Piltdown Poppa

At a Royal Film Performance in London this fall, Queen Elizabeth II faced a scrawny, sharp-featured young man with shaggy blond hair lying like a bunch of damp seaweed across his forehead. How, the Queen asked, did he like movie work?

"The lights are very hot," he said, "but I'm getting used to it."

"Aren't we all?" said Her Majesty, smiled graciously and moved on. Thus the Crown noted the existence of the most raucous sound currently abroad in Great Britain: the throbbing voice and thumping guitar of Pop Singer Tommy Steele.

"Maybe I don't talk posh," says Singer Steele, "but I can look after No. 1 all right." He has been doing that so successfully for the last year that his popeyed, teen-age following in Britain has boosted his take to $5,000 a week and given him a taste of the good posh life he never knew back in London's Bermondsey slums. At 21, Tommy is Britain's first homegrown rock 'n' roller. He appears before his public with his pipestem legs encased in garish blue pants, with embroidered silver guitars running down the seams. Tommy goes through all the required hip swivelings and head bobbings as he emits his spasmodic love calls.

Rock with caveman Roll with caveman . . . Stalactite, stalagmite Hold your baby very tight Piltdown poppa sings this song Archaeologist done me wrong The British Museum's got my head Most unfortunate 'cause I ain't dead.

Rock with Puck. The subtle magic of such numbers sends squealing British teen-agers catapulting through plate-glass windows in pursuit of Tommy, has produced a rash of Tommy Steele autographs on teen-age backs and legs. It also sells Tommy Steele belts, blouses and underwear by the hundreds of thousands, and moves Bloomsbury parlor psychologists to long, long thoughts. Wrote Novelist Colin Maclnnes in the highbrow monthly Encounter: "The most striking feature of Tommy's performance is that it is both animally sensual and innocent, pure. He is Pan, he is Puck ... he is every mother's cherished adolescent son."

Tommy was once plain Thomas Hicks, and his mother worked as a "tinbasher" in a metal-box factory. He served for a time as a swimming-pool attendant on the Mauretania ("I noticed that most of those rich necks also carried plenty of wrinkles"), spent his layovers in Manhattan plunking coin after coin into the jukeboxes to hear Elvis Presley sing Heartbreak Hotel. When Tommy retired from the sea, he bought a guitar and sang for his meals in a succession of sleazy Soho clubs. British Songwriter Lionel Bart heard him, collaborated with him on Rock with the Caveman and helped turn him into a teen-age National Trust.

Dance with Mum. Tommy starred in a film (The Tommy Steele Story), followed such stars as Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward into London's swank Cafe de Paris, and told his fans how the posh life felt: "I'm the proudest kid in the world--I've danced with my mum in the Cafe de Paris."

Tommy would like to be posher yet; currently he is assembling a two-hour symphony entitled An Ode from the Ages ("Chopin, Bach--the lot"), and delivering himself of moody, guitar-punctuated thoughts: "I got a strange feeling [plunk, plunk] that H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds is going to come [plunk, plunk], Dad." But Bermondsey is still there beneath the supper-club surface. On Christmas Eve Tommy will open in a pantomime of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In rehearsal he gave his fans his own version of the tale, beginning: "Once upon a time there were three dirty, lousy bears, and the father bear came up and . . ."

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