The Dave Clark Five

Over an eight year time period this "British Invasion" band sold more than 100 million records, had 15 consecutive Top 20 U.S. hit singles, and appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" more times (18) than any other pop, rock or R&B group. 
Were they the Beatles?  No! 
Were they the Rolling Stones?  No! 
Were they the Dave Clark Five?  Yes!
This Podcast discusses the impact of the "Tottenham Sound" of The Dave Clark Five and will hopefully make you glad all over!  I dedicate this podcast to the memory of my love and soulmate, Sally Lehman McDermott, who was a big fan of the DC5.

All podcasts on the Rock and Roll Flashback Podcast are produced by brothers-in-law Bill Price and "Jumpin' John" McDermott. The Podcast Theme Song, "You Essay", was written by John. It was initially recorded by Bill and John on April 1, 2004 with several revisions since then.
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Until next time...
Rock On!

Transcript

The Dave Clark Five  

Welcome to Rock & Roll Flashback!  I'm Jumpin' John McDermott, and we'll be looking back at some of Rock and Roll's greatest artists, songs, and stories.  Today we will focus on the second big British Invasion band to hit America's shores in 1964:  The Dave Clark Five.  I dedicate this podcast to the memory of Sally Lehman McDermott.  Sally was my beloved lifetime partner, my best friend for fifty years, and my soul mate.

Before we met, Sally and I had both been fans of The Dave Clark Five.  Sally particularly liked saxophonist Denis Payton.  I was attracted to the heavy beat and loud instrumentation of the band.  The Dave Clark Five, who were sometimes called the DC5,  were an English band formed in Tottenham in 1958. In January 1964 they had their first UK top ten single, "Glad All Over", which knocked the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" off the top of the UK Singles Chart. It peaked at No. 6 in the United States in April 1964.  Although this was their only UK No. 1, they eventually topped the US chart on Christmas Day 1965, with their cover of Bobby Day's "Over and Over".  Ironically that tune only peaked at #45 in the UK!

Following just after the Beatles, the DC5 were the second group of the British Invasion to appear on CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States.  They appeared on the show for two weeks in March 1964 following the Beatles' three weeks the previous month.  The Dave Clark Five would appear more times on Ed Sullivan than any other band:  18 appearances!  In May 1964 they became the first British Invasion band to do a full-scale sellout tour of the USA.  They would eventually do six complete North American tours.  The Dave Clark Five was the first band to have their own private plane, which bore the DC5 insignia that the group often was fondly referred to.

The Dave Clark 5 were one of the most commercially successful acts of the British Invasion, releasing seventeen Top 40 US Billboard hits.  They had 12 Top 40 hits in the UK. The band's trajectory of fame was very rapid.  Lead singer Mike Smith said that the day before the band first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, he had never left England, never had been on a plane, never had stayed in a hotel and never had seen a limousine.  The DC5 was briefly considered to be serious rivals to the Beatles, and they eventually sold over 100 million records.  However, as musical tastes moved audiences from AM to FM radio, the band never really transitioned from simple pop tunes to a more complex form of music, and the group disbanded in early 1970.  While the band was known for their melodic tunes with nice harmonies, they were never considered to be hip. In March 2008, 44 years after their first arrival in the US, the Dave Clark Five was inducted by Tom Hanks into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

Before making it big with the band, Dave Clark was an extra and stuntman in films starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ("The VIPs") and Peter Sellers ("Pink Panther: A Shot in the Dark").  As I mentioned earlier, The DC5 had its origins in 1958, as the backing musicians for north London vocalist Stan Saxon.  Dave Clark on drums and Rick Huxley on guitar were part of that backing group.  After a few lineup changes, by 1962 they were making their home in the South Grove Youth Club in Tottenham District of London.  The classic  band finally consisted of Dave Clark on drums, Rick Huxley moving to bass, Lenny Davidson on lead guitar, Denis Payton on tenor and bari saxophone (and harmonica and second guitar), and Mike Smith on keyboards and main vocals.  On some songs all band members added backing vocals.  Dave Clark’s favorite first drum set was Trixon.  Trixon drums were made in Germany until 1970.

The band honed their performance skills performing first at US Military bases and then on the Mecca Ballroom circuit.  This lead to them being signed by EMI.  The band's early 45's were issued under the Epic label in the US, the result of CBS/Epic Records international distribution deal with EMI.  DC5  recordings were issued by EMI on the Columbia label in the UK.

In response to Liverpool's Mersey Beat sound, The Dave Clark 5 was promoted as the vanguard of a Tottenham Sound.  Thanks to engineer Adrian Kerridge at Lansdowne Studios, they featured an often loud and forceful production style driven by Clark's punchy, stomping drums, Payton's gravelly saxophone, and Smith's belting, leathery vocals.  The sound was riveting: blasting the airwaves with the heavy thump, thump, thump of Clark's drums, the deep growl of Payton's baritone sax, Smith's throaty lead vocals - all accentuated by high volume recording and often supplemented with heavy reverb.  It was hard to ignore the foot stomping intro of Bits and Pieces on even the smallest transistor radio!  

Seeing the success of the Beatle's 1964 film, "A Hard Day's Night", the DC5 released a film, "Catch Us If You Can" in 1965. The film was released in the United States under a different title: "Having a Wild Weekend."  It is interesting to note that in the film Dave Clark (and the rest of the band members) play stuntmen.  In 1965 Epic Records had a Dave Clark Five fan club with 500,000 members and also had a fan club for Dave Clark’s dog, Spike. The Spike Clark Fan Club had over 50,000 fans. A hairstyle, the Dave Clark Spike, was named for the dog.

