So was Expresso Bongo Britain's greatest-ever film musical??

 

and has any one seen Gonks Go Beat ??? which just sound like a mad cult random thing (is there a gonks go pop?)!!!

 

http://modculture.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/expressobongo_sleeve.jpg

 

he's an article to read, its v much like the cinema show's show on brit musicals but without talking about Quadrophina and Absolute Beginners

 

Celebrating 50 years of the rock'n'roll film musical

Andrew Roberts looks back on the birth of a hip-swivelling, lip-curling, toe-tapping genre

Published: 13 March 2007 TheIndependent

 

The first real British rock'n'roll musical was The Tommy Steele Story (1957), which laid down the template for the new genre for years to come. The formula was simple: establish the leading man as a clean-cut type who wants to be an "all-round entertainer" and throw in some decent guest stars, in this case Nancy Whiskey and The Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group singing their classic "Freight Train".

 

In fact, Steele was not typical of the new breed: he co-wrote much of his own material, didn't affect a cod-American singing voice and possessed genuine acting ability, none of which could be taken for granted by a hard-pressed film producer of the time.

 

The new "youth" films were often shot in just two weeks, with locations limited to the studios' surrounding suburbs. Direction was by the likes of the B-movie veterans Don Sharp and Lance Comfort. A quick turnaround was vital as there was always the distinct possibility that the young rock'n'roller's fame might be over in weeks.

 

In the cruel but not-inaccurate words of one producer: "Not only can they not sing or dance, they also can't act!" For 1963's Live It Up, for example, the leading man, Heinz Burt, the bass player with The Tornados, is strictly monosyllabic and most of the dialogue is carried by the young David Hemmings. It was feared that Burt's marked Southampton accent would destroy his rock'n'roll mystique.

 

But to criticise such films on artistic grounds is to overlook their charm. The Golden Disc (1958) may boast some of cinema's worst-ever choreography, but it also features the Les Hobeaux Skiffle Group singing "Dynamo", plus the only surviving footage of Terry Dene, the rocker whose career was wrecked by National Service. The War Office stage-managed his Army entrance but any PR value was dissipated by Dene's nervous breakdown and subsequent medical discharge.

 

Television footage of British performers from this era is rare; only two editions of the BBC's The 6-5 Special are known to exist, while a mere three episodes of Oh Boy! were recorded. By the 1960s, Pathé Newsreels might deign to include The Searchers miming to their latest hit, but Fifties teenagers had to endure the film version of The 6-5 Special, sitting through a painful comedy routine by Mike and Bernie Winters, and some very odd novelty acts. But the movie does contain real gems. What other film of the late 1950s can boast Johnny Dankworth & Cleo Laine, Lonnie Donegan's group, a guitar-strumming Jim Dale and two numbers by the John Barry Seven?

 

The most famous directors to cut their teeth on the British pop film are Michael Winner and Richard Lester. The former made his A-film debut with 1962's endearing Play It Cool. Virtually all pre-Beatles pop life is present and correct, from Bobby Vee and Helen Shapiro to Shane Fenton & The Fentones, the Lionel Blair Dancers and, of course, the great Billy Fury. Lester's breakthrough film had come a year earlier with a celebration of the trad jazz scene, It's Trad, Dad!.

 

But by the mid-Sixties, such films were already period pieces. Lester directed A Hard Day's Night in 1964 and sounded the death knell for the entire genre. It wasn't so much that the self-penned Lennon-McCartney soundtrack was sublime, that the script was sharp and non-patronising, or even Lester's direction; it was that The Beatles themselves did not defer to any quasi-paternal figure or make any attempt to become all-round entertainers. They even uttered their (polysyllabic) dialogue with verve and aplomb. Meanwhile, picture houses were closing everywhere and the surviving cinemas were less inclined to endure the expense of a double bill, the lower half of which was the pop musical's natural home. The likes of Mike Sarne and John Leyton in Every Day's a Holiday were hard-pressed to compete with the impact of A Hard Day's Night, but some film-makers persisted with presenting rock'n'rollers as family entertainers.

 

At a time when The Beatles were filming Help! on location in the Bahamas, Fury, one of Britain's finest rock'n'roll singer/songwriters, was performing some stultifying rotten song-and-dance numbers "on location in Yarmouth". The sight of Fury reduced to singing the praises of cuddly animals to a gang of Italia Conti children in I've Gotta Horse is one that haunts all who have seen it.

