The Rise and Fall of Jukeboxes

A controversial history and a slow fade out…

It was the mid-1940s, eighty years ago, when the British public first had to get their heads around the notion and the presence of jukeboxes. By the late 1970s and into my studenty 1980s, I don’t recall visiting any pubs without a jukebox; it was a pre-requisite in my world. If you went for a drink, you’d go somewhere with a decent juke box. Then they faded away

The arrival of jukeboxes from the USA in mid-1940s was greeted with joy by British youth - especially working-class youth - but by suspicion from older folk and the authorities. They were controversial for years; until the Sixties. Jukeboxes were considered part of the Americanisation of country, and the kind of thing that attracted delinquents and threatened the morals of young Brits.

The term “jukebox” is believed to derive from a West African word “juke” or “joog”, meaning rowdy; a word used in and amongst parts of the Afro-American community in parts of Southern United States. In the phrase “juke joints”, for example, where music and dancing took place. Occasionally in its early history the jukebox was also known as a “nickelodeon”, although a “nickelodeon” is a slightly different coin-operated machine; playing music, but not from gramophone records.

In 1942, a film called Juke Box Jenny spread the word into public consciousness, playing in town centre and suburban cinemas including the Magnet in Newton Heath, the Temple in Cheetham Hill, and the Tower in Broughton. A comedy with a happy ending, tracing attempts to make a star of a nightclub singer, it was described in the movie magazine Kinematograph Weekly as “pleasantly entertaining in a lighthearted sing-as-you-go way”.

Amusement arcades were among the first sites of jukeboxes in Britain. Jukeboxes were a teen thing. In 1947, Harry Greenberg the owner of the Amusement Arcade in Aberavon, installed a jukebox inside his premises which he hooked-up to loud speakers over the entrance playing music to people outside on the Promenade. For Mr Greenberg’s potential customers, the music from the jukebox was a way of luring them into his Arcade filled with slot machines, a punch ball, and rifle targets. Into the 1950s, jukeboxes were found in similar premises nationwide, including Arthur’s Amusement Arcade in Chelmsford, Gaiety Amusements in Sandown on the Isle of Wight, and Lots-O-Fun amusement arcade at Tooting Broadway.

Milk bars were also a teen thing. Milk was rationed in the aftermath of the war, so a trip to a milk bar was a treat, but, more excitingly, a chance to hang out somewhere, meet up, congregate. And, if there was a jukebox, listen to loud music. In 1948, the Star Milk Bar opposite the Odeon on King St in Lancaster was open seven days a week from 9.30am to 10.30pm offered lunches, snacks, tea, coffee, ice-cream and “a chance to choose your records on our Wurlitzer juke-box”.

Wurlitzer was considered the premier jukebox manufacturer, along with other American companies including Seeburg and Rockola. However, there were some import barriers to the importation of luxury goods from America – part of the attempts to kickstart Britain’s economy after the War. So, as well as the big American names, several British companies entered the market.

Teenagers were attracted to jukeboxes because access to music was otherwise so difficult. The radio played music, but there was nothing like Radio One playing the new songs from the hit parade, let alone anything more unusual. There might have been a gramophone player in the house but both it, and the radio, would have been in territory patrolled by adults. The first big revolution in the process that leads to iPods and headphones was the manufacture of portable Dansette record players and their popularity in the first years of the 1960s; this gave some lucky teenagers a chance to play music in their bedrooms on records bought with their own money.

There was a difficult issue or two surrounding the beginnings of the spread of jukeboxes; the law required owners of premises with a jukebox to obtain a licence to play public music. This entailed applying to the Licensing Committee, which was often made up of middle-aged establishment figures – local Councillors and the like - rarely au fait with even what exactly a jukebox was, and also rarely inclined to sympathise with teenagers.

In February 1948, the law caught up with Mr. Greenberg and his Amusement Arcade in Aberavon; he was fined for playing public music without a licence. The Town Clerk explained the music emanated from “an automatic gramophone known as an American Jukebox, which had twelve push buttons for the selection of a particular recording and operated by means of the insertion of a coin”. He’d been told off for playing music in public and advised to get a licence so he could legally do so, and promised he would. But he’d neglected so to do.

The spread of jukeboxes in Britain was considered a new fad, and a regrettable import from America. They were being described in all kinds of horrified ways: a Liverpool Councillor in 1949 described a jukebox as “an instrument of torture”.

