Melody Maker interview (1977)

[JimN]

In early 1977, during the runaway chart success of the "20 Golden Greats" LP, and some months before the "Twenty Golden Dates" tour of the summer of the same year, The Shadows were once again in the news, cool and trendy, fourteen years after the coming of The Beatles. For once, the flagship UK music weekly "Melody Maker" decided to treat the act as the phenomenon it was, and to do an interview without taking the p***, as had been the journal's practice over the previous twelve years or so.

I can't find an archive slot here for documents (only for pictures), so here is that interview as the main body of a posting. I have followed the MM's paragraphing (they look longer in newspaper columns).

JN

Melody Maker; 26 February 1977

IN AND OUT OF THE SHADOWS

After a 15-year wait, the Shadows are approaching a hat trick of number one albums with "20 Golden Greats" - a fitting reward for one of Britain's most influential bands. The two remaining original members, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch, talk to Geoff Brown about their incredible career.

Hank B. Marvin, the spectacles that launched a thousand guitarists, was approached by EMI, his record company, with a list of tunes. They were all 'A' sides, all hits, and there were 20 of them. Let's do a compilation album, they said.

Hank, with the rest of the Shadows, that is to say Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett, considered the proposal and agreed. Repackages, especially with heavy TV promotion, have a habit of selling well. All in all, thought the Shadows, it's a sound idea. Sound is what the Shadows were about. Especially Hank B. Marvin.

Unquestionably, he was the first young British guitarist of the rock 'n' roll era to forge an identifiable sound of his own. The fact that he looked distinctive did him no harm either. He has influenced the vast majority of rock guitarists who emerged in the Sixties in as diverse musical areas as the West Coast style of Neil Young to the British pop of Tim Renwick.

Anecdotes and paeans to the melodic interpretative powers of Marvin are both plentiful and unlikely. Roy Wood once asked him to join the Move, for instance. It's now well over a decade since the Shadows had their first number one album ("The Shadows" in 1961) and a similar period since their last ("Out Of The Shadows" in 1962). Now, with "The Shadows' 20 Golden Greats" approaching number one, Hank, Bruce and Brian are planning a new Shadows album to be out in March, and are setting up the briefest of tours for later in the year.

With the sudden explosion of interest in the seminal rock guitarist and his group, Hank and Bruce have been engaged in a flurry of radio and TV appearances, as well as being subjected to the probes and barbs of scribes like myself. They are, of course, extremely easy targets for ridicule as you may have noticed elsewhere recently, yet that cannot disguise the fact that the Shadows spawned a multitude of groups. Their downfall, perhaps, was that they were caught in the middle of the sudden polarisation of the rock business when, in 1963-64, first the Beatles and their Merseyside contingent and then the Stones and their R&B army turned the business on it's head.

The Shadows, by then, were being firmly directed towards a family audience while trying to maintain their appeal to the kids. But how, I ask you, can one accept, as a rock band in competition with the vivacity of the Stones, a group which takes the roles of Wishee, Washee, Noshee and Toshee in Aladdin at the London Palladium, or play the parts of four sailors in Dick Whittington at the Stockton Globe?

So against this tide - or more properly, swimming in another stream altogether - they went on to do more films, more summer seasons and pantomimes, TV shows with "our lead singer" Cliff Richard until their inevitable breakup in 1968 when co-founder member Bruce Welch quit, and, rather than carry on with another, Brian Bennett and John Rostill, the drummer and the bassist, informed Hank that the Shads were finished. Rostill joined Tom Jones until 1973 when he was killed in an accident in his home studio at Radlett. Hank pondered, made some vocal records ("Throw Down A Line" with Cliff), produced, and made some more records with Welch and John Farrar , whom he'd met in Australia. Pleasant records but not, alas, able to boast the distinction of the Shadows' earliest instrumental hits, which had been so inspirational for so many hopeful ambitious teenagers.

