Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

On the first Sunday of each month, at 4 p.m. GMT, a small but significant ritual is enacted in homes up and down the country. Loose-limbed, chic, sexy, in jeans and short flared skirts, part of the youth of the nation waits in easy yet expectant silence for the hour to strike. Hundreds of hands are poised above the pick-ups of expensive gramophones. There is, I like to think, a sinking to teenage knees, or at least a straightening of backs, a spreading of skirts, small gestures towards decorum. Needles are lowered to discs, giving a short sibilant warning that music is about to begin. And then — and then Elvis Presley’s record of the month. Silence, please: communion is in progress. Or, as Elvis Monthly puts it, naming the record to be played: ‘All Elvis fans are drawn together by playing a certain Elvis record.’

     Although it claims a circulation of 6o,ooo and a readership of 200,000, Elvis Monthly is not, I suspect, widely read by subscribers to The London Magazine. Perhaps it should be. It is edited, rather surprisingly, from Derbyshire, and across the top of the cover is written ‘Always 100% Elvis’, rather as the Daily Mail has ‘For Queen and Commonwealth’. It is a commercial magazine, available at bookstalls for a shilling, and has nothing to do with the official Elvis Presley Fan Club’s monthly bulletin (which gets its material ‘personal from El to us’). Commercial and unofficial though it is Elvis Monthly is full of fascinating information. In the latest issue to hand, for instance, under the heading ‘Here, There and Elviswhere’, one learns that ‘The New Musical Express Awards have been announced, and Elvis takes No. 1 Spot as World’s Musical Personality with 6 1/2 thousand more points than his nearest rival, and top award for the World’s Male Singer, polling over three times more votes than Cliff Richard, second place.’ This won’t surprise Elvis fans, of course, and probably not even Cliff Richard’s fans, patriotically rooting for an English boy. But an interview between Elvis Monthly’s editor and Elvis himself was full of surprises:

     ‘“Malta is probably the strongest Elvis country in the world,” I informed him. “Percentage-wise to population, that is.”

     “Malta,” Elvis ruminated. “That’s a small island in the Mediterranean, isn’t it?”

     ‘I said it was.’

     Yes, Malta may be a small island, but it goes big for Elvis: and so do Finland, Australia, Eire, Malaya, Iceland and Britain. His fan clubs range from the Elvis Presley Golden Platters (Sunshine Chapter) of Houston, Texas, to the Futurist Elvis Presley Fan Club of Stoke-on-Trent. The official Fan Club in London claims a membership of 12,000. His face, with black smudges under the eyes, slack cheeks, an air of sexual insolence, looks out of countless magazines every month, scowling, smiling, contemptuous, indifferent, occasionally abandoned, perpetually popular. Almost every time he cuts a disc, whether a rock number or a ballad, it sells the million copies required to become a golden record. Whereas most songs work their way up the popularity charts, Elvis’s enter at number one — and stay there. His films draw people to the otherwise emptying cinemas, and it doesn’t matter whether he sings in them or not. Other pop-singers come and go, other actors make and break reputations: Elvis goes imperturbably on.

     In a market as fiercely competitive as that of the pop-song, Elvis’s survival is remarkable. Not that it has always been certain. Only last summer Angus Wilson found support in the ‘Live Letters’ column of the Daily Mirror when he complained in the Observer that Elvis was going soft and not singing rock numbers any more. There had been two films running in which Elvis’s singing was largely confined to the theme songs behind the credits. And he certainly wasn’t singing rock the way he had sung it before the United States Army got hold of him in 1958. But the alarm was false: his popularity remains as high as ever. Yet Mr Wilson was right when he claimed that there had been a change in Elvis. The change is, I think, absolutely deliberate. Presley’s manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, knows exactly what he is doing.

     Dance-fad devotees, now recovering from their slipped discs, wrenched kneecaps, heart attacks and other side-effects of the invasion of Chubby Checker and the Twist, may well wish that rock ‘n’ roll was still being denounced in the favourite newspapers of Middle Age Incorporated. (Middle Age Incorporated provides the stooge watch committee necessary to every rock movie:
the hero and heroine argue with it, incontrovertibly and earnestly, that their gyrations are no more obscene, silly, delinquent or demoralizing than the antediluvian Black Bottom or Charleston. After token resistance, MAI surrenders: at times it even joins rather self-consciously in.) But rock is over now — or at least so transformed as to be barely recognizable. Few people even remember Bill Haley and his Comets. Yet Elvis, King of Rock, is still very much with us. The explanation is that there are now two Elvises, Mark I and Mark II, both of whom derive from the Original Elvis. (Elvis’s twin brother Jesse died at birth, incidentally.)

     The Original Elvis was refractory, mean, frequently lacking one or both parents, misunderstood, lonely, a potential (if not always actual) juvenile delinquent. He was discovered and saved by an older woman, who handed him on, at the end of the movie, to sweetness and innocence and romance in the shape of a girl more his own age (e.g. Loving You, King Creole). He acted like Marion Brando with swivel hips, and had a prodigious talent for projecting sexuality without ever quite sinking to straight bumping and grinding. His major successes on record were numbers with a heavy beat: ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Treat Me Nice’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’. It was this mean rocking JD personality that I call Mark I.

