When The Beatles first arrived, they were seen as a straight forward pop group, but the difference was that they wrote their own songs. The 1963 transition in the music scene was definitely that more songwriters performed their own songs, rather than stars being ‘manufactured’ by songwriters and music publishers; the writers churned the songs [...]
Carl Leighton-Pope
Journal entries by Carl Leighton-Pope
Sex and the Sixties
When I was an adolescent, we all talked about sex but nobody did it. You would walk ten miles in those days for a kiss goodnight and to get your hand in somebody’s sweater was unbelievable. During the early Sixties, at 14/15 years old, there came a time when everybody had a girlfriend and it [...]
Clubbing in the Sixties at The Marquee Club
As a teenager, Carnaby Street and the West End clubs became really important to us. In the spring of ‘64, The Marquee had just moved from Oxford Street to 90 Wardour Street and I got a job working there for Harold Pendleton who owned the club with his wife Barbara and jazz musician Chris Barber. [...]
Song and Dance
Being Welsh, I grew up with lots of music. Everyone had a piano in their house and my father played in that kind of sliding, vamp style which made all the songs sound the same. And everybody could dance, so at 10 or 11 years old, you were taught to waltz and foxtrot. My parents [...]