Hank has hardly aged. He has not put on an ounce of weight, not a facial line. His face was as lean and creased with a smile in the fifties as it is now. Bruce has filled out somewhat. We decided to talk about each track on the album and place it in the development of the group and of pop music in general. We started with "Apache", their first big hit, a number one and a Jerry Lordan tune.

They'd done three singles previously, two as the Drifters, which they had to change when the American group of the same name objected. Jet Harris, their first bassist, thought of the Shadows. "Feeling Fine" was the initial record. It was a vocal. Then they did "Driftin" and "Jet Black", two tracks off Cliff's live album of the late Fifties. It was a live-in-the-studio set. "Then the third one, by which time we'd changed our name to the Shadows: we recorded another vocal. It was another of our own compositions, a thing called "Saturday Dance", and I think by that time the sound was getting much better. We were playing better and the sound was beginning to sound like "The Shadows Sound", definitely beginning to get recognisable," says Hank. "Saturday Dance" was almost a hit. "Then after that we got into a situation, I suppose laziness really ... we should have been writing and trying to follow up. Getting in quickly with something else would have been the right thing but we didn't have anything at all. No material from either outside or us."

Several months went by, they did a tour with Cliff in the States for six weeks followed by a British tour of similar length. "On the tour was Jerry Lordan, who was a singer-songwriter. He'd had quite a bit of chart success with songs for other people. The one he had then was 'Who Could Be Bluer'. Well, on the road, we were talking to Jerry about the quandary we were in." Not only did they have no material, says Hank, at that stage they didn't know whether to opt for a vocal or instrumental direction. "It really depended on the quality of the material we found."

Lordan immediately "got out his ukulele" said Hank. When no punchline followed, he went on. "Jerry used to write using the ukulele, which was very unusual". He played them an instrumental which he'd already given to Bert Weedon, who had done nothing with it. Besides, says Hank, Lordan didn't like Bert's version. They liked Lordan's tune, played it to Norrie Paramor, their producer, who felt likewise, and they cut it, took "Quartermasters Stores", potentially an A-side, and put it out on the B-side of "Apache".

Pre-release reaction was so good that Paramor told them to get a manager at once and recommended Frank Ifield's manger, Peter Gormley, who took them on and manages them to this day. Later, the Shadows introduced Cliff to Gormley and he took on the singer's career as well.

How far, I wondered, had Hank's guitar sound been developed before "Apache"? Had he been using tremelo long? He had. "The first Stratocaster I had I got in '59. Before that I had an Antoria, no tremelo on, very cheap guitar, the one we used on nearly all records until the middle of '59. The first record that used the Strat on was 'Saturday Dance' and Cliff's second album". "You can tell the difference almost immediately. Also, I had the echo box and that sound started to develop".

The Stratocaster had been imported directly from the States. "You see," continued Hank, "you couldn't get American instruments here, not new ones anyway. Cliff ordered this one and paid for it. It was his guitar really, but for me to use. The reason it came about was that we knew James Burton who played on Ricky Nelson's records and played a Stratocaster, and we assumed, when we got the brochure, that it must be the most expensive Fender which was the Strat with the tremelo on - gold plated hardware and all that. It wasn't in fact. He had a tatty old Telecaster!"

The Shad's sound, however, didn't fully develop until they got the echo box, a matter of weeks after the arrival of the brand new Strat. "Got to use the tremelo, it was like a toy at first, but that was it. We were off, without really realising that we were developing a distinctive sound. It was just accidental in that sense."

