March [1964] saw the publication of a ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ magazine for sale to the general public. Designed by John Tribe of Graphic Design and edited by Ronald Elliott, the 24 giant pages include six pages in full colour besides the front and back covers in colour. Price 2s; print order 200,000.

Twelve articles have been specially written for the magazine. Here Fusion reproduces a couple of them to give you the flavour, plus our own photographs of the first early eveing show to get consistently in the London top ten.

Our neighbours hate us

It sounds like a dream job – listening to records, but when you know your choice is going to be heard by millions it’s not so easy as it sounds. Here Michael Aldred, an assistant on ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ tells how the discs are picked for the programme.

One of the most frequently asked questions about ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ is how we pick the records that are played on the programme. If you imagine all we do is sit back in our chairs with our feet on the desk while the melodious strains of the Beatles, the Crystals or the Rolling Stones waft around us, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is a wee bit more frantic than that.

Each week the major record companies send us upwards of 50 new pre-releases. In addition, music publishers and agents send acetate demo discs of new songs and new artists for us to hear.

To be completely fair to everybody – ourselves included – we have to play every record, all the way through, both sides, often more than once. Then we can be sure we keep up with what is happening in the music world.

Decisions on a record are collective – Francis Hitching, my boss, Vicki Wickham, his personal assistant, Cathy McGowan and I discuss each record before accepting or rejecting it.

If you allow a minimum of four minutes for each record, it takes something like three hours or so of playing time to hear everything. And that doesn’t take in all the discussions!

So we have mad record sessions which drive the inhabitants of the neighbouring offices on the fifth floor of Television House slightly mad.

When we have decided on the records which we think have the right sound for the programme, we set about booking artists.

When we’ve got everything lined up for the week’s show you might think we relax. But you’d be wrong … we’re already making plans for the next week.

I pick the stars

What goes on behind a show such as Associated-Rediffusion’s ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’? In this article the programme’s editor, Francis Hitching, lets you into the secrets behind his job.

The first person we booked on ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ was Billy Fury. In fact, he was booked before I got my own job! I arrived in the office on my first morning to be told that we’d got a star for the opening programme – Billy – and from there on it was up to me.

It’s a very pleasant job, I can tell you. With a couple of possible exceptions (and nothing anybody says will make me mention their names) pop stars are as nice a bunch of people as you’ll meet anywhere.

Lots of them genuinely seem to like ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ – perhaps because it gives them a chance to do something more than just sing. They pop into our office and give us ideas for features in the programme, or suggestions for records they’re tipping for the top.

Brian O’Hara of the Rolling Stones, for instance, rang up the other day to tell us about some clothes he’d seen kids wearing round the clubs.

Dee Dee Sharp, when she’s in this country, tips us off about new dances in America.

Dusty Springfield and Kenny Lynch are regular visitors to our room on the fifth floor – they seem to like our office coffee!

When we’re building up a programme, we try to stick to some rules we’ve invented.

1. The numbers should be a mixture of new ones and familiar ones. And ideally, we either try to play a record the first week it’s released – or when it’s got into our charts.
2. Besides the stars, we ought to have at least one newcomer – or comparative newcomer – on each show.
3. There ought to be a good, newsy reason for every record we play.

Because ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ is a live show, were able to fit in extra items quite late. The week the Springfields broke up, we reorganised the schedule so they could do a medley of their best-known hits for a farewell performance the same week. When film stars like Pat Boone arrive unexpectedly in the country, we drop a number so we can fit in an interview with them.

I think the stars like this sort of urgency. The Beatles came on the show expecting just to do a couple of numbers at the end of the programme.

But we’d had so many postcards from viewers – nearly 5,000 – that we decided to interview all four of them.

We also wanted Helen Shapiro to sing her number ‘Look Who It Is’ to each of them in turn. But when she ran through the song, it gave us a problem – there was only time for her to sing to three of the Beatles. Which one would we drop? In the end, it was Paul who stood down (with much grimacing and shouts of unfair). And as a consolation prize we gave him a spot on his own in which he picked the winner of the mime contest – who reckoned she was the luckiest girl in the studio that night.

The post Ready, Steady, Go! appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The phenomenon about those early days of Ready, Steady, Go!, was not the teenagers who enjoyed it, but the adults. They, used to write and telephone in their hundreds: protesting, inquiring, congratulating. If there was one word to describe their reaction, it was bafflement. They simply couldn’t believe their eyes.

RSG! quickly became half a musical programme, half a weekly documentary. It was the first pop programme to show teenagers as they really were, acne and all. The reason for its early runaway success (one week it had a rating in the sixties, easily a record for the slot) was that it happened at a time when teenagers were more curious, more inventive, more interesting, more clanish, and more independent than ever before. Their clothes, their dancing and their music all showed this. And the outside world looked on bewildered, as explorers at a complex initiation/fertility rite.

Pre-RSG! was pre-jerk, pre-Rolling Stones, and pre-Carnaby Street. I remember the first night I went out hunting for audience dancers, going into a club and realising with a shock that they weren’t doing the twist. The Rolling Stones I knew about already – I had been at the Richmond Jazz Festival earlier in the year when a handful of people watched the supposed main attraction, Acker Bilk, while simultaneously police and officials tried desperately to control an audience of thousands crammed into the Stones marquee. The new fashions were there for anybody to see – provided they looked at teenagers, not film stars.

