Towards the end of a
two-hour hagiography of the Dave Clark Five – The Dave Clark Five And Beyond: Glad All Over – broadcast last Saturday night on BBC2,
Elton John stated: “The three giants of rock and roll to come out of the UK in
the sixties were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Dave Clark Five.”
As a general rule Just Backdated tends
to adopt a fairly charitable stance towards the music and musicians covered
here. That’s the beauty of having your own blog – you need only write about
what you like and ignore the rest. Every so often, however, something gets up
its goat and a more robust position is necessary. A case in point was this.
The accepted wisdom with regard to the
pecking order in the great UK sixties rock group Olympiad is that The Beatles took
the gold medal, The Rolling Stones the silver and The Who the bronze. This is arrived
at by a combination of single and album sales in the UK and US, chart positions
in both territories, concert ticket sales and general acclaim from both critics
and fans – with all of these combined for the
entire decade and beyond. Also in the final heat were The Kinks, Small
Faces and Cream, and arguably a couple of others who arrived in the late sixties,
Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, who didn’t really fulfil their potential until the
seventies. Then there was a second tier that included groups like The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Hollies, Them and The Jeff Beck Group, from which individual members graduated to significance, and further down the order were scores of also-rans, among them The Dave Clark Five who
were no better and no worse than dozens of others from the same era. And while
it is true that like so many of those others they mounted a brief but futile challenge to The
Beatles and Stones – “The Tottenham Sound” (!) – the DC5 fell away pretty
quickly, unable to progress after pop morphed into rock, thereafter settling into
obscurity like so many of the rest.
Interestingly, sometime in the eighties
Dave Clark astutely acquired the rights to what remained of Rediffusion TV’s
ground-breaking pop show Ready Steady Go!,
scooping up in the process the footage of all those shows that hadn’t been
wiped. No one is quite sure how many shows Clark owns but in the late eighties
and nineties a series of ‘mash-up’ RSG!s
were shown on Channel 4. These included clips of the DC5 from US TV
shows like Shindig! and Ed Sullivan in an attempt to mislead viewers
into thinking they were actually clips from RSG! Although the DC5 did appear many times on RSG!, the obvious conclusion is that those shows were wiped and
therefore not in Clark’s possession. Nevertheless, he felt the need to include
his group alongside The Beatles and Stones so as to create the impression they
were their equals.
Clark was also savvy enough to secure the
rights to everything his group recorded and this may explain why he is so dedicated
to such shameless revisionism. Others who lost the rights to their work have
neither the means nor incentive to indulge in this kind of thing. However, I'll now let the
facts speak for themselves. The DC5 had only one number one hit (‘Glad All Over’
in 1964) and a further seven top ten hits in the UK. They had just two albums
in the UK charts during the sixties and one further top ten album in 1978, a
compilation called 25 Thumping Great Hits
which, of course, contained nothing like 25 hits, thumping or otherwise. Placing
them in the same hierarchy as The Beatles (22 top ten hits between 1963 and
1970, including 18 number ones) or Stones (20 top ten hits to 1981, eight
number ones) is therefore sacrilege, and let’s not even get into comparisons with the Beatles
and Stones’ vastly superior presence on the album charts (or ongoing concert ticket
sales over succeeding decades for solo Beatles or still-at-it Stones, Who,
Floyd, Zep etc). In the US the DC5 had eight top ten hits, including one number
one, and three top ten albums. The Beatles had 21 number one hits from 31 top tenners... need I go on? The DC5 toured America and, like every other UK pop
group of the era, were screamed at by excitable young girls. Then again, they
screamed at Freddie & The Dreamers too.
The
Dave Clark Five And Beyond: Glad All Over, of course, was produced by Big 5
Productions, Dave Clark’s own company, and designed in every way to extol his
group, hence the emphasis on their belated induction into the strangely prejudiced
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (see other posts). But quite why BBC2 should
allocate two hours of prime time Saturday night television to this kind of non-objective self-promotion is beyond me.
So sorry Elton. You – and all the rest of the rock stars who appeared in this film and ought to have known better – got it very wrong.
I totally agree and I think you have been very polite and gracious to what was a spit educing load of tosh. My comments posted here are similar and I hope others share our views. We can't have history re-written in this shameless way.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.btoe.com/stories/dave-clark-rewrites-history
Thank goodness someone has said this, I thought I was alone, Glad all over and bits and pieces are all I remember and with very little affection, I think his biggest claim to fame is that I believe he owns the rites to some rear music footage Ready Steady Go again cashing in on other peoples talents.
ReplyDeleteThe show was revisionism at its worst.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to overstating the importance of the DC5, the roles of the band members not called Dave Clark was under-played. That said, the programme was produced by...Dave Clark, and so not likely to be offer much criticism.
It was indeed an appalling program full of self grandiosity.
ReplyDeleteIf the Dave Clark 5 were such a hot live band, where is the evidence? Whereas the Beatles, Bo Diddley, Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Stones (at first), all appeared LIVE on Ed Sullivan, "the 5" did not. In fact there is an embarrassing video on Youtube of the backing track failing them.
Dave Clark's genius was his business sense. A combination of Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman long ahead of his time. Can't take that away from him. But musician no. (Bobby Graham was the session drummer on all their records according to his memoirs).
Okay, so the first single I ever bought was Glad All Over. But the second was I Am the Walrus. So I reckon I'm forgiven.
Thanks for posting. great blog as always.
I love the DC5. I think Mike Smith is one of the most underrated singers in Rock and Roll...
ReplyDeleteAs for the Show - it was just the usual Self-Centered, Self-Involved, Self-Aggrandizing, Pompous, Egocentric BS from Megalomaniac Dave, who it seems, likely had no Musical Talent at all, except maybe promotion, and squirreled his name into Production and Song Writing Credits, and of course, the name of the group.
The DC5 had some really mediocre stuff that shined only because of Mike's wonderful voice, but it also had great Rock and Pop Tunes like most of the Hits, and oddball stuff like "Because," and the criminally under-appreciated "Everybody Knows (I Still Love You)."
But at least, I can listen to Mike sing all day.
Thanks you Leesa. I agree with you 100% that Mike Smith was the real talent in the DC5.
ReplyDelete