Second track on the album, and their second hit, in November 1960 (it got to number two) was "Man Of Mystery", a Michael Carr song. Bruce bursts into a rendition of "South Of The Border," a Carr chestnut. It was a demo, says Hank. "After 'Apache', we suddenly got a pile of demos coming in, most of them with Western names - 'Cowboy' and 'Spurs', 'Indian', 'Red Indian', 'Big Chief'. Things like that. And this was one of them." "We tried to be flash" says Bruce, "we tried to record late at night. In the early days it was always a three-hour session but ten to one or two to five." At the time they were playing a season at the London Palladium, three shows a day, and then went into the studios at midnight. "Really groovy," says Bruce, "we were cool cats. 'This is how they REALLY make it', you know. And we were just knackered out. we just started falling asleep at about one o'clock." "We'd done three shows in the day and after those two evening shows ...... it got silly! We were making so many mistakes," says Hank.

"In your record contract you had to finish three titles in three hours, and usually we would do three and come up with two hits out of three, two "A" sides, which was amazing," remembers Bruce, "when you compare it with modern day recording where people are going in for months. We used to come out with two hits in one session. Obviously, it was very simple, no over-dubbing, it was direct recording".

At that time, during the 1960 Palladium run, the Shadows were just backing Cliff. They didn't have their own set, however brief and cursory. "It just shows you how showbusiness was then," says Bruce. "We started the show in May or June and we came to the situation where we were still Cliff's backing group and 'Apache went to number one in August, I think. The show had set a format and they wouldn't change it. We had the number one record in the country for six weeks and we couldn't play it on the show".

To add insult to injury, the release of the Shadows' first hit in the States was so totally mis-handled that it flopped miserably, and later a Danish guitarist with a more high-powered record company at the time, released a cover version of "Apache" which shot to number one. "Sold about two million copies. A bit of a choker," says Bruce, with delicate restraint. "I mean, the same thing almost happened to the Beatles," says Hank. "They had three big hit singles, the first three big hits, which did nothing." He adds that it wasn't until a year later that, following a massive promotion campaign, the Beatles succeeded in the States. "It's a pity because I think that we could have had a lot of success there, thinking in terms of Americans who've seen us working on the Continent and just can't work out why we haven't made it in the States."

"The Frightened City", their fourth hit, was a theme tune to a film, a type of material source which gave them several hits. Their producer, Paramor, wrote it. Their version didn't actually appear in the film says Hank, though Paramor cleverly "managed to make it sound as much like us as possible." "We arranged it ourselves, we put the introduction on the theme but the basic melody was very strong."

By now, of course, it is mid-1961 and Shadows soundalikes are proliferating. It worried them at first, says Hank, because "some of these groups were possibly better musicians than us and our success might be very short-lived. But, in fact, as always seems to happen, if someone gets in with something first, and they've got the appeal and the sound to sustain it, the copyists come up, and although they might be better singers and musicians technically, the public doesn't really want to know. They want the original article."

Of the American instrumental groups of the day, the Ventures were their hottest commercial competition, but, despite hits with "Walk Don't Run" (which they'd offered to the Shadows before their own version was released in Britain) and "Perfidia", their impact was minimal. They wouldn't consider covering an American hit then, says Hank. "It was better that we released our own original records which no-one else had done. To me it somehow seemed more important."

Their toughest British competition was Joe Meek's Tornados, whose "Telstar" sold something like three million copies but who couldn't last more than three follow-up hits ("Globtrotter", "Robot" and "Ice Cream Man"). "Apart from that," says Bruce, "I don't think there was any competition, certainly not instrumentally. You never came across a group that had ten or more hits on the trot. Like you mentioned the Surfaris. Great record ("Wipe Out") at the time but you never heard them again."

The eighth hit was "Guitar Tango", and there was a great to-do about it. "Yes," smiles Hank, "it was to do with the acoustic guitar. I don't think people said we'd actually sold out. The opinion was that we had a formula, a distinctive sound on the electric guitar, which we dropped. So when someone put the record on, they wouldn't know who it was. That was the point. 'You've blown it!' In fact it was a big hit."

They did two arrangements of "Guitar Tango", using the suggestion of Cliff's road manager, Mike Connolly, to use Spanish-sounding cornets, and Paramor scored strings. A large orchestration for the group especially as there was no multi-tracking in those days. "We tended to look at reviews and things, and get very upset if they were against us .... perhaps there was a feeling that they might be right and maybe we had made a mistake. But obviously when the record proved to be successful ...."

