A Good Time to be a Teenager:   I count myself lucky I was a teenager in the 1960’s.  Born in 1948, I entered my teens just as the pop music phenomenon blasted off in the UK.  In the words of a Conservative prime minister of the day, we 'never had it so good’ * and that certainly applied to pop music as well.  Throughout the 60s, popular groups of the day (this changed to the cooler US term ‘bands’ in 1967 as I recall) used to appear in ‘package tours’; one night stands in the large variety theatres and cinemas scattered around the UK.   These were the dying days of variety and touring musical shows, and nearly all these theatres became bingo halls or closed altogether a few years later.  Pop package tours played two evening shows on each date; 6:00pm for the younger fans, and another at 8:30pm.  Each act was expected to do only about twenty minutes, consisting of their 'hits'.  Between acts, the curtains would close, to allow for amplifiers, etc. to be swapped over as quickly as possible, during which time a 'comedian of the day' (there were no comedians back then targeting teenagers) would attempt to entertain the young audience with gags and chatter, until he received a signal from the wings that the next act were ready.  A very hard spot to fill!  Such comperes were really used to adult audiences, and mother-in-law gags, etc. didn't go down well.  The kids just wanted to see and hear the bands - now!  The compere interlude also helped to built the excitement for the next group.  We used to book early for any package tours announced, in order to get seats in the first three or four rows.  I can still recall the thrill when the curtains swept back, the band kicked off at a good volume, and the smell of hot valves and rexine wafted off the stage!  (See bottom of page for info on the famous 1967 Jimi Hendrix package tour).

The show format was always the same: about half a dozen ‘name’ acts doing short sets of about twenty minutes each, with the curtains coming down in between so that gear could be quickly swapped around (groups didn't have quite so much then), with the impatient teenage audience placated during the delay by a second division comic of the day in evening dress. There were always two ‘houses’ or shows, one at 6:00pm for the smaller fans plus their parent(s), and one at 8pm for the older teenagers. In a few short months in the mid-‘60s I went to most of the package tours that stopped near us at the Coventry Theatre, seeing amongst others The Who, Jimi Hendrix, The Yardbirds, Pink Floyd, The Byrds (August 1965: the audience started to walk out early on their bill-topping act, not understanding their new blend of folk-rock), Traffic, Marmalade, The Kinks (March 1964), Manfred Mann, The Hollies, The Nice, Amen Corner, Them, as well as bands not later favoured with a place in the rock pantheon such as Paul and Barry Ryan, Eire Apparent (sic) and my favourites at the time, the US all-girl group, Goldie and The Gingerbreads!

I can remember the Who gig clearly, they were top of the bill. I was in the front row and the previous bands had overrun.  There were six bands and sixteen roadies, about forty blokes trying to set up, play and make way for the next setup.  No wonder the acts overran and things became fractious... It was Sunday and the law stipulated that the front of stage curtain and the fire curtain behind it, must come down promptly at 10pm. The Who had only performed one or two songs (from a set of twelve) when the curtains began to come down and Pete Townsend went berserk, coming to the front of the stage and working his way along all the footlights, smashing nearly one with the heel of his Gibson SG before finally launching his fist (it may have been Daltrey) at a staff ‘jobsworth’ in his brown overall who walked on stage in an attempt to stop the anarchy.  We sat there dumbstruck.  The six bands, by the way, included Traffic, Marmalade, The Tremeloes and the The Herd.  There's a Coventry Telegraph article describing the night here.  

The compere at this show was comedian Ray Cameron, who valiantly held things together between the chaotic changeovers.  Ray Cameron's son is Michael McIntyre, in 2012 the world's highest-grossing stand-up comedian.  In 1993, when he was seventeen, McIntyre was told his father had died of a heart attack in Hollywood.  In fact, he committed suicide by shooting himself due to his career faltering.  In 2010, McIntyre released his autobiography, 'Life and Laughing: My Story'.  It was after that his mother told him the truth about his father's death.

What seemed like a never-ending stream of new bands assailed our young, newly-liberated teenage ears, each bringing their own take on a potent mixture of happy pop and blues. And boy was it loud! Unlike today, we could genuinely say we’d never heard anything like it before, with bands vying with each other to break new ground. Ok, the music business being what it is (and was then), there was also a flood of me-too rubbish and un-original tripe as get-rich-quick entrepreneurs rushed to cash in on the 'beat boom' which they firmly believed was a passing fad, so they wanted to make as much money from it as they could.  But there’s no doubt the ‘60s gave us a plethora of truly original pop and rock music unequalled before or since.  We had no idea that things would progress as they did, and how much amazing music was yet to come.  And I was there.  The Coventry Theatre declined in the 1970s due to the national decline in interest in touring plays and variety shows.  After a steady decline and various attempts to save it, the art deco building was demolished in 2002.  

*  Harold MacMillan was mocked for saying that phrase in a speech 1957, but two years later he led the Conservativesand to a general election victory with an increased majority.  In hindsight, he was right.  (Everything's relative...)  Britain came out of WW2 bankrupt and the 1950s were grim, but at the dawn of the technicolour 60s, things were improving rapidly.   

Photo Left: Me, posing in my bedroom in 1967 with my first electric guitar a 'Hofner Galaxie' and first acoustic guitar, a Futurama?  You can just see bottom left the tiny amplifier I bought with the Galaxie, which soon proved very inadequate for gigs!