1 The times they are a-changin’
In the early 1960s, Swinging London was rocking to the sounds of Jamaican ska while Parisian clubbers were discovering musicians freshly arrived from Algiers, Tunis and Rabat. Young people were beginning to be recognised as a new social group in their own right, complete with their own codes, spots and sounds. Among these young people were many new arrivals from the colonies of the French and British empires. Between 1955 and 1960, 200,000 people migrated from Commonwealth countries to the United Kingdom (mainly from the West Indies: Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados, and South Asia: India and Pakistan); between 1954 and 1962, almost 150,000 Algerians moved to France, taking the total Algerian population to 350,000.
Immigration from the British colonies was facilitated by the British Nationality Act of 1948, establishing the new status ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ and awarding new political rights to residents of the colonies, including freedom of movement. Immigration continued after 1962, with the difference that the next wave of immigrants were now citizens of independent countries travelling to Europe under the terms of agreements negotiated with the newly-formed governments of the former colonies.
Many contemporary artists were part of this wave of immigration, though few chose to speak about it openly; some went as far as to change their names. For baby-boomers born between 1945 and 1960, this was a time of rock’n’roll, Afro-American culture and a certain spirit of rebellion against the old guard.
Let’s twist
During the 1960s, with the consumer society in full swing, rock’n’roll established itself as the music of a generation, the baby-boom generation, born between 1945 and 1950. With the record player, radio, illustrated magazines and television, rock culture inflamed the youth of France and the UK. In Paris, it was the yéyé phenomenon, a name given to it by Edgar Morin the day after a concert on June 22 1963 that attracted 200,000 young people to Place de la Nation in Paris, for the anniversary of the magazine Salut les copains. Meanwhile in London, the explosion of Beatlemania was making its mark.
Rock’n’roll was viewed as dangerous because it was associated with the fear car il est associé à la peur que suscite toujours la jeunesse. In Paris, the police reports written after the Nation concert show the concern among the forces of law and order. In the UK, that fear was accentuated by the ending in 1963 of military service, viewed as a remedy for delinquency. This association of ideas between youth and violence was also linked to the fact that rock’n’roll represented African American culture, perceived at the time as “perverting” the minds of young people.
The London Rock scene
Swaying crowds, concert halls taken by storm, screaming so loud that the music was inaudible, outbursts of tears and fainting fits… The images – and sounds – of Beatlemania were broadcast across the world. Every appearance by the Beatles was the subject of unprecedented media coverage. Front page newspaper articles, special radio programmes and TV shows became increasingly common from 1963 on. Beatlemania and, in its wake, the wave of British pop music, were broadly amplified by emblematic TV programs like “Six-Five Special”, “Ready, Steady, Go” then “Top of the Pops”. British youth eagerly awaited these televised events to discover new groups like The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Who, The Kinks, The Hollies, The Merseybeats, Davy Jones and the King Bees (led by a young David Bowie). All artists who had drawn their inspiration from Black American music (blues, rhythm & blues, soul).
The Yéyé days
In France, rock was born in the street, and was initially ignored by the music establishment. “The wave entered into the suburbs, reigning over the jukeboxes in cafés frequented by young people,” notes Edgar Morin in his famous article published in Le Monde in 1963 about the movement that he baptised “yéyé”. These young people shared the same yearning to stand out from adults, through their musical choices, clothing, hairstyles – quiffs, beehives, braids – but above all through their capacity for ecstatic communion “from surprise-party to music-hall show, and perhaps, in the future, huge gatherings like the one at Nation”, the sociologist prophesied. In Paris, this musical fervour had its very own temple: the Golf Drouot located in the 9th arrondissement. While the big British rock groups did perform there, among them The Pretty Things, The Animals, The Yardbirds, the venue was primarily known for revealing many talented French artists such as Eddy Mitchell during the Chaussettes Noires period, Dick Rivers with Les Chats Sauvages, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc and Vigon.
