Now here’s a word that I’ve never used in Classic Bike Guide’s 21-year history; Beatniks. There, said it. And it’s possible, after this feature, that I’ll never use it again. I’ve never mentioned them before, but the Beatniks can’t be overlooked when considering the youth culture of the Fifties.

 

They were very different from the Teddy Boys, Rockers and Mods in several crucial ways. For a start, they tended to be very well educated, well read and effortlessly middle class. And what’s more, a large part of their influences came from the USA, which wasn’t the case with Teds, Rockers and Mods. Yes, they were derivative, and I mark them down for that. And … when they died out, they disappeared from the face of the earth entirely. There are no Beatnik revival clubs; no annual seaside holiday camp festivals that re-create the era of the Beatnik. They were the Tyrannosaurus Rex of youth cultures of the Fifties and Sixties – except that you won’t even find the bones of one in a science museum.

 

They’re gone and forgotten.

 

They were hugely inspired by American Beat novels and poetry – their heroes being Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Kesey and the like. Their music was experimental jazz - often dense, atonal and impenetrable, though their heroes were Chet Baker and Miles Davis. Their art was abstract, and their visual turn-on was incredibly obscure French cinema. They were also political; unswervingly and idealistically left wing, happier with middle class liberals than working class socialists, and they were the foot soldiers of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Ban The Bomb campaigns.

 

So, if they were as diametrically opposed to Rockers as could be – why mention them here? Because without them, there might not have been such a rock ‘n roll culture in Britain, and some of the most famous stars might never have been discovered.
The 2i’s Coffee Bar (I’m sorry about the erroneous apostrophe but there’s no other way of writing it) in the London ‘village’ of Soho was one of the coolest beatnik hide-outs in London. There they would sit over steaming espressos, discussing art and literature – putting the world to rights and discussing lofty idealism. But a revolution was simmering, and rock ‘n roll – which they loathed - quite accidently invaded the Beatniks’ bastion and shoved them aside.

 

The first coffee bar in Soho was the Moka bar, which opened in Frith Street in 1953; indeed, the metaphorical ribbon was cut by the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida. Ever so exotic for post-War Britain. It had the UK’s first Gaggia coffee machine, and introduced Londoners to espresso. Others followed; including the Top Ten in Berwick Street and Heaven And Hell, next door to where the 2i’s was to open later.

 

The 2i’s was started in the cellars of 59 Old Compton Street in 1956. It was run by an Australian by the name of Paul Lincoln, though it seems to have got its name from three middle-eastern brothers with the surname Irani, and was, it seems, The 3i’s at one time.
The coffee bar wasn’t Lincoln’s day job; he was a well-known wrestler and promoter. At the time, one Dale Martin was the pre-eminent force in wrestling and had a virtual monopoly on promoting the sport, but Lincoln challenged his dominance, and – to wrestling fans – he is remembered as having had a huge impact on the accessibility of the sport.  He had several professional wrestlers in his stable, including The Wild Man Of Borneo (shades of Screaming Lord Sutch?). He himself wrestled anonymously as an out-sized masked figure known as Doctor Death; always billed as having come direct from Hollywood, USA – rather than London, W1. He had a huge following of fans but always managed to maintain his anonymity.

 

The Beats rapidly made The 2i’s their own; it was ideal – had the right atmosphere, the right clientele and was in exactly the right place. But there was another sort of customer too; Soho was the centre of the music industry – the British version of Tin Pan Alley (the original of which was in New York, of course – on West 28th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan). And the various promoters and impresarios started wandering into the 2i’s.

 

These were guys like the television producer Jack Good, the promoter and publisher Larry Parnes, and the promoter and band manager Don Arden. As soon as it was known that these talent spotters and deal-makers could be found in one place – and just for the price of a cup of coffee – performers and would-be performers started to drop by. Some of these would be old-style crooners or jazzers, but the ones we are interested in were the proto-rock ‘n roll stars.