Their fifth hit was "Kon Tiki", another Mike Carr tune. Bruce contained himself and did not sing "South Of The Border" again. Like the Tornados' "Telstar", it was a topical title. "What seemed to be a good thing at that time was that Michael Carr had written these songs like "South Of The Border", 20 years before and could still come up with current melodies at the time. He just wrote good melodies." Wasn't it that the melody was helped by the then modern arrangement. The Shadows, surely, eventually did "South Of The Border" on an album, didn't they? They did.

Their B-sides often attracted much attention - mostly due to their conscious "silliness" - "What A Lovely Tune", for example, which featured Brian Bennett on The Spoken Word. "A lot of those things kind of happened in the studio. We'd fool around, there'd be a sort of silly melody and we might think, as in this case, 'It's pretty cute'. But then you'd realise it's a cute melody but you don't want to do it as a straight melody and you fool around and eventually it takes shape," says Hank. It sounds rather haphazard. "Some of our B-sides" says Bruce, "became really quite famous without being hits. Maybe it was because of our humour and crazy titles. I mean like '36-24-36'. People really got into that. That was supposedly inspired by a curvaceous secretary at Gormley's office. "Very likely", says Bruce. "All kinds of rumours go about; I think it just seemed a good title at the time," explains Hank.

They say they weren't aware of being in the vanguard of a movement, of being influential, until they started travelling, and in Bruce's words "saw all the groups that were obviously imitating our ideas, especially things like the steps and lead guitarists wearing Hank's glasses even if they didn't need them - which definitely happened." The much imitated steps had their roots in a concert which Bruce and Hank went to not long after they arrived in London from Newcastle. It was in 1958 and Jerry Lee Lewis was playing the Kilburn State. On the bill was an American group, the Trenniers, who had Fender bass, drums, piano, sax and three or four singers. "The bass player, the sax and the singers used to work as a front line, doing movements like a lot of the American vocal groups do," Hank explains. "We'd never seen anything like it at the time and it obviously stuck in our minds." For the first few months as Cliff's backing group "what we were doing was pretty much what all the groups were doing , which was just leaping around the stage and throwing yourself on your knees, jumping on the piano, lying on your back and kicking your legs in the air. All the posing, rock 'n' roll posturing."

When they started to routine Johnny Otis' "Willie And The Hand Jive," with Hank and Bruce doing backing vocals, they decided to work around one central mike. They'd stand on either side of Cliff and, between his lines, interject their own, turning in towards the mike when it was their part and backing off when it was Cliff's. "We thought, Why not try to do something in the instrumental break?" So the three guitarists plus Cliff worked out a cross-over step not unlike the one they'd seen at the Kilburn State.

The audience loved it from the start, recalls Hank, and so did Cliff. "He loves to be part of the group really. So when we had the success with 'Apache' we had to do performances of our own, it was obviously a logical step to include those kind of movements - and more of them - in the act." "It was a really distinctive stage presentation because no one else, apart from the Dallas Boys as a vocal group, were doing movement on stage. You didn't get instrumental groups doing that. They just stood there and played."

Once their hits started to flow, their writing touch came back to them. They wrote many of their own and Cliff's early album material, several of his singles and many of their own. Like "Foot Tapper." Interesting story, they say. They were in Paris (very popular in France, right from the start) and the movie director Jacques Tati contacted them to write the music for a projected film. They returned to Britain and "wrote this melody which later became 'Foot Tapper'," says Bruce. "Having done that, we made Summer Holiday and they said they needed another bit of music. And, er, copping out like we normally do, we played them a snatch of what became 'Foot Tapper'. They liked it and we used it in Summer Holiday rather than give it to Jacques Tati. (Pause). And he hasn't spoken to us since."

