I'm conscious that I've been more than dismissive about British rock & roll on these pages to date, viewing it more as an oxymoron than a meaningful description of anything substantial. And I don't have to look further than one step behind for a classic illustration of the dilution us Brits applied to the concentrate of the source. That's not to single out Cliff Richard as a whipping boy: Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, Joe Brown et al make up a roll call of home-grown acts who sought to emulate but, lacking access to the historical evolution of the genre, generally only succeeded in creating a surface approximation that only imitated.Of course, there were exceptions. Richard himself provided one with his 1958 debut 'Move It' (which is to 'Please Don't Tease' as Slayer are to Bon Jovi) but right up amongst the cream of the British crop sits 'Shakin' All Over', a song with the tension of a coiled spring. It's not truly innovative (I can hear more than a shade of the slowburn of Gene Vincent's 1956 'Be-Bop-A-Lula' in it), but there's no doubt that there's been nothing quite like this on these pages so far. The basic twin guitar/bass/drums line-up of The Pirates pays dividends in its sparseness, making 'Shakin' All Over' hunger lean with no surplus (Kidd and The Pirates re-recorded the song themselves in 1965 with Vox organ fills that lost far more than it added to the song).
Though both guitarists strike sparks off each other like a prototype version of Television, Joe Moretti's lead guitar runs are as sharply jarring as a crate of empty milkbottles being thrown one by one down a stone staircase, providing a glacial shimmer that's an apt cold shower to douse the ardour of Kidd's out of control libido. And I'm sorry, but I can't help comparing Cliff's earlier 'Please Don't Tease' with Kidd's bug eyed frustration on "When you move in right up close to me, that's when I get the shakes all over me".
The polar opposite of Cliff's polite request, 'Shakin' All Over' is red raw with the sexual frustrations of your average teenager: "Just the way that you say goodnight to me, brings that feelin' on inside of me" - it doesn't take much at that age* and by the time Kidd gets to "Yeah the tremors in my baaaaaack bonnnnnne" we can guess what bone he's most concerned with. This is a woman really teasing and content to leave him howling at the moon so that poor Johnny is left to take matters into his own hands, closing the song with "Well you make me shake it" to fade. A tremendous single and a milestone in British popular music that at a stroke made Cliff, Billy, Marty, Joe et al look very foolish indeed.
* Which reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' - "I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex."
Cliff Richard's 'Move It' usually receives the accolade for the 'first British rock'n'roll song'. But 'Move It' could have been sung by any number of American rockers of the fifties, including Eddie Cochrane and Jerry Lee Lewis, because it has an 'American' flavour to it, at least in my opinion. Not so for Johnny Kidd's 'Shakin' All Over', surely the first real 'British' rock'n'roll song. It is nothing like 'American rock' whatsoever. It is impossible to think that an American could sing it, much the same way as an American could never sing 'My Generation'. 'Shakin' All Over' is a defining moment in British rock history, pure and simple. It stands out like a lonely beacon of brilliance until the Beatles and Stones and Kinks et al come along some 2 or 3 years later, a one off wonder of not just British rock, but rock'n'roll in general. It is as fresh today as it was more than 50 years ago.
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