Die Tommy Steele Story

By the time I became aware of Tommy Steele. He was the guy with a toothy smile who did musicals like Singin in the Rain.

Steele was a pop star who quickly recognised his brand of pop will become outdated and soon turned to the movies and theatre.

The Tommy Steele Story was rushed out while he was still having his first few chart hits.

It starts off with Tommy being hospitalised after a bad judo fall. Learning to play the guitar at hospital. Working in the merchant navy where he also practised his singing and dance moves.

Then entertaining the punters at a Soho coffee bar before he meets an agent.

The Tommy Steele presented here is shown more Elvis lite. Although Cliff Richard did that kind of thing better in the 1950s. Richard also had a longer pop career as well as fitting in a few movies in the 1960s as well.

The movie is frothy, undemanding and I am tempted to add heavily fictionalised. Steele was regarded as a cross between Elvis and George Formby at the time with a more of a skiffle sound.

There is a lot of calypso music and at times it is a revue for other musical acts. It was nice to see a young Humphrey Lyttelton.

It is low budget and has all the hallmarks of being rushe released to capitalise on his teenage fan base.

At Tommy Steele survived as a musical performer and was knighted in 2020.

This film was produced by Nat Cohen and Stuart. Levy. Cohen produced many of the most importantBritish films of the 1960s and 1970s as well as this profitable dross. It is somewhat surprising that nobody has written his biography. My grandparents knee him as he was the son of an Easy End kosher butchet. I was able to use this as a way of getting a job interview in the 1970s. I remember being shown into his office and there He was declining on a sofa,no doubt after a long lunch. I didn't get a job.

Tommy Steele was at the peak of his career when he made this film. He made some poor film musicals in the sixties. Half a Sixpence was a poor version of Kipps. I remember walking out of the HappIest millionaire as it was so bad.

A fictionalised account of the rise to fame of surely the most cheerful, amiable and exuberant star in the business, Tommy Steele. There is nothing about a manager trying to turn him into Elvis Presley, but mainly musical numbers, including the amusing Cannibal Pot, though some of the others sound rather the same. Clearly made on a very low budget - scenes supposedly on a ship appear to have been shot in a church hall - I wonder what they made of it in the US where it was released under the misleading title Rock Around the World.

There are a couple of calypsos from Tommy Eytle and his band, Nancy Whiskey sings Freight Train and there's a rare chance to see the great Humphrey Lyttelton and his band performing Bermondsey Bounce, written especially for the film in tribute to its star.

My folks used to have an LP of Tommy Steele songs - I always remember him singing "Little White Bull" but that's about the height of it, so it was quite interesting to discover a little more about the man. He writes his own songs and gets a lucky break playing in a Soho coffee bar where his lively performances start to do decent business. His parents think he's irresponsible but he's determined, and when he's spotted by a talent agent then a record deal beckons. Comparisons were made to Elvis Presley which I'm not sure did either artist any favours. The film does illustrate nicely though the one thing that they did have in common - and that's charisma. Steele had a cheeky smile, a lively on-stage technique and the ability to engage with an audience as he churned out his cheery but simplistic rhymes. He plays himself in this short biopic and comes across as quite an enthusiastically agreeable young man with the world as his oyster. The tail end of the film features a mini-concert with the likes of Humphrey Lyttelton and Nancy Whiskey on stage to remind us, rather nostalgically, of the stuff we listened to in the 1950s. It's not a great piece of cinema, but it has an innocent sense of opportunity to it that I rather liked.

Tommy Steele matured into a very talented stage performer in musical theatre in the West End, on Broadway, and even in a few big movies.

I suspect that this clearly exploitative contribution to 'Yoof Culture' in Britain in the early to mid 50s is at least honest in so far as this was, briefly, what 'the kids' wanted (they knew no better).

But looking at it from this distance (2025) despite the untrained earnest charisma of our boy next door lead, some decent supporting players and the introduction of some real and talented jazz musicians such as Humphrey Littleton; the real issue is that we can see just how feeble Steele's version of Rock'n' Roll was. For one thing it is tinged with the Trad Jazz and the Skiffle sounds which were more popular in the UK at that moment. That wouldn't be an issue if they were adding to or localizing the core .... Rock n Roll.

But it doesn't work at all, because it lacks all Soul. The R&B (blackness) of it is completely absent. So it is just a tinny cartoon bang-bang version of the original genre (Elevator rock anyone?).

It would be another two years before Cliff Richard and The Shadows unleashed 'Move It' on the scene and the difference is huge. Move it is often credited as the first real British Rock n Roll record. And on this evidence I agree.

There are some interesting parts to the soundtrack, a version of Freight Train, Freight Train for example, which leans more towards skiffle and folk, and of course the Littleton contributions.

It is a genuinely interesting bit of social history because these days, US culture has so overwhelmed the UK that people molten reference American culture as if it were ours. It wasn't, and this is probably closer to the truth than nostalgia like Grease or American Graffiti, or even movies of the time itself like Jailhouse Rock et al Steele is sincere and that proves (as so often) to be what allowed him to supersede his brief time as such a phony 'white bread' pop star. He deserves the success he has had.