It was another number one hit. "Although it wasn't featured very much in the Summer Holiday film anyway," adds Hank. "It was supposedly being played on the radio while several of them were twisting on the bus!" "It was," says Bruce, with finality, "a five-and-a-half-bar blues."

The movies, they say, were initially fun to do: a bit average, but they had little to actually perform in them. Hank liked doing The Young Ones because "we seemed to be performing more music. There was a great kind of atmosphere to it, with Richard O'Sullivan and Melvin Hayes, whereas Summer Holiday we flew out to Greece for a week and I think they used us for one day and then did some studio work for the club scene." (Always a club scene).

Their earliest film, however, was Expresso Bongo, Wolf Mankowitz's satire on the meteoric rise of Tommy Steele. "What was funny about that at the time was that it was an X film and we were too young to go and see it," laughs Bruce.

Their films gave them many hits. One of the first "The Savage", brought from Hank a much publicised blast. He didn't like the record. "We'd been on tour and we got back and we read in the papers that it'd been released. We felt we hadn't been consulted. It'd been a kind of unilateral decision by Norrie Paramor and Peter Gormley. We were a bit put out. It only got to number nine in this country and some people said, 'That's it, they're on their way out'."

"The Savage" was followed by Jerry Lordan's "Wonderful Land", a massive hit which shot to number one in about three weeks and stayed there for eight consecutive weeks. By then, the Shadows had been through several crucial personnel changes.

Initially their drummer had been Terry Smart, a friend of Cliff's. On going professional, they replaced Smart in January 1959 with Tony Meehan from Vince Eager's Vagabonds. Says Hank: "Tony was only 15 then and everybody lied about his age so he could work on the stage." Meehan lasted until October 1961 when he left to further his drum studies and to take up record production. He was replaced by Brian Bennett, an already seasoned drummer, who'd been with Marty Wilde's Wild Cats and the Krew Kats, who emerged from Wilde's backing band and had a small instrumental hit with "Trambone". He's been a Shadow ever since says Hank "and never forgiven us for it." Their first bassist, Jet Harris, had been touring with Tony Crombie's Rockets, when he joined the Shadows. He left in the spring of 1962 and made a couple of solo singles before teaming up with Tony Meehan for a run of three hits ("Scarlet O'Hara," "Applejack" and "Diamonds"). He was replaced by Brian Locking, a British Railways fireman turned bassist who'd played with the Vagabonds, backed Terry Dene (with bennett) and also been in Marty Wilde's group. The departure of Meehan and Harris had privately worried both Hank and Bruce because it meant that by 1962 half the original group had quit. "We were in a ridiculous situation really. It would've been, like, in 1965 if Ringo and Paul had left the Beatles."

However, the changes were by no means catastrophic, although, as Hank says, the popular balance and chemistry of the original lineup had been badly affected. "We all had very varying personalities. Jet came over as a very moody James Dean sort of character, which was very appealing. Tony came over as a youthful little drummer, the original teenybopper's idol. Bruce came over as the sort of heavy Elvis Presley and I came over as an idiot. I think that was a great asset." The change that they went through was to give a cleaner, more adult, more polished image and a less rampant musical act. Bennett was, technically, a better drummer than Meehan. Locking, a Jehovah's Witness like Hank after him, left the group in the autumn of 1963 and was replaced by John Rostill of the Interns. He'd had some competition for the job, notably from the bass player from the Meehan-Harris band (not Jet). "Hank and I went up to Cambridge where they were playing. John Paul Jones was on bass - we went up specifically to see him. Met him afterwards. Very quiet sort of person and he had this long cigar-holder. I thought, even in those days, he had a chauffeur. He was a great arranger. Anyway, we didn't get John Paul Jones and he went on in the business and into Led Zeppelin shortly after," says Bruce.

