Alan Johnson: ‘Growing up in the Fifties meant music was precious’ (2024)

For Alan Johnson, politics was an interest, but music was a passion. His political career, which would lead to high office as home secretary under Gordon Brown, began in his teens when he became involved in the trade union movement, but his devotion to music goes back to his childhood in the slums of North Kensington in London. He and his sister were brought up listening to Two Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme radio station, and he can still remember his mother in the kitchen, swaying to the sound of True Love, sung by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly.

One day in 1955, his father brought home a box of 78rpm records, which he had bought for a pound at Portobello market. They sat, unplayed, because the family could not afford a gramophone, until Johnson’s mother won enough money on the football pools to buy a Dansette record player. From then on, music was to dominate his life. For the teenagers of today, most music is available at the touch of a button. In those days, its rarity was something to be cherished.

“Those pieces of music were precious,” Johnson recalls. “Most people can remember the first record they bought, and in a sense part of this still lives in me, because when I get a record I really love I don’t play it very often. I hold it back, as if continuing to play it will make me sick of it and lose its preciousness. That’s a product of growing up in those times. It was famine and now we’ve gone to feast.”

He thinks that some of that early innocence has been lost.

“I don’t want to go back to those times — they could be pretty brutal if you were a minority or unusual,” he says. “But what you did have, because there was just a few radio programmes and one TV channel, was a shared cultural experience that people could talk about and have a shared history about. Now, trying to get a piece of culture is like holding a glass under the Niagara Falls — there’s so much of it.”

He describes his passions as “books, music and football. Politics is an interest. Because I left school at 15 and was almost an autodidact, the politics came through an English teacher, Mr Carlen, who saw I loved reading and started to direct it. He introduced the whole class to George Orwell, had us all reading Animal Farm, and he was explaining the subtext of the Bolshevik revolution and we were all 13 and 14-years-olds, at a time of the Berlin Wall and all of that. I became fanatical about Orwell. But music was the passion.”

Johnson’s musical memories go back to Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle era, to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and Johnny Tillotson’s Poetry in Motion. Then, as the 78s gave way to 45rpm records, there came his greatest love, the Beatles, to be followed by Bob Dylan, Kate Bush and Elvis Costello. Johnson acquired a guitar, formed a group and aspired to stardom.

Today we might be recalling the stellar career of Alan Johnson the pop star, rather than Alan Johnson the politician and writer. He formed two groups, and the second one, called the In Betweens, came close to signing a contract. But bad luck intervened when the group’s equipment was stolen during a break-in. Also, he confesses, maybe they weren’t quite good enough.

“The In Betweens were semi-professional and multiracial before the Specials,” he says. “We had this fabulous singer called Carmen, and since there weren’t so many bands around, and they were in such high demand, we could have made it. It wouldn’t have been the Beatles or the Stones, but we could have had our five minutes of fame.”

Johnson’s son Jamie did, however, forge a musical career.

“He’s a far better musician and a guitarist,” Johnson says. “He had a gift, like my father, who could listen to a piece of music and reproduce it on the piano right away. He played piano at army concerts in his uniform with a pair white gloves: it was how he met my mother, and then the band leader Bert Ambrose asked my father to join the band, but he would have to learn music, and that was too much like hard work.

“So this gift has skipped a generation. Jamie’s got it. He worked with many great artists — four Paul Weller albums, Razorlight, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. These days he’s married with two kids and he teaches ukulele to kids and guitar to adults.”

Johnson puts the Beatles at the top of his list of all-time favourites.

“They were a sensation,” he says. “Musically everything we had listened to before was transatlantic. British pop music didn’t bother the American charts — all we had was Nelly the Elephant or Pinky and Perky. British artists had their songs written for them in Tin Pan Alley, and then along came the Beatles. It was not just brilliant music, not just their iconic look, it was the way their music developed in just five years from pretty simple stuff — although if you listen to All My Loving on the guitar it’s not as simple as all that — from She Loves You and Thank You Girl, and all that early stuff, to Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever and She’s Leaving Home.

“They took popular music to new levels to such an extent that the Times music critic actually reviewed Sgt Pepper. So for me, living it in real time, these were our boys, four working-class lads from Liverpool — my mum was from Liverpool — who were just conquering the world.”

Elvis Costello was the only performer who came close to the Beatles, in Johnson’s view, although his playlist includes David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Kate Bush.

“I was a Bowie freak for a time,” Johnson recalls. “Because I was living on a council estate with three kids and was a postman, I couldn’t put that Bowie slash across my face, that lightning bolt. Some people in the sorting office did — and they were sent home.”

In the same way that pop music has become more diverse and complex, so the early politics with which he was involved has become harder to define, and more difficult to engage with. In his trade union days there was only one party to be involved with, and that was Labour — a party now split by issues such as Brexit and antisemitism, led by an “unreconstructed” Jeremy Corbyn.

“What we’re living through now is the same old battle between democratic socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, many of whom are in the Labour Party, and we’ve got the Islington correspondent of the Morning Star leading Labour and he’s not changed his views on any of that,” is the way Johnson puts it. “Orwell was warning of this in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, about the perils of fellow-travelling, because you see some attractions in a workers’ state.

“Orwell was a democratic socialist, like me, and it was always Orwell who stopped me in my tracks when I was in my teens and attracted to this idea of a workers’ state. He warned about totalitarianism, and where that led. In a sense that is still the big battle on the left. It’s more complicated because now there’s less of a loyalty to one party. Politics has become more diverse, but it’s the same old arguments on the left.”

That may be why, these days, Johnson prefers books and music. He has largely turned his back on politics and is about to embark on his first novel. He applauds the Beatles for disbanding, unlike the Rolling Stones. A good performer, he says, knows when to stop.
Alan Johnson appears at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall at 4.45pm on March 24

Eight of the best from Alan Johnson
● You Little Fool Elvis Costello
● And Your Bird Can Sing The Beatles
● A record my son Jamie made
● A Man Needs a Maid Neil Young
● Drive-In Saturday David Bowie
● The Man with the Child in His Eyes Kate Bush
● It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) Bob Dylan
● Poetry in Motion Johnny Tillotson