Shout, Britons introduction to The Isley Brothers in 1959, was covered to good effect five years later by fifteen year old Scottish singer Lulu, with her band the Lovers, but The Isley Brothers story goes way back to when they grouped together in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the early 1950s. Like many black musicians and singers, Ronald, Rudolph and O'Kelly Isley, started their musical career singing gospel. In 1956 the brothers moved to New York, looking to sing their songs for anyone who would record them, and record they did, flop after flop, for a  verity of small independent labels: Teenage, Mark-X, Cindy, and Gone. They eventually signed with the major RCA Victor in 1959, and the first release came out early that year, I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door b/w Turn To Me, but it was the next release Shout Parts 1&2 that was to launch them into orbit. The song is a classic gospel style call and response, yet this one seemed different enough to stand out from the hundreds of other group numbers released around that time. It had what it takes to make it belong more to the coming decade, than to the one it was leaving, in this sense it was a 'cut off' record. As all of a sudden, most everything else would seem dated, this was the new sound the kids want, these are the hip young men, this is where it's at. The Modernists in Great Britain had the same response to the Isley's Twist And Shout, released by Wand Records in 1962. That had a style, a beat and lyrics that were new, fresh and vital, they could only belong to the young, it was theirs, for a brief moment the oppressors were out, excluded, they could neither see nor hear it, it was off their radar. It represented for those with their senses wide open, a metaphysical freedom, a sublime freedom, both symbolic and real, from a world that would soon close in and smother them.

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