CAT STEVENS has been back into the studio and is ready to release his first new album for almost 30 years. Good news. I like the music of Cat Stevens — Teaser and the Firecat, Tea for the Tillerman and all that.
Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s mosque and community affairs committee, does not share my reaction. Cat Stevens has spent much of the last three decades as Yusuf Islam, a leading British Muslim and the sheikh is concerned about his recording activity. “My personal view,” said Mogra, “is that the only music that should be permitted is the voice and the drum.”
Now, I understand the voice. But the drum? Why the drum? “You can carry on, Ringo. The rest of you, stop.” And there are so many grey areas. The cymbal? The triangle? And if voice is permissible, what is the position on Billy Bragg?
You don’t have to be a religious figure to have a strong reaction to pop music, of course. A couple of weeks ago, in an article you couldn’t make up if you were writing a sitcom on why-oh-why columnists, Simon Heffer expressed his dismay that instead of listening to Chopin and Shostakovich, David Cameron was “choosing to rot his brain by listening to hideous pop music of the sort favoured by acne-flecked youths half his age”.
That these remarks will appear risible to the vast majority of people even vaguely in Heffer’s age group (he is 45) is, strangely enough, an indication that he and Mogra are on to something. You do not have to concur with the sheikh that pop music should be forbidden because it “has many associations with dance, nudity and taking drugs” to agree that rock music has profoundly changed our culture. In both good and bad ways rock music has helped to shape the modern era.
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Tomorrow Channel 4 will be screening Tony Blair Rock Star, a “documentary” recording the Prime Minister’s teenage enthusiasm for rock music and his desire to make a living in the pop industry. I’ve placed the word documentary in inverted commas because straight, and reasonably fair, interviews with Mr Blair’s contemporaries are intercut with an impersonation of him as a teenager designed to make him look entirely ridiculous. The drama sections are comic fantasy, only loosely related to the evidence the film makers collected. The aim is to belittle the Prime Minister. As Channel 4 put it: “Blair is portrayed as fame-obsessed, someone who had no interest in politics but forever craved the limelight.”
The comedy element in the film was diverting, but was also a shame. Far from being ludicrous, Tony Blair’s attraction to the music and the glamour of the rock world is a central reason why he has been such a great political success and understands so well the country he is leading. A really worthwhile documentary would have made this its subject.
Tony Blair was born in May 1953. That summer a truck driver called Elvis Presley dropped into the Memphis Recording Studios to make his first record — a birthday present for his mother. The next year Alan Freed, a New York DJ, appropriated black slang for sexual intercourse and popularised the term “rock and roll”. Throughout Blair’s childhood, the popularity of American “sexy music” (as the Daily Mail termed it) continued to rise. In 1956 a film based on Bill Haley’s hit Rock Around the Clock caused riots in some cinemas.
Yet this American invasion was only the beginning of the rock revolution. In the early 1960s, two significant changes took place. The first was the shift away from professionalism. It was an important moment when, in late 1962, the Beatles rejected a tune by a jobbing songwriter in favour of releasing one of their own compositions as their first record. The rest of the decade saw the development of what critic Ian MacDonald calls “The People’s Music”, in which the slick acts of people like Haley and Presley were supplanted by a democratic, chaotic freedom in which anyone could perform.
The second change was that rock and pop music became the dominant form of popular music. To do that it had to see off a challenge from, among others, the folk music community, a politically committed clique that saw itself as the authentic voice of the people. But as one observer put it: the public “did not respond to earnest celebrations of the Tolpuddle Martyrs by men and women in Aran sweaters with a hand clasped over one ear”.
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The opening up of popular culture to anyone, the strength of American influences, the rejection of a fake Old Left traditionalism in favour of an accesible, popular commercial product, the overwhelming triumph of rock and pop music over all its rivals, all these things have helped to define modern Britain. And all these things Tony Blair rock star comprehends.
How does a boy from an upper-class public school become leader of the working-class movement and attract the middle class to its cause? By seeing that popular culture, and particularly popular music, had changed society irrevocably, breaking class barriers, altering accents, doing away with formality. How does a boy without a political history rise to political greatness? By realising that this is a non-ideological age and that mass entertainment carries all before it. The ambition to be a rock star is far more common than the desire to be a statesman.
Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent history of the period, Never Had It So Good, records an encounter that took place as filming finished for a 1960s chat show. One of the guests, Enoch Powell, made his way purposefully towards another, the rock performer Bill Haley, and asked to shake his hand. Why did you want to do that, he was asked. “Surely the answer must be obvious,” Powell replied. “He is the most influential character of our age.”
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk