ianlouisiana Review of The Inbetween Age

The Inbetween Age (1958)

The world was a safer place when there were coffee bars.

[6/10 · 9 January 2006]

The world was a safer place when there were coffee bars.For a brief shining hour coffee bars became the places where young people socialised even if they were old enough to drink alcohol.Because old people didn't go into coffee bars,they went into pubs.They drank Guinness,Watney's Red Barrel,port and lemon and gin and orange.They wore greasy old sports jackets with a row of pens in the top pocket,headscarves,had big handbags and snappy suspicious fox terriers.Then they got drunk and fought each other.It wasn't what young people wanted to do,and no Italian-suited advertising manager had yet thought to tell them that they should. So as our elders and betters sat in a fug in the saloon bar complaining about us we sat in a fug in a coffee bar complaining about them. We listened to Elvis,Cliff,Tommy,Fats,Gene and Bill Haley on the jukebox. Lonnie Donegan was popular but skiffle was usually the music of choice of the grammar school kids and they all sat round the one table occasionally looking longingly at the juke box. Into this oh-so-innocent world came one Terry Dene.Possibly even in a way like that portrayed in "The Golden Disc".However his arrival came about he was soon tackling the Marty Wilde-Billy Fury brigade of 2nd string English rock n' rollers on their own turf.He seemed a pleasant enough young man with none of the danger of Elvis or Gene and none of the Brylcreemed chubbiness of Cliff,or the cheeky cockney sparrowness of Tommy.Largely his appeal was to girls whose mums chose their records for them. It was still a grown-ups' world.They had fought for it and by God they were going to hang on to it."Spineless and spoonfed",TV personality Gilbert Harding called our generation.Our musical taste was ignored or patronised and "The Golden Disc" unwittingly depicts this acccurately. We had yet to discover that money talks,even our money. By the time we did,Terry Dene had disappeared into oblivion,having had his chance and missed it. In the film Terry is so completely dominated by grown-ups that he doesn't even pretend to rebel.He sings some fairly banal songs in an anxious-to -please voice,as if he knows he is only going to have one go round this particular track and he'd better give it his best shot.You have to feel a bit sorry for him,he was called up into the army and promptly had a nervous breakdown due to his being unsuited to the military life unlike Elvis who took to it as a duck to water. As a record of how bad British pop music was at the time "The Golden Disc"is worth seeing for a procession of embarrassed looking acts doing their schtick.Remember,we used to pay good money to go to see them. As a film per se,it has absolutely nothing whatsoever going for it. Within a few years the Italian - suited admen had us drinking in pubs and the days of the coffee bars were over.Now we sat around in a fug in the saloon bar drinking Guinness,Watney's Red Barrel,Port and Lemon,gin and orange then fight with each other.There is a moral there somewhere.