of youth culture, all the rock and roll heroes and glamorous Hollywood stars teasing a Technicolour window of fascination from kids across the country. As always, there was a quiet before the storm. Before Bill Haley and his Comets packaged the Black man’s R&B to mainstream white audiences, the charts were an infinitely more pedestrian affair.
To this day, Italian-American crooner Frankie Laine still stands as the record holder with the single that spent the most weeks at the top of the UK charts, 1953’s ‘I Believe’, enjoying number one for a whopping 18 non-consecutive weeks.
Written in mind for the plight of the Korean War but panged with an extra pertinence with the Second World War still in recent memory, Laine and Frank Weston’s orchestra rendition was carried to the centre of the British musical affection, pushed to the top by sentimentality yet to be countered by rock’s plugged-in attack.
Which unlucky number spent eight weeks stuck in second place?
Riding a similar wave of stirring easy listening, popular light orchestral composer Frank Chacksfield signed with Decca and made his label debut, tackling the defining theme of 1952’s Limelight. A comedy-drama from Charlie Chaplin, ‘The Terry Theme’ that scores co-star Claire Bloom’s character would be realised by Chacksfield’s 40-piece orchestra to plenty of sales, NME awarding the piece ‘Record of the Year’, yet, the instrumental was just never able to shift Laine from the top spot, spending a frustrating eight weeks at number two on the UK Singles Chart.
It’s hard to imagine such gentle soundtracks ever winning such unit shifts in the same way again. Easy listening would never die, a fact Percy Faith would discover in the early 1960s, but rock and roll’s big bang towered over the soundtrack boom with cultural primacy courtesy of the teenager’s eager nab of the holy 45 single, setting in motion the rock and pop industry template and trends largely followed to this day.
While Laine’s feat may have never been trounced, it’s likely that Chacksfield garnered a deeper ubiquity in British culture, recording copious amounts of stock music that played out along with the late-night Test card and Ceefax cycles on BBC TV for students and insomniacs across the 1980s and 1990s via the canned music Starborne Productions company.
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