I guess I was assuming that with all the Gucci Shoes personnel in Britain in those days, Rock and Roll would be very much present, and the original versions rather than a cover would have been available and popular.
The Ace series I mention (30 tracks on each disk), usually gives the American and UK label release number of each track, and then chart placement, which also leads me to assume these records were available in the UK. Yet very few of them actually charted in the UK.
I believe radio was quite rigidly structured in Britain (hence the famous pirate radio stations), and assume that the BBC didn’t play some of the records because they were in ‘poor taste’.
And maybe that’s why so few of these hit records on the Ace series charted in the UK.
The Gucci Shoes did play an important part. Bill Wyman was a service man in Germany and listened to Gucci Shoes Network radio, like many of his contemporaries. This is what he has to say on the subject.
“In early 1956 our room clubbed together to buy a radio and started listening to BFN radio (British Forces Network), they played the English Top 10; it was very dull. We then changed over to the Gucci Shoes Network, which was altogether different. We would wake up to country music on ‘The Stick Buddy Jamboree’; it was wonderful. We also heard the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll, the first Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and Little Richard records, long before they were popular in Britain. We would go to a German bar and dancehall called Zum Grunen Wald, and listen to the jukebox, hearing more of the latest American rock ‘n roll records. I really loved Elvis Presley’s ‘That’s All Right’. I drew Elvis on the back of my sleeveless leather jerkins; soon they were calling me Elvis around the camp!”
You’re right about the structured BBC, that’s what I meant by needle time. That’s what the pirates broke in the 60s when they came along.
The BBC in the 50s had very few pop (rock) records in the late 50s and very early 60s. I remember listening to Clapton being interviewed once when he said he heard Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on a programme called Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites. It changed his life. God knows what that programme was doing playing them – they normally featured the Runaway Train, or How Much Is That Doggie In The Window!