Commenters and journalists and many of older folk in general considered the influence of America on British culture a threat. Voices had been speaking up for several decades, in the face of the success of big Hollywood films featuring the likes of James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Jean Harlow, and, in addition, the arrival of jazz. According to the historian Eric Hobsbawm, when jazz arrived it was recognised as a “symbol of modernity, the machine age, a break from the past”. Trad British society wasn’t ready for a fast turnover of styles when it came to clothes, haircuts, and music, and the rise of premises all sleek-looking furnishings, chrome and glowing.

There’s one role in an older person’s life that’s as traditional and traditional can be; complaining about the music the kids are listening to. Music was creating a generation gap, even in the late 1920s. Ewan MacColl’s cousin, John, harboured a desire to be a singer. He and the young Ewan (then aged around eleven) set about learning some of the popular songs of the time. Once rehearsed and polished, they presented a performance in front of John’s father and some of his cronies. They were bewildered by the duo’s material. His Dad’s friend, Jock, couldn’t get his head round it; “If that’s music, then I’m the Shah of Persia”, he said.

In addition to bewilderment, the older generation was prone to chide the younger generation for being super frivolous at an age when their parents would have been suffering the privations of war. Americanisation was a threat to British culture, apparently, but then so were the fads of teenagers with their disposable income and their disdain for established customs and traditional hierarchies.

Jukeboxes in the 1940s only played ten-inch 78 rpm shellac records, rather than vinyl. They’d also only play one side of the disc – unlike later models that flipped the record over to B-sides too. In 1950, the Seeburg Corporation introduced an all 45 rpm vinyl jukebox and this turned out to presage the future; in America, between 1948 and 1951, the sales of 45 rpm vinyl records from 4% to 20%. In March 1952, it was announced that 45 rpm vinyl records would now be the industry standard.

Jukeboxes were becoming a familiar piece of furniture in amusement arcades and milk bars, but also in several other corners of the hospitality industry. In January 1948, a journalist at the Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner told of a visit to a seafood restaurant where the presence of “non-stop canned music” put him right off his boiled lobster; he called jukeboxes “an international disease”.

Musicians had been playing in pubs for centuries in pubs, sometimes informal singalongs around the piano, sometimes in groups. The Musicians Union in the UK and its American equivalents tended to oppose the replacement of live musicians with recorded music in venues, viewing jukeboxes and “canned music” as competition that destroyed opportunities for performers. However, the music industry was conflicted about the popularity of jukeboxes; record labels would give free copies to some jukebox operators, hoping to get lots of play and boost the profile of their artists.

On the corner of Griffiths St and Nelson St in Liverpool, The Nook had an Irish landlady called Eileen Jones who was known for sporting a variety of wide-brimmed hat from her collection when serving behind the bar. She was also known for attempting to pioneer placing jukeboxes in Liverpool pubs.

Her pub was popular, and cosmopolitan; frequented particularly by the local, and growing, Chinese community. In 1949 Mrs Jones faced the Licensing committee to argue the case for installing a jukebox. First, she had to explain what a jukebox was – “an electrical instrument playing sixteen records”. One of those present panicked, fearing a cacophony; “How many does it play at a time?” he asked. So Mrs Jones further explained that played only one side of one record for each 3d inserted.

Mrs Jones planned to hire a jukebox, and once a week, every Thursday, someone would visit from the hire company and swap some of the records. The actual purchase of a machine was far too big a capital outlay for most venue owners. This arrangement – hiring a jukebox and the hire company refreshing the tunes was the prevailing model over the next decades.

However, the justices announced they were not prepared to grant the application to The Nook. Nevertheless, Liverpool has done OK for jukeboxes since. Roger Eagle installed a jukebox in the Eric’s club in the late 1970s; Mick Hucknall recalls the jukebox included ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘’A Night In Tunisia’ by Charlie Parker; Bernie Connor remembers the jukebox being carried into the club, and the first record played on it; ‘Going To A Go-Go’ by Smokey Robinson And The Miracles; and Pete Wylie says Roger loaded the jukebox with amazing and mostly obscure 50s singles, some immortalised on the Jukebox at Eric’s album. He tells me his current favourite Liverpool pub jukebox is at Ye Cracke on Rice St.

Complaints about loud music and the ne’er do wells frequenting premises with a jukebox became widespread. In February 1950, the Red Rose milk bar in Warrington had its music licence removed after someone living in a neighbouring property told magistrates the repetition of the same tunes over and over again was “depressing”, particularly, said the complainant as many numbers were a “very blatant, jazzy type known as be-bop”.

