100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #68 Johnny Kidd and the Pirates – Shakin’ All Over

Released: 1960

Despite eventually selling it back over the Atlantic to spectacular success, Britain’s relationship with early rock n’ roll was an uneasy one. Partially this was the post-war lingered on for much longer, with food and fun rationing continuing well into the fifties, also because there were few outlets willing to thumb their nose at the establishment by playing it, whilst it’s physical manifesation was in the Teddy Boy, a youth subculture who earned a reputation for violence and racism.

Musically the first steps were predicatably tentative, with the likes of Cliff Richard and Billy Fury offering up a meek facsimilies that lacked the movement’s two key prerequisities; rhythym and sex. Johnny Kidd’s first band took up the half way house that was skiffle, but the eyepatch was real, so having recorded their would be first hit Please Don’t Touch, they were supposedly advised by their new label that they’d become the Pirates.

Kidd, AKA Albert “Freddie” Heath, had been a prolific songwriter in the previous years and working with manager Gus Robinson he struck treasure with Shakin’ All Over, one of the first homegrown numbers that didn’t sound like theft. With guitarist Alan Caddy’s walking tremelo in the role of a teenage libido, Kidd and friends couldn’t get any satisfaction, because it was still old Blighty and that just wasn’t the done thing. Over in Hamburg meanwhile an outfit called The Beatles had just hit town, and one day not too far off in the future, thanks largely to them, that stiff upper lip would be clamped to someone else’s.