Rostill, says Hank, looked good on stage, was a fine musician and "did things at the time that other bass players weren't doing, chord things on the bass. Great musical ear. he liked rock 'n' roll as well, so if we did anything with a bit of a beat he used to love it, sock into it."

To return to their hits, "War Lord," another film theme. Yes, says Hank, starring Charlton Heston. "We liked it very much. I still think it's a great melody. On reflection I think I wish we'd put strings on it and a bit more production, but we tried to keep it a very 'group' sound." "A Place In The Sun" was another Jerry Lordan song? "Actually it was his wife's, Patrina Lordan. Again, this was the latter part of our career. A small hit," says Bruce. "It was while we were making Finders Keepers that we recorded this," says Hank. How did they feel at that time, in 1966, about their place in the strata of British rock?

BRUCE: Strata?

"Actually it was very difficult to place us at the time because we started to get down into the light entertainment business," explains Hank. "In the late Fifties and early Sixties, to survive in the business, it was accepted that you got as broad an audience as possible, usually by means of light entertainment, because rock 'n' roll appeared to have no future."

"I mean, who really could survive on rock 'n' roll apart from Elvis Presley? So hence the films and some of Cliff's early songs and the kind of TV shows we were doing. I think it got to the stage in the mid Sixties when the rock thing really exploded with the Stones and it took everybody kind of by surprise."

"Obviously the whole thing had been building slowly, but when it really happened there was a realisation that you could in fact have a career entirely in rock 'n' roll music. It changed the whole thing."

"We found ourselves caught between two things. Not quiet in the rock mainstream of things but halfway in between the light entertainment and showbiz side of the picture and the music business," says Hank.

And by that time, offered Bruce, it was too late for them to turn back or leap forward with a massive image/music change. It wouldn't have been genuine. "It's only on reflection now that we can think 'that's where we went wrong,' or 'we turned the echo off the guitar or we swung the guitar a rather too much when we should have twanged."

Hank says that just prior to that he'd "started to soften my sound, trying to get a sweeter sound really, which, I think, was the wrong thing to do. We lost the bite of the old Shadows sound."

Alas, says Bruce, they'd been professionally active for eight years by then and were thinking they could've done something similar to the Ventures in the States, i.e. to identify each trend and cover it, instrumentally. Thus you'd have got "The Shadows Play The Twist" or "The Shadows Play Lennon And McCartney" or "The Shadows Play R&B Greats".

"In a way that's very sensible because you keep your identity as an instrumental group but you go along with what's happening. You don't get out of tune with the world." says Hank. "I mean, it was still 1943 in the Shadows."

One hears much moaning nowadays from extraordinarily wealthy rock stars about the pressures on their life. As veterans of almost 20 years, how did Hank and Bruce view "the pressures"?

Inevitably, the obvious changes in road conditions (no motorways in the Fifties etc.) are prominent in their minds as is the condition of the buses they used. On their first tour with Cliff, they recall. they used to get out of the bus and walk up the hills to (a) lighten the load, (b) because it was quicker. Cliff had had a couple of hits by then.

Hank says pressure is related to the way the management works the group. Obviously if you're working seven nights a week, 50 weeks a year you'll have a nervous breakdown. Ah, I said, didn't Bruce suffer a breakdown in 1963?

Yes, says Bruce, he did. "It was tuning up. I always had a problem with tuning up my guitar, literally. I think we were playing Stratocasters then and I'd spend THREE HOURS tuning my guitar up."

"You know how it is," says Hank, "when someone gets a paranoia about something. It was silly, it got beyond a joke."

His paranoia came to a head in Blackpool where they were playing a long summer season. "The show started at quarter past six in the evening. I'd get in the theatre at three o'clock to start tuning up, and at a quarter past six I STILL wasn't in tune (laughs) - that was what started driving me nuts."

"Two minutes before we went on I was still out of tune, and by then, at Blackpool, I just threw my Fender across the room on the floor, leapt into my E-type and drove back to London. I left the group about four times that year."