 

http://www.satisfactionclub.com/images/april-film.gif

 

Worse still was Cuckoo Patrol, but if Freddie and The Dreamers deciding to join the Boy Scouts for no very good reason was not sufficiently awful, there was always Gonks Go Beat. Mere words cannot do justice to a picture that combines the talents of Lulu and The Luvvers, the Graham Bond Organisation, Derek Thompson of Casualty as a lemon-quiffed folk singer, Carry On's Kenneth Connor and the aforementioned gonk puppets.

 

http://www.geocities.com/go_gonks/GoneGonk.jpg

 

After Steele, if the lure for resting skiffle musicians wasn't to become a family entertainer, then it was to be a "proper" actor. In the excellent 1960 crime drama Never Let Go, Adam Faith's performance as a Teddy boy working for Peter Sellers' sociopathic car-dealer was accomplished enough to banish memories of his pivotal role in 1960's Beat Girl ("I don't fight; that's for squares"). And any picture that boasts, as 1959's Jetstream did, Marty Wilde helping to save a passenger aeroplane from mad bomber Richard Attenborough has to be worth watching.

 

Serious Charge was a 1958 adaptation of a controversial West End hit, concerning Andrew Ray's Teddy boy attempting to destroy the reputation of a decent vicar, played by Anthony Quayle. To demonstrate the extent to which Ray is the local bad lot, his gang of louts invade the youth club and put a stop to the table tennis by playing rock'n'roll on the jukebox. Gleefully hand-jiving to an up-tempo "Living Doll" is Ray's wayward but fundamentally decent younger brother Curly, played by an 18-year-old Cliff Richard.

 

Popular belief has it that Sir Cliff's abiding legacy to British cinema takes the form of his two early 1960s musicals, 1961's The Young Ones and 1962's Summer Holiday, but these are far removed from the standard British teenage musical film. The Young Ones was an elaborate Eastmancolor production starring Cliff and The Shadows rather than a mere black-and-white pop vehicle. Summer Holiday diluted the rock'n'roll formula to an even greater degree, with Cliff and Una Stubbs even performing a Viennese waltz.

 

Val Guest's 1959 Expresso Bongo is Britain's greatest-ever film musical, and the picture that inspired Andrew Loog Oldham to become a pop impresario. It cast Cliff as a singing bongo-player discovered in a coffee bar by Laurence Harvey's Johnny Jackson. If the brilliant use of authentic Soho locations and the sight of Sylvia Syms as a singing stripper wasn't value enough, Cliff's performance as the naive-seeming singer is so plausible that many observers wondered if the 19-year-old actor really understood the X-rated script.

 

Best of all is Harvey's portrayal of Jackson, rock'n'roll manager and spiv, who assures "Bongo Herbert" that one day he will "open shoe shops for cash!" Harvey perfectly captures the cynicism of the piece. One of the most prescient images of the Macmillan era is that of a caffeine-crazed Jackson skipping through parked Crestas and Zodiacs crooning "I Never Had It So Good Before", but better still is the film's standout number "Nausea", in which Harvey and Meier Tzelniker dance through Soho as they summarise the nature of most pop music: "When I hear this little bleeder and compare him with Aida - nausea!" Quite.

im not reading all that lot m8...lol..

 

gonks go beat was subliminal though, featuring ginger baker too!

The greatest-ever British film musical was Slade In Flame (1975).

 

Quite frankly, there is no need to argue for another candidate as you'd be wrong.

 

Excerpt from the movie.

 

Like the greatest ever US film musical - The Monkees "Head". This film did the same for their career despite the critics loving it at the time for it's gritty realism of the fictional band "Flame" in the murky world of the music industry at the time.

 

What about the 2 great Adam Faith movies Beat Girl and Mix Me a Person??? Both films are actually watchable unlike some of those mentioned above. Up Jumped a Swagman with Frank Ifield is also an interesting flick.

im not reading all that lot m8...lol..

 

gonks go beat was subliminal though, featuring ginger baker too!

 

gonks go beat sound like something investigating further

 

btw BBC 4 might have the show on again. they rpt things over and over again. my dad was watching it last night.