In the public mind, the links between jukeboxes and teenage delinquency wouldn’t go away. In January 1954, a rebellious and truanting 14 year-old girl in Oldham was given the nickname “the jukebox girl” by local papers reporting on the juvenile courts attempts to control her. The mother called her “ a terrible liar”, her headteacher called her “unstable”. Her probation officer said she was “going downhill fast”, explaining there was one place where the girl was popular; a café bar where she spent all her spare time and money listening to the jukebox. The café bar, said the probation officer, “is a rendezvous for the worst type in the town”.

In Salford in 1958, there was a total ban on juke boxes; the licensing justices refused all applications from cafes and snack bars including from Luigi Sivori of Sivori’s Snack Bar on Cross Lane. This was after Police Chief Constable Frederick Richard Gray claimed that jukeboxes attracted an “undesirable teenage element”.

Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy was an influential book published in 1957. In one particular passage Hoggart joins the generally negative attitude to those parts of working class youth that could be found grouped around jukeboxes; revealing - at least it seemed to me when I first read the book - a reactionary view that misses the liveliness and adventure of the new and evolving urban popular culture which would go on to play a progressive role in the Sixties.

Hoggart writes of the ‘juke-box boys’, the young men between the ages of 15 and 20 who “spend their evening listening in harshly lighted milk-bars to the ‘nickelodeons’”. To Hoggart this is both an example of the influence of mass culture - specifically American culture - on British working-class youths, extending even to the way they deport themselves, in the style of Humphrey Bogart, but also a sign of the hollowness of modern life; “shiny barbarism”, he said, was creating “a candy-floss world”.

There were two successors to the milk bars – one, from 1954 were the Wimpy Bars, selling milkshakes, knickerbocker glories and hamburgers aimed primarily at a young people. Some of the first Wimpy Bars in Britain had a jukebox installed.

By the mid-1950s there was a second new arrival providing a community and loud music for the youth of the day; Italian-style espresso bars. We were ten years on from hanging out in the Lancaster milk bars; now aspirational youth worshipped frothy coffee from Gaggia espresso machines from Italy. In 1954, a possibly over-caffeinated writer in Architectural Design magazine called the espresso bar trend “the greatest social revolution since the laundrette”.

Unlike Hoggart’s milk bars, however, the espresso bars, with its Italian origins, didn’t fit into any simple narrative about American cultural imperialism. They were a sign that the young crowd wanted to break out of heavily defined Britishness and embrace exciting influences from anywhere and everywhere. Coffee bars also marked both the territory and the victory of pop culture, a world increasingly dominated by teenagers.

Music had become a central interest among the post-War generations. Pubs, though, were a traditional space resistant to innovations; the older crowd knew what they liked, and many of them didn’t like Little Richard. Nevertheless, it was clear that sooner-or-later jukeboxes would spread into places frequented by the over-18s as the first waves of jukebox fans jived their way towards middle-age. A journalist in the Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Remorseless March of the Jukebox’, published in 1956 could see the beginning of this; “The public-house juke-box movement is still in its early stages.”

Again, there were licensing authorities to consider, and annoyed neighbours. In Kent, in 1960, West Malling magistrates received a complaint from a neighbour of the George & Dragon in Wrotham objecting to the renewal of the music licence for the pub. Music from the jukebox was keeping her awake; “The music is blaring all night, often after 10.30pm. The continual thumping is playing on my nerves and I have started taking a sleeping tablet”, she told the hearing. Furthermore, she said “I consider that the jukebox should never have been installed, it only encourages the wrong people”. The magistrates heard from the licensee of the pub, who disputed the facts, and was granted a renewal on the condition he kept the volume of the jukebox as low as possible.

In the 1980s, I got to know Phil Mason of Mason’s Games who hired-out and stocked several jukeboxes around Manchester including the one in the Cornerhouse. He explained there was a popularity meter in the machines, giving the operators clues of which records to replace. He was very into sourcing quality 7” singles, taking pride in choosing the tunes. Many other jukeboxes were just stuffed with the Top 20 but places like the Cornerhouse and Corbieres required and thrived off a bespoke selection.

A clever, and unique, selection could end up being the defining feature of the venue. The jukebox at the Central Premier Amusement in Blackpool had a ludicrously good mix of ska, reggae and Motown; this is 1969/70 (the quality of its pinball machines was also high). A few years on, in Newcastle upon Tyne, the Haymarket was a proper rock pub, the jukebox cranked up really high playing ‘All Along the Watchtower’ by Jimi Hendrix , ‘Radar Love’ by Golden Earring, and ‘Silver Machine’ by Hawkwind. More pubs established themselves as the site of jukeboxes worth travelling to, including the Trent House, also in Newcastle, where Sly & the Family Stone ‘Family Affair’ usually topped the most-played charts.