Hank says it was all in Bruce's mind. He was in tune but wouldn't believe it was so. His problem didn't clear up until John Rostill joined the group and taught him to tune the guitar from the middle of the guitar - the D rather than from the Top E. Ultimately, Bruce was paying Rostill to tune his guitar for him.

"That was the pressure I lived under. Tuning up."

Their titles often caused puzzlement or, indeed, hostility, at the often self-concious stupidity. Some however, intrigued. "The Rise And Fall Of Flingel Bunt"?

"Flingel Bunt was a fictitious character invented by Richard O'Sullivan of Richard O'Sullivan fame, and he'll remain nameless from now on. The session was a busk really. A 12-bar thing. We'd been to see the movie The Rise And Fall Of Legs Diamond, and Richard had these two names and we loved Flingel Bunt. So we put the two together."

"Stingray?" "Stingray had nothing to do with the television series. I don't know whether it was it was an American record or just a demo. I don't know. We liked the melody," recalls Hank.

"Shindig" was most certainly not inspired by the American TV show of the same name, says Bruce. It was before it, says Hank. The tune was written in one of Bruce's more rational days in Blackpool in 1963 and was recorded there at the Jubilee Theatre on a mobile mixing desk.

"Atlantis", another Jerry Lordan song. Again, they say, a great melody like "Wonderful Land".

It got to number two in June 1963. "We were hoping to get a number one because we'd just had 'Dance On' and 'Foot Tapper' which were number ones before it, and this would've meant that we's have had three number ones on the trot - which, at the time, hadn't been done by anyone. Funnily enough, Frank Ifield was the first to do that. Unfortunately, the Beatles kept us off with 'She Loves You'."

Hank and Bruce had both gone to the same school in Newcastle (Welch had been born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, but moved to Tyneside as a youngster. Hank had got his nickname at this time because there was a severe over-population of Brians - the "B" - among his friends). They were born five days apart - Hank on October 28, Bruce on November 2, in 1941 - and went to the same school, Rutherford College.

Just as 'O' levels loomed, in April, 1958, they packed up their worldly goods and came to London on the 16th of the month, recalls Bruce. It wasn't easy, they say.

Their parents disapproved? "They weren't over the moon." They think their parents expected them back, penniless, within six months. "In fact we were back within six months," smiles Hank. "With Cliff!" They got a one-roomed flat in Hornsey. "Place called Crouch End," says Hank," people all walk around like this." He does a Quasimodo.

They went to the Two I's coffee bar in Old Compton Street, which had, for a while, become the centre of the civilised world after Tommy Steele had been discovered there and swept to the charts and his first national tour within the space of six frantic weeks. Hank and Bruce had to wait a little longer, but not much. "Actually it was tailing off," admits Hank. "It was just at the end of that little bit of excitement following the skiffle era and Tommy Steele."

WELCH: Bert Weedon had left, all the excitement had gone. (Grins).

During May, June and July of that year they were regularly seen around the coffee bar. They were known as the two Geordies. In August, perhaps as late as September, Cliff came in.

"We used to alternate playing three or four nights a week for 18 shillings a night and working the orange machine. Yeah, literally selling orange juice. We were playing American - Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Elvis - rock," says Bruce.

"All the rock 'n' roll flavoured hits of the day plus a few other standards like 'Mean Woman Blues' and 'Twenty Flight Rock'. Everybody used to join in. 'I Don't Want No Other Baby But You', they used to have some very er .... well, in fact, coarse lyrics," says Hank delicately.

By October 5 they were on the road with Cliff. Still skint, says Hank. They earned 12 pounds a week that first tour, and you paid for your digs yourself.

"The funny thing was," says Hank, "I earned more money on that tour than Cliff because I was playing for the Most Brothers (one being Mickie, of course) and I played a number for the Kalin Twins, so I got a fiver from them. I came off with about 25 quid a week. Cliff couldn't work it out."