Dave Clark shrewdly made business deals that allowed him to produce the band's recordings, giving him royalties greater than other acts, and giving him control of the master recordings.  Songwriting credits for the band's original material went to Clark, or more often to the team of Clark and Mike Smith.  Between 1978 and 1993, none of their music was available to be purchased in any commercial format due to rights-holder Clark declining to license the band's recordings. Since 1993, Clark has gradually released some material.  On a personal note, Sally and I had to wait until 1993 to find a CD of Dave Clark Five tunes.  That year Dave digitally re-mastered 50 songs for Disney's Hollywood Records and released them in a two disc CD called "The History of The Dave Clark Five".  In 2019, almost the entire catalogue from the band, including all the original 1960s studio albums, became available on Spotify for the first time.

The Dave Clark Five’s wide range of fans include diverse music legends, film stars and celebrities you wouldn’t expect to find at the same record-playing party. Here are a few famous fan comments:

1. Sir Laurence Olivier on the Band’s Fame

“Dave Clark Five, for Christ sake, they’re as huge, as well-known as the English Dictionary.”

2. Gene Simmons of KISS on the Inspiration

“It connected with me. It was sort of modern electric church, and I just wanted to go yell ‘Hallelujah.'”

3. Bruce Springsteen on the Nasty Sound

“The thing that people have kind of missed in reference to the Dave Clark Five is those were big, powerful, nasty sounding records, man. Bigger, a much bigger sound than, say, the Stones or the Beatles.”

4. Tom Hanks’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Speech for The Dave Clark Five

“(The band’s) true product was joy, unparalleled, unstoppable, undeniable joy, the joy to be alive, the joy to be young.”

5. Elton John on Dave Clark

“He is an absolutely stone-cold genius.”

6. Dionne Warwick on Fashion Style

“I loved the way they dressed. The French sort of shirts and boots. It was sharp, really sharp.”

7. Fashion model Twiggy on the Crushes

“It was always a big competition in schools about the fight about the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five and who the girls liked, and you’d have names carved in your desks and things.”

8. Ozzy Osbourne on Getting Chills

“I wanted to be a member of Dave Clark Five. I remember being at the school dance and ‘Glad All Over’ came on, and every time they went “And I’m feeling..” boom boom. It sent chills up my spine.”

9. Whoopi Goldberg on Being a Fan

“As a kid it was a gift from another country that was actually meant for me …. I had this great poster, and for some reason I thought (Dave Clark) could see me through the poster, that he would know that I was a huge fan.”

10. Sir Ian McKellen on Sex Appeal

“I mean sex was a big part of it, and the look of the Dave Clark Five, yeah, they all shaved, didn’t they, they clearly shampooed, or somebody shampooed for them.”

So what is the back story behind the song, “Glad All Over”?  

 “Glad All Over”, written by Dave Clark and Mike Smith, became Dave Clark Five’s first big hit.  As mentioned earlier, it was so massively successful that it managed to kick out The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand” from the UK top spot which in turn, fueled the DC5 and Fab Four rivalry.  By charting at #6 in the US, it was the first British Invasion hit in the US by a group other than the Beatles.  The song was #1 in Ireland, #3 in Australia, #2 in Canada, #4 in the Netherlands, and #16 in Germany.  For the year 1964 it ended up finishing second to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in the UK and by the end of 1964 around one million UK singles had sold for the 2 year period.  Aside from the call and response pattern, the song features a saxophone line under the whole song and a thumping drum sound developed by engineer Adrian Kerridge at Lansdowne Studios. Smith got the idea for the title when he came across the Carl Perkins song “Glad All Over”.  As quoted in Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh's book 1000 UK #1 Hits, Smith said, “We had lost out on "Do You Love Me" to Brian Poole and so Dave (Clark) thought we should do an original. He asked me to come up with something and I looked through my record collection for a suitable title.”  For the record, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes version of "Do You Love Me" had gone to #1 in the UK earlier that year.  Clark added, “I knew that we needed a song with the thumps in. We had been playing dance halls and we were getting a great audience response to the stomping things we were doing.”  Clark revealed that it didn’t take them long to write this classic hit saying that “best songs are the ones you seem to do very quickly. It was a great hook, and a very simple one.”

 So how about those 17 Top 40 US hits?  Here they are by year released, song title, and how high they peaked in the US charts:

YR RELEASED……SONG TITLE…………………………....US PEAK

•1963….Do You Love Me………………………………...#11

•1963….Glad All Over……………………….……………….#6

•1964….Bits and Pieces………………………….………...#4

•1964..Can't You See That She's Mine…….………..#4

•1964.…Because…………………………………….………...#3

•1964….Everybody Knows………………….…………...#15

•1964….Anyway You Want It…………………………..#14

•1965....Come Home……………………………………...#14

•1965….Reelin' and Rockin'………………..............#23

•1965….I Like It Like That………………………………....#7

•1965….Catch Us If You Can………………………………#4

•1965….Over and Over……………………………………..#1

•1966….At the Scene……………………………………….#18

•1966….Try Too Hard……………………………………….#12

•1966….Please Tell Me Why…………………………….#28

•1967….You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby.#35

•1967….You Got What It Takes…………………………#7

 This has been Rock and Roll Flashback…a look at The Dave Clark Five.  I'm Jumpin' John McDermott and until next time….Rock On!