Jon Savage continues his search for forgotten pop-cultural gems in the archives of British Pathe newsreels. Here he explains how Feldman's jazz club set the bar for postwar British youth culture

I missed this on my last trawl through the archives, so apologies for stretching the chronology – but this is really great. For once during this period, Pathe gets it right and sends the cameras down to where something is really happening – and then, even better, lets the footage run.

The location is Feldman's, at 100 Oxford Street, London – that's right, the basement known to successive generations as the 100 Club. Feldman's had started out in October 1942 as a swing venue and was one of the very first regular homes in Britain for contemporary American jazz music. During the second world war, it was visited by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Art Pepper among others.

Despite the attempt at jive talk in the voice-over – "London's rhythm enthusiasts of all ages put on their zoot suits and go to town" – the Humphrey Lyttelton Band are not playing swing. The date is mid-1950 and we're already a few years into the New Orleans revival. Retro is not just a 21st-century state, but an impulse that goes right back to the immediate postwar period.

The first band in England to revive the hot style of the 1920s was George Webb's Dixielanders, who came together in 1942. Humphrey Lyttelton joined them in 1947 – breaking away soon afterwards to form his own band with the clarinettist and cartoonist Wally Fawkes. This is basically the group that you see here, in front of a manic crowd of dancers.

In the immediate postwar period, jazz was popular culture. But it was already riven into several warring tribes. Swing had become the mainstream pop of the day. Jazz was waning in innovation and excitement. The New Orleans revival took everything back to basics, stripping it down to a noisy energy that not only inspired audiences, but a generation of young musicians.

Revivalism, however, went hand in hand with proto-modernism – sowing the seed for the pop wars of the late 50s and early 60s. New Orleans or bebop, Ken Colyer and Humphrey Lyttelton or Johnny Dankworth and Ronnie Scott – you had to decide. The revivalists were more numerous but even they had their own fissures, between the purists and the entertainers.

Lyttelton knew which side he was on. In his memoir I Play As I Please, he wrote about seeing an Australian group, Graeme Bell's Band, who in 1947 founded a London club "… for the purpose of playing jazz for dancing. It seems difficult now to understand the stir which this revolutionary and sacrilegious notion caused in purist circles. 'Dancing to jazz?' they cried: 'Whatever next?'"

So the Lyttelton band tucked up their shirt-sleeves, loosened their ties and their trouser belts, and rocked the house. The crowd are young, dressed in a variety of styles – from spiv to art-school and all points in between – and extremely enthusiastic: lost in the music, slaves to the rhythm. They'd all been through years of war: now they could really cut loose.

Naturally, Pathe attempted to put a gloss on this: "It's good fun and good exercise. Rhythm is the only stimulus, as the drinks are strictly non-alcoholic." That was debatable: although Lyttelton firmly states that drugs never percolated Feldman's, Raymond Thorp – in his memoir Viper – states that some indulgers in "charge" (as weed was then called) did frequent the venue.

Not that it really matters. Total involvement is its own justification, as the band careen through Snake Rag – originally recorded by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in June 1923. The dancing is a mixture of jitterbugging and the old art-school stomp. The faces and the awkward energy might be British, but the dreams – and some of the clothes – are American.

It's worth noting that, thanks to a Musicians' Union ban, comparatively few American jazz musicians had played in the UK since the mid 1930s – although Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway had both toured. Many Brits hadn't therefore seen any jazz of consequence live, making the domestic version the only way to experience the youth music of the day.

Today this clip looks like the start of postwar British youth culture. The influence of the New Orleans revival during the 1950s was immense: from 20s hot jazz through to skiffle and then contemporary Chicago R&B (the latter two thanks largely to Chris Barber). This was the music that soundtracked the decade's largest protest movement: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Trad jazz went pop at the end of the decade with huge hits by Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk among others. But despite a great pop/exploitation film by Dick Lester, It's Trad, Dad!, the revivalist fire had gone out by 1961-2 and British youth were beginning to tackle more contemporary American forms. Then would be the modernists' time.