Music and Migrations
Immigration in London : immigration from the Commonwealth
London was the main immigration hub in the UK. After the end of World War 2, most of the immigrant flow from the Empire was concentrated there. The West Indians were the first to arrive. They are referred to as “Generation Windrush”, after the ship that arrived from Kingston, Jamaica, reaching the port of Tilbury, in the UK, on June 21 1948. In 1965, of the 450,000 West Indians recorded as living in the country, 150,000 settled in London, mainly in the neighbourhoods of Islington, North Kensington, Paddington and Brixton. They were followed by migrations from India and Pakistan, which intensified from 1960. In 1965, there were 180,000 Indians and 120,000 Pakistanis in the UK. For the most part, they settled in Greater London, and proportionally exceeded the number of West Indians in districts like Southall or Stepney. Initially facilitated by their status as Citizen of the United Kingdom and the Colonies, which had granted freedom of circulation since 1948, immigration from former colonies that had gained independence required a work permit from 1962.
Zoom : The Windrush was a ship that some 800 Caribbeans from the British West Indies (Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, mainly) sailed in to come and work in the UK. They were the first to benefit from the free circulation that came with the status of Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, accorded in 1948. The passenger register shows that many of them planned to settle there, and indeed their status enabled them to benefit from permanent residence authorisation. The consequences of this colonial period steel be felt until 2018, when the British government created barriers to recognising the right of former citizens of the Empire to full British nationality.
Foreign music scenes in London
When Ghana acquired independence in 1957, highlife (a cross between jazz and traditional African music) became the ode to freedom. The same phenomenon occurred with the independence of Jamaica in 1962: the contribution made by American music to local mento (Jamaican popular music) gave birth to ska, then reggae, via rocksteady. Once imported to London, these different types of music mixed in with the city’s own scenes, emerging as a condensed pop and modern version of all these new styles. From 1962, the Blue Beat label dominated ska production in the UK to the point that the name “blue beat” was commonly used at the time in referring to ska music in general. The first hit in its genre, “My Boy Lollipop”, was recorded in 1963 by the singer Millie Small. African music had a lower profile and could be experienced when artists, mainly from Ghana and Nigeria, including names like E.T, Mensah, toured the country, and also thanks to clubs that hosted artists such as Ebo Taylor and the young Fela Kuti. A real music scene emerged in the late 60s and throughout the following decade, notably featuring Osibisa, a group formed by musicians of Ghanaian and Caribbean origin.
Mediterranean and international immigration in Paris
Paris concentrates a large part of the migratory flow into France. In 1962, 8% of foreigners lived there, as opposed to 4% in the country as a whole, and that proportion was constantly on the rise: by 1990 the figure had reached almost 16%, as opposed to 6% for the whole of France. Most of all, the capital comprised a diversity of nationalities unmatched elsewhere in the country. While Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians accounted for half of them for three decades, the other half was made up of foreigners from across the world. From all types of social backgrounds, they could be found everywhere, from the high-end neighbourhoods to the more working class arrondissements of eastern Paris, around Barbès, Stalingrad or Belleville. The Ile-de-France region also welcomed immigrants. From the 1960s, some settled in the shantytowns of the North-West (Nanterre, Gennevilliers) and East (Champigny), before being rehomed in the public housing estates of the Greater Paris suburbs.
Foreign music scenes in Paris
Paris, capital of melting-pot music and magnet for intellectuals and artists from across the world, became a hotspot for North African music in France from the 1940s on. While immigration from Black Africa was less extensive at the time, North Africans were already well established in the capital. From the most sordid immigrant hole-in-the-wall eateries nestled inside cheap furnished hotels to the Oriental cabarets of the Latin Quarter, North African and Arab song found in Paris a stage where it could meet its audience. But the tawdry reality of the cafés chantants, with their stucco and pasteboard décors, covered over the more subterranean reality of the music scenes thriving in the Algerian cafés so abundant in the capital. Serving as improvised stages that still exist to this day, these cafes, the only places where the North African worker reduced to manual labour could kick back and socialise, operated as an information centre, offering a variety of services, including public letter writer. Modern both in the professionalism of their shows and in the wind of freedom that blew through those long sleepless nights, these North African performances were definitely among the forerunners of entertainment arts driven by a foreign community in France.