When poor Eileen Jones was trying to get a music licence for The Nook, one of the committee asked what would happen if the customers disputed what records should be played. A reasonable question, perhaps. Jukebox users were quick to understand that putting money into a jukebox entailed buying into a kind of democracy. Out and about at the beginning of 1983, you’d understand hearing the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ was one of those things you just had to suffer in order to get a chance to play ‘The Story of the Blues’ by Wah!.

Also part of the etiquette was not to monopolise the machine. I recall an evening when some pub customer picked ‘Happy Talk’ by Captain Sensible so often the whole room was close to never wanting to hear the record ever ever again. Then the landlord intervened and reset the machine.

There were quirks that could be exploited. The B-side of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division, ‘These Days’, was at 33 rpm rather than the usual 45 rpm. We’d select that, and, as the ridiclously speeded-up song played, we’d snigger like the sixth form dickheads we were.

Vinyl jukeboxes were getting replaced by CD jukeboxes by the end of the 1980s. There were then around 45,000 juke boxes in Britain; 8000 of them new-fangled CD boxes on the wall rather than a lovely big piece of furniture playing vinyl.

But pubs and other venues were beginning to dispense with jukeboxes altogether. The first key reason why jukeboxes took off as an idea was that music was hard to access; this was no longer the case. Music was on TV, and served by countless radio stations. In addition, the dance music generation was growing up listening to 12” imports unavailable on 7” so unrepresented in jukeboxes.

Then the decline accelerated in the late 1990s when the advent of digital music changed ways people wanted to consume music. For example in private, with headphones. And the need for landlords to cut costs in the wake of reduced footfall in pubs; the expense of hiring or maintaining jukeboxes increased, parts for repair were scarce, for one thing. And I guess also DJs were being installed in the corner of the room to provide music. DJs aren’t exactly jukeboxes though. A reminder that lots of DJs don’t take requests…

Some of the best live music and DJ gigs around are in pubs. There are pubs that ramp up the raucousness, especially at weekends. But the trend is much more towards no music, or music very much in the background. An experience more conversation-friendly.

There’s also been a splintering in the definition of a pub. 1980s wine bars were generally considered more refined, if that was your aspiration. From the mid-1990s, café bars, serving coffee and brunch and staying open beyond traditional pub hours, have taken over town centres and trendy suburbs. The gastro pubs had already come along to offer higher end food than a trad pub offering of crisps, toasted sandwiches, pickled eggs and pork scratchings.

Pub jukeboxes blasting out ‘Silver Machine’ or ‘Going To A Go-Go’ are incompatible with menus offering Grey oyster mushrooms on toasted focaccia with a poached egg, followed by Sesame seared tuna loin steak, tempura of tender stem broccoli, with yuzu lemon sauce (side of peas £5). The Duke of Wellington on Bristol St in Birmingham recently took out their very decent jukebox because it disrupted the separate restaurant in the back of the pub.

Jukeboxes haven’t entirely disappeared, although most of them are now touch screen affairs, with no vinyl inside, no whirring and clicking as the needle drops on the record. The memory of the original versions of jukeboxes certainly hasn’t disappeared either; the great Motown selection in one, ‘Walk Out to Winter’ in another.

We’re in the era of a hospitality crisis and Spotify playlists. Unless there’s a DJ - who I pray knows how to set a perfect mood - we’re at the mercy of whichever staff member makes or takes charge of the playlists.

Luckily for me, the choice of café bars in South Manchester isn’t too bad on that front. I appreciate any premises that have taken some care with the music. Perhaps I’m unduly sensitive to these things, but I’m quite choosy about where to hang out. If I’m sharing space with music I like, I’m one rung further up the ladder to happiness.

Just as I used to hunt out pubs with decent jukeboxes, similarly I’m always on the lookout for places to frequent where I can relate to, and enjoy, the music. I sketched out this essay sitting in The Art of Tea in Didsbury, listening to a playlist which included something gorgeous I’d never heard before (‘6 Feet Down’ by Tara Lily and Theo Croker) plus three of my faves ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac, ‘Why Why Why Why Why’ by Sault, and ‘Burning’ by Whitest Boy Alive. I felt very much at home. And I didn’t need to pay 3 for 50p for the privilege.

Further reading:

New book announcement

Before Tinder, there was the Monkey Parade…

Teenage Perverts at the Hacienda