 

Men like Parnes and Arden weren’t daft. They were very hard-nosed businessman – and often of dubious ethical make-up, it must be said – who were there to make money, rather than any particular love of music. They were Jewish, as were their Stateside equivalents, and they were looking for ‘The Next Big Thing’, whatever it might be. As soon as they saw rock ‘n roll taking America by storm they were desperate to replicate it over here.
The list of musicians who pitched up at the 2i’s is quite incredible, and how they, individually, came to know about the coffee bar’s existence remains largely mysterious. I guess it was just the grapevine. It certainly wasn’t the facilities; the stage was tiny and was raised just eighteen inches from the café floor, there was a single microphone, and that fed two modest speakers which were bolted to the walls, one on either side of the stage. Hardly a ballroom standard – let alone stadium standard – PA system.

 

One of the first real stars of the 2i’s was Tom Hicks who wandered in from Bermondsey. Having originally been a merchant seaman (from the age of sixteen), he played guitar and banjo in skiffle groups (notably with Wally Whyton’s Vipers Skiffle Group – who were 2i’s regulars) but was seduced into rock ‘n roll the moment he heard Buddy Holly in early 1956. He changed his name to Tommy Steele, and was spotted and signed up by Larry Parnes at The 2i’s – who saw him as the British answer to Elvis. Parnes’s previous experience was as a shopkeeper, by the by, but his shrewdness soon gained him the nickname of Mister Parnes, Shilllings and Pence. In late October ‘56 Tommy had a number thirteen hit with Rock With The Caveman, having only got a recording contract with Decca in September of that year.

 

In January 1957 Guy Mitchell went to number one with Singin’ The Blues, and a couple of weeks later Tommy was at number one with his rather rockier version of the same song. Tommy had all of twenty four hit singles through until August 1961 – putting out recordings at any astonishing rate, nine in ’57 alone. He then moved into acting and broader-based light entertainment, which is where he’s still working today.

 

The other huge name who owes his big break to turning up at the 2i’s is of course Harry Webb – or Sir Cliff Richard as we know him now. That’s where he headed to from Cheshunt in Hertfordshire in 1958, added eighteen. There he met a band who were calling themselves The Drifters (unaware that there was an established American group of that name), who rapidly became The Shadows. Bruce Welsh has said that they’d read that Tommy Steele had been discovered at The 2i’s and so they made a bee-line for the place; ‘If it was good enough for Tommy it was definitely going to be good enough for us’.
Cliff and the boys were signed up by the impresario Harry Greatorex, who promptly despatched the band to their first gig – all of a hundred and something miles up the A1 to The Regal Ballroom in Ripley, up in Derbyshire. By September of that year though they were in rather more exotic territory; they had cut their first single, and thanks to Jack Good’s intervention, the B-side became the A-side and Move It hit second place in the British charts. It was the first of dozens and dozens of hits that Cliff – and The Shadows, together and separately – have seen over six different decades.

 

Joe Brown was another musician who got his break at The 2i’s, as were Eden Kane, Terry Dene (who I saw I the mid-Sixties when he’d become a Christian evangelist), Johnny Kidd, Billy Fury, Georgie Fame, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde (Joe Brown being the only one who insisted on keeping his own name and not being cursed with the sort of silly name that the managers of the day thought essential to success; Parnes wanted to call him Elmer Twitch). Oh yes, and Paul Gadd was another 2i’s regular, who had little success under that name and only slightly more as Paul Raven, then a lot more as Gary Glitter – and finally, total infamy.

 

It wasn’t just musicians who first made their mark at the coffee bar. Lionel Bart, then in his late twenties, who went on to write the stage show Oliver! among others, was a waiter there. And one Michael Hayes was employed as a singing waiter, but he didn’t gone to sing professionally, becoming instead – under the pseudonym Mickie Most - a very successful record producer and record label owner (and keen motorcyclist), right through until his death in 2003.

 

The 2i’s was depicted in the film Absolute Beginners, made by Julian Temple in 1986 (starring David Bowie, James Fox, Patsy Kensit and – appropriately Lionel Blair), but that showed the coffee bar to be much smarter and glossier than it ever was. In fact, like so many similar establishments of the time, it was actually a touch sleazy, very hot when full, very smoky, and if you could find a coffee cup that wasn’t chipped and a teaspoon that didn’t have a forty-five degree bend in the handle you were doing well.