These three elements became the mixture which exploded every Friday evening, forcing themselves into national thinking. In its early stages, the teenage attitude represented a genuine popular folk movement, confined not by class but by age. At its best, it was a rejection of commercialism and paternalism; even at its worst it had the flavour of home-made bread.

The criticisms made at the time by adults now sound absurd. ‘It isn’t music’. ‘All that long, dirty hair’. ‘They don’t even dance together’. ‘I can’t tell one song from another’. ‘I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one’. In most cases, the opposite of the criticisms was the truth.

For the first time this century Britain had popular music of its own – derived, it is true, from urban American blues, but still incomparably better than the sentimental product of Denmark Street (remember Where Will The Baby’s Dimple Be?). While the standard of musicianship was lower than that of the best session players, at it was it was themselves who were playing. As for the hair, criticism would have been better directed against dandyism than dirt. And does anybody still seriously suggest that the traditional lot are as expressive as Sandie Serjeant?

More disciplined, yes; more creative, no. It was probably this aspect that most riled adults – that teenagers could happily and successfully get along without the authority of anyone older. Elkan Allan, who as executive producer devised and master-minded the programme, enthusiastically endorsed this. Apart from myself, who was regarded as somewhere between an elderly brother and a youngish uncle, everybody on the production team had to be more or less in their teens. What’s more they had to work as a team and keep control of the programme’s content. What matter if Cathy McGowan fluffed her lines: to a teenager she was was one of Us, not Them. Meanwhile Vicki Wickham, who started on the programme as my secretary and became the editor, gradually developed into a kind of conscience for the pop world. Earlier than anyone, she identified the coloured source of the best of current pop, and held this up as the example which every record producer had to match.

Stories of the Beatles’ retirement were published the same week as the announcement of the end of Ready, Steady, Go! The coincidence should signify something. The end of an era, perhaps. More likely, it’s just that the novelty has worn off. Teenagers don’t dance, dress or sing less interestingly than they did in 1963. But the adults have joined the game.

The post Ready, Steady, Goes appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

THIS week, Ready, Steady, Go! — Britain’s most popular pop show — moves from its crowded, informal niche in Television House, Kingsway, to the suburban, wide open spaces of Wembley Studios.

The jam-packed atmosphere of a Mod cellar-club has gone. Replacing it — slicker presentation, more glitter.

Gone, too, the tried-and-trusted record pantomime of most television disc shows. Defying tradition, Ready Steady Goes Live!

Why the changes?

Elkan Allan, executive producer of the show and head of Rediffusion’s light entertainment, said, “Ready, Steady, Go! started to go sour on us six months ago.

“The standard of dancing. The clothes teenagers wore. Every factor had fallen away from its former high point. Something had to be done to reignite interest.” Elkan decided to cut disc miming from the show. Teenagers had written to say they felt it gave a false impression. Nevertheless, a brave decision.

A decision that set Tin Pan Alley and show business generally a-buzz; a decision that will cost money.

It means a 50 per cent increase on the shows weekly budget: for extra musicians, backing singers, and arrangements. Plus a hefty outlay for new electronic equipment.

Producer Francis Hitching positively gloated as he described it: “More than £10,000 has been spent on the most up-to- date apparatus,” he said. “The studio will be littered with echo chambers, limiters, compressors, equalisers… It should be the most advanced sound technique ever used in a television studio.

“We don’t claim to produce an authentic ‘record’ sound. What viewers will see and hear is comparable to a live stage performance… with all its accompanying excitement.”

New sound. New studio, too. More space for dancers. No more elbow-to-elbow jostling. Now there’s room for 250, exhibiting all the intricacies of the latest dance crazes without space restriction.

Room for artists to breathe. To move about without dodging camera booms. Or wires. Or clusters of fans.

One thing Ready Steady Goes Live! must capture is atmosphere. Their old home, however cramped, did have an informal feel about it. The new studio must try to acquire this spirit.

In an effort to do just this, an R.S.G. Club will be formed. About two thousand teenagers will be selected as dancer-members… and work in a rota to appear on the new show.

New sound. New studio. Almost new compere. Until now, 20-year-old Cathy McGowan has been a sort of perky Girl Friday on the programme. Now she will be in charge.

Nervous at the prospect? Certainly. But bubbling over at the prospect of the show’s new image.

Enthusiastically she explained the R.S.G. Club. “The girls will look smashing and all the boys will be so good-looking you won’t believe it,” she said. “And they will ALL wear the very latest clothes.

“If they don’t arrive at the studio looking smart and up-to-the-minute, they won’t be allowed on the show and they will lose their club membership. We want to return to the style of the early days, when teenagers bought a special with-it outfit just because they were appearing on the show.”

Will the actual pop quality of the show change? Yes, it should improve. Lined up to appear on the new show are Gerry and the Pacemakers, Georgie Fame, The Animals and The Rolling Stones.

All-important musical direction for the first month will be handled by Johnny Spence, who has arranged backings on hits for artists like Matt Monro and P. J. Proby.

How do stars feel about Ready Steady Goes Live!? Particularly about the new feature that affects them — the miming ban?

Dionne Warwick and Cliff Bennett are in Friday’s show. Said Dionne: “I’m quite happy to do live performances. This is the way we work back in the States and it suits me fine.” And Cliff Bennett: “Much prefer to sing live. It creates much more atmosphere in the studio and this makes for a better programme.”

Will there really be a big difference in the new show?

Last word from Elkan Allan. His ideas sparked the show off originally. He’s behind the big new moves.

“Change?” he said. “Certainly. It will be far more exciting!”

The post Ready Steady Goes LIVE! appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.