Here's Little Richard

Elvis Presley got there first, but the real rock’n’roll Book Of Genesis was delivered in 1957 by a piano-humping, falsetto-squealing, mascaraed rascal from Georgia…

- Simon Goddard

Rock’n’roll never wanted to be album-shaped. Born at 78 revolutions per minute, its big bangs were all singles exploding from 10-inches of whizzing shellac made for teenagers, jukeboxes and disc jockeys fast-flipping one quick fix of sex and rebellion after another. Singles like the one Liverpool schoolboy Mike Hill picked up on a school exchange holiday to Amsterdam in April 1956, returning home where he played it to his classmate, the 15-year-old John Lennon. “When I heard it,” Lennon recalled, “it was so great I couldn’t speak.” The disc that shut his mouth, changed his life and ignited his inner Beatle? Long Tall Sally by Little Richard.

Lennon’s generation, the first wave of rock’n’roll fans to feel its maximum impact in the mid-’50s, didn’t need the LP, then a strictly adult luxury for lovers of Mantovani priced beyond the paper-round wage bracket of your average British teen. Similarly, the independent labels in the American South and Midwest that wet-nursed the genre in its 78 rpm infancy didn’t dare take on the risk of investing in albums should they prove costly flops.