 

Adam Faith recalled how the café stretched out under the street, with old linoleum on the floor and patterned Formica on the tables. ‘It was an ordinary sort of place’, he said, ‘Especially in the day time. At night it came alive though. The first music I heard there was skiffle, but rock ‘n roll soon came along. Of course there’d be all the old guys, sitting in the corners and shaking their heads, saying how all this nonsense would just be a flash in the pan – and how it’d be history in a week or two’.

 

Joe Moretti, who played guitar so brilliantly on Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ Shakin’ All Over, and who was a regular musician and coffee drinker at The 2i’s, said, ‘In reality it was a just a little café in a basement, with an old and very battered piano in the corner – but it had soul and an incredible buzz’.

 

Bruce Welch, who was to go to be the backbone of The Shadows, of course, arrived at The 2i’s soon after he and Hank Marvin arrived in London from the north-east. Somehow or other they knew that this dive in Soho was the place to be seen. ‘It was all so exciting’, he says, ‘An exciting place to be, during an exciting time. Really though we were all a complete hotch-potch of wannabees.’

 

Several people remember the coffee bar as a potential death trap – much in the way that The Cavern in Liverpool was. When a top act was on, the place would be absolutely crowded, and there was no such thing as an emergency exit – just the single, narrow entrance on to Old Compton Street. Clem Cattini, who played there when he was drumming with The Tornados said that you’d never get away with it nowadays, and added that the Health & Safety inspectors would close it down in moments (but despite that, he said, ‘It was an incredible place to play. Fantastic’).

 

The 2i’s wasn’t just a hugely important catalyst in the emergence of rock ‘n roll in this country though. There was a connection with later, and much heavier rock too; in particular, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

 

Soon after the coffee bar opened, Lincoln employed a heavily-built lad from South Norwood as a bouncer; a handy guy named Peter Grant. He’d reached the rank of sergeant during his National Service and was a very convincing doorman – the sort you didn’t argue with. He was at the 2i’s for a couple of years, before becoming an actor, and then drifting into music as a tour manager – establishing a reputation for getting things done, no matter the problems along the way. All the time he kept a careful watch on how others, higher up the food chain, went about their business, and in 1968 he became the manager of Led Zeppelin; hugely influential and notoriously tough.

 

Another guitarist who used to hang around the 2i’s in the very early Sixties was one Richard Hugh Blackmore, born in Weston-super-Mare but brought up in Middlesex. He was classically trained as a guitarist but switched over to rock ‘n roll as a teenager, and soon showed up at the 2i’s. He was spotted by Joe Meek, who used him as a house musician, and then – calling himself Ritchie Blackmore – was a member of The Satellites, and then The Outlaws (who toured with Heinz Burt, Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent). He was then a Wild Boy behind Heinz, was a Savage for Screaming Lord Sutch, and again backed Jerry Lee on two more UK tours. In 1968, still only 23, he joined keyboards player Jon Lord to create a very different sort of music with a band called Deep Purple. After a few years of enormous success he left to play guitar with Rainbow, with singer Ronnie Dio (who died a couple of months ago), but returned to Deep Purple for nine years from 1983 … before going back to Rainbow again!

 

Westminster City Council recently unveiled a blue plaque at number 59 Old Compton Street, which was a neat gesture towards one of London’s more esoteric cultural icons. Councillor Robert Davis said, ‘In the early days of rock ‘n roll in this country, before The Beatles had even been formed, pretty much every act that ever made it big cut its teeth playing here. It’s only fitting that people know that they are passing the place where British rock ‘n roll was born’.

 

Nowadays, not only are the Beatniks long gone but so are the rock ‘n rollers. You’ll hear young men with pony-tails and women in Jimmy Choos taking in marketing-speak about ‘building the brand’, and the advantages of new media for the Twenty First century. Old Compton Street is still cool, but in a very different sense. What you’ll see at street level is The Boulevard Bar & Dining Room, but the cellars at number 59 are just used for storage – and they’re quiet but for the scurrying of mice – no hum of excited conversation there, no hissing of Gaggia machines, no strumming of guitars, and absolutely no Be-Bop-A-Lula.