"Our opening date," says Bruce, "was October 5, 1958 at Hanley, and I shared a room with three Irish labourers. Six o'clock in the morning they got up. One of them lifted me bed in the air to look for his boots!"

They're certain that the success of the album isn't purely attributable to nostalgia. Young kids, who're curious, are buying a lot, they think. They also think the success is linked, obviously, with the massive sales of Bert Weedon's recent album and with the sort of groundswell that creates a number one album for someone like Slim Whitman.

There is a pause for consideration. "I think it's also due to the fact that I've got half a million albums in the boot of my car," says Bruce, deadpan.

Yes, they will work live again soon.

BRUCE: There's always a demand for the Shadows to work.

HANK: From Brian Bennett and Peter Gormley. (Laughter).

[Geoff Alderton LH]

Hi Jim, I have no idea where from or how you come up with all this info on the Shadows but please keep it coming. This is a fascinating read. Good one Jim.
Regards Geoff.

[roger bayliss]

Yes good read Jim thanks... they clearly state the strat landed in 59 and also he had the echo box ... talking mid 1959 and Saturday Dance

Thinking back is there not a copy of a letter Cliff sent off when ordering the Strat and is it dated ?

How far, I wondered, had Hank's guitar sound been developed before "Apache"? Had he been using tremelo long? He had. "The first Stratocaster I had I got in '59. Before that I had an Antoria, no tremelo on, very cheap guitar, the one we used on nearly all records until the middle of '59. The first record that used the Strat on was 'Saturday Dance' and Cliff's second album". "You can tell the difference almost immediately. Also, I had the echo box and that sound started to develop".

The Stratocaster had been imported directly from the States. "You see," continued Hank, "you couldn't get American instruments here, not new ones anyway. Cliff ordered this one and paid for it. It was his guitar really, but for me to use. The reason it came about was that we knew James Burton who played on Ricky Nelson's records and played a Stratocaster, and we assumed, when we got the brochure, that it must be the most expensive Fender which was the Strat with the tremelo on - gold plated hardware and all that. It wasn't in fact. He had a tatty old Telecaster!"

The Shad's sound, however, didn't fully develop until they got the echo box, a matter of weeks after the arrival of the brand new Strat.


Also Hank explains why some mistakes were made during recordings late at night after a day doing shows...

Second track on the album, and their second hit, in November 1960 (it got to number two) was "Man Of Mystery", a Michael Carr song. Bruce bursts into a rendition of "South Of The Border," a Carr chestnut. It was a demo, says Hank. "After 'Apache', we suddenly got a pile of demos coming in, most of them with Western names - 'Cowboy' and 'Spurs', 'Indian', 'Red Indian', 'Big Chief'. Things like that. And this was one of them." "We tried to be flash" says Bruce, "we tried to record late at night. In the early days it was always a three-hour session but ten to one or two to five." At the time they were playing a season at the London Palladium, three shows a day, and then went into the studios at midnight. "Really groovy," says Bruce, "we were cool cats. 'This is how they REALLY make it', you know. And we were just knackered out. we just started falling asleep at about one o'clock." "We'd done three shows in the day and after those two evening shows ...... it got silly! We were making so many mistakes," says Hank.

[David Martin]

Fab stuff Jim...

I could make a new area called Documents, and you could attach whatever articles etc to posts in there. If it all got too much I could then put in some sub forums. The key to success would be good descriptive titles for the posts.

[chronikman-ch]

Wenn ich zurückdenke ist es nicht eine Kopie eines Schreibens, Cliff schickte bei der Anordnung der Start und ist veraltet?
cheers Heinz

[Tone]

Thanks for posting that most interesting interview, Jim. And it was also nice to see the letter from Cliif again, Heinz.

I noticed that the interview misspells "Quatermasster'a Stores" so the mistake has been going on for years. A bit ironic, really, when there is reference in the article to quirky song titles.

Cheers.

Tony