     At the same time, and ignored by those who dug Mark I, the title-songs of his first two films were both slow sentimental ballads — ’Love Me Tender’ and ‘Loving You’. (‘Love Me Tender’ is, in fact, simply the old song ‘Aura Lee’ with new words.) Underneath the JD lurked Mark II, the nice, decent, clean All-American boy who just needed one break to make good. It is Mark II who gets the nice, decent, clean All-American girl in the last reel. The plots of the four films made before Elvis went into the Army were all to do with the struggles of this decent Mark II against the unfair circumstances which encourage the Mark I in him to break loose. Provocation is enormous, violence is resorted to: but Mark II always wins in the end. (Even in the post-Army ‘soft’ films, even in Blue Hawaii, in which Mark I has been abolished, a fight scene remains a basic ingredient of the plot: Mark II is perfectly capable of using his fists when required.) Thus in the Original Elvis there was a very successful King of Rock and an equally successful ordinary boy next door trying to live with him. Archetypal of this split personality and its problems was the scene in Loving You in which the corniest of corn-belt imagery was used to suggest virtue (a white cockerel, small children, country life): into this happy scene came the older woman (Lizabeth Scott) in a white Cadillac, representing vice, the sour smell of success, a career as a pop-singer. Mark II detached himself unwillingly from the arms of Dolores Hart and got into the Cadillac to become Mark I but not for ever.

     Four Elvis films have appeared in Britain since his release from the Army. Two are musicals, two almost straight melodramas. Mark I is in complete command in the latter — Flaming Star and Wild in the Country (which has a screen-play by Clifford Odets, believe it or not). Mark II is undisturbed in the musicals, G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii. Meanwhile, the singer keeps up a fair percentage of rhythmical numbers as well as ballads, and occasionally the cinematic Mark II is allowed to cut loose with a really swinging number — e.g. ‘Slicin’ Sand’ in Blue Hawaii. Though this lacks meanness, and so would probably displease some of Elvis’s critics, it has a blatant sexuality up to anything in the older movies: wearing nothing but a shirt and a revealing bathing costume, Elvis leads some equally undressed girls in a bout of ferocious sand-kicking into the eye of the camera. Out of the context of clubs and one-nightstands, Elvis’s particular gifts appear to be innocently exploited by a Hawaiian setting. I’m not at all sure that the innocence of the setting doesn’t make the performance more exciting. There are similarly ‘innocent’ scenes in the film — a good deal of underwater kissing, for instance, and ducking with clothes on (and we all know why teenagers sit in the bath with their jeans on) — which somewhat undercut the boyishness and decency which Mark II goes in for. One is never, I mean, reminded of Esther Williams. But it is nevertheless clear that as far as musicals are concerned, Mark I is out, and harmless Mark II is in.

     For the brooding Mark I it is necessary to go to the non-singing films. These are exactly like the early movies, only without the music. In Wild in the Country, for instance, Elvis ends up by going to College to become a writer instead of getting to the top of the bill. He is presented as a wild, fractious, louring character without any very obvious virtues except a certain ability to attract women, and an appealing lack of self-confidence. He has given up shaking, rattling and rolling, but he hasn’t given up being mean and a troublemaker. For these roles Elvis is required to act and is put up against competent performers such as Hope Lange and Millie Perkins.

     Thus in the post-GI Elvis the division between Mark I and Mark II has become almost absolute. Some complain about this, others maintain that the fans are now getting twice the value. But whichever way you look at it, there is no doubt about Elvis’s continued popularity, nor about his ability to survive the death of the particular craze whose crest he so successfully rode. And I should think it is a safe bet that Elvis will still be at the top of the Hit Parade long after the Twist has gone the way of the Cha-cha-cha.

     Can the same be said for his chief English follower, with three times fewer votes for World’s Male Singer, Cliff Richard? Cliff is five years younger than Elvis — still only 21, in fact — but doing pretty well for an English singer. His first big film, The Young Ones, appeared this winter, his autobiography is available in paperbacks, called It’s Great To Be Young, his records leap up the charts. But — The Young Ones is almost mindless in its inanity of plot, and one notices its idiocy because Cliff Richard fails to occupy the main rôle. He is there, of course, rather pudgy in the face, gently attractive, without any strong masculine characteristics except a surprising command of judo, smiling, singing, looking soulful, but totally lacking in dynamism of any kind. He’s so clean he’s like a detergent advertisement.

     But at least he’s made some pleasant records and actually interests one enough to be disappointed in him so far, while Adam Faith, his only English rival, merely depresses one. He looks like a nice kid, the sort you’d like to have a couple of doors away to get rid of importunate travelling salesmen — if you’re an old lady, that is. Sometimes he looks as though a dissolute Roman Emperor has called him out of the chorus line, ruffled his hair, pondered a moment, then sent him back with a kindly smile. Margarine wouldn’t melt in his mouth. His last film, What a Whopper, was so bad that I can only think his manager is desperate.

     Both these English singers are imitators of Elvis Mark II, of the post-GI Elvis. They are said to rock, but they don’t: they both came up via skiffle (and whatever happened to that?) and though they have both survived into ‘beat’ music (nothing to do with the Beats) they both have a long way to go. They could, I suppose, both make it if they were as cleverly handled as Elvis has been handled. Pop-singing is a business, a business of extracting money painlessly from teenage pockets, and at that few men have got near ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. As The Elvis Presley Story put it:

     ‘All the contracts are drawn by the Colonel and are considered classics by some of the best legal brains in the industry. There is no fine print in a Presley contract. As a matter of fact, all of them are printed in block letters at least one inch tall to prevent anyone’s saying at a later date that they misunderstood the fine print. As the Colonel puts it, “All anyone has to do to understand our contract is to be able to read.”

     ‘The Colonel interprets everything Elvis does in terms of “How much money does it pay?”’

     The answer is, of course, that it pays a great deal. There is a picture in Valentine Pop Special No. 4 which explains why. It shows a real gone Elvis, lips parted, long eye-lashes draped over the closed eyes, nostrils flared, hair awry: ‘the monarch of the hip-wiggle’ in close-up, far, far out, and a million fans with him.