The Shadows At Sixty - BBC4 Programme 01/05/2020

from the kinks to khaki king players of six strings thrill in a collection of live performances from the archives here on bbc4 in an hour great guitar riffs at the bbc follows a celebration of the backing band that became stars with some strong language the shadows at 60. [Applause] in 1959 a band burst onto the scene and changed everything nearing their 80th birthdays founder members hank marvin and bruce welsh were once part of the coolest group on the planet as the shadows they set the template for the british guitar band and sparked a musical revolution making chart-topping hits like apache wonderful land and foot tapper that spent over 500 weeks in the charts but then got swept aside by what they'd unleashed 60 years after their groundbreaking single apache everyone say apache yeah we tell the story of the quintessential bucking band who emerged from the shadow of a mega star and became musical heroes in their own right it's a tale of friendship loyalty staying power and some very twangy guitars [Music] the shadows [Applause] [Music] [Applause] march 1959 three teenagers are standing in a room looking at a guitar catalog one is the most famous boy in britain the other two are spotty teenagers from newcastle all of us cliff bruce and myself just stood together heads together pouring through this brochure looking at all the different instruments steel guitars amplifiers precision bass it was a wonder world of guitars and accessories they are hank marvin 17. bruce welsh 17 and cliff richard 18. cliff wanted his lead guitarist to be sounding the best so he sent to the fender factory in california for the brochure what happens next will have an everlasting effect on british music and then we came to the section we really wanted to look at the stratocaster because that was clearly the one buddy holly was using and we saw that they did it in red with the bird's eye maple neck and gold plated hardware and we thought that's the one cliff said great right let's get it because i bought it for hank to play they were my band and so i thought i'd supply hank with a great guitar yeah this big rectangular cardboard box arrived and we tore it open open the case and we just went wow the interior was orangey red crushed velvet and there was this beautiful thing from the future lying there [Music] it's believed to be the first fender stratocaster in britain [Music] and as the proud owner hank marvin's experimentations would have an extraordinary impact on musicians and musical composition for generations to come it's like the guitar finally found its voice and found its way to the center of the stage and that's all the kids wanted to see it was like a kind of rebellion it's hard to imagine now because you see hank marvin bruce wells very genial guys and they became part of the fabric of music in britain but in those days it was the edge [Music] that first strat out of the box it looked very similar to this what was really interesting for me was that it had this what they call a tremolo arm which is actually a vibrato bar because of this whammy bar it enabled me to add a vibrato the other thing was i could do ridiculous things like [Music] which was the introduction to man of mystery [Applause] there were simple melodies beautifully played that everyone could learn and a generation of young boys and i'm sure there were some girls as well staring at the stage with wide eyes listening and trying to work out what it was he was doing and how he was doing it just three years earlier hank and bruce were 14 years old and at the same school in newcastle they hadn't met yet but both were searching for musical inspiration [Music] our mums and dads would have gotten to ballrooms and you know the big orchestra would be playing and the crooner would be singing and then rock and roll came [Music] and i thought wow i love these guitar sounds they're doing wow this is for me just inside the school grounds i saw five six seven kids gathered around in a circle but sticking out above this i could see the top of the the top of the neck and the head stock of a guitar wow someone's got a guitar exciting and i rushed on over and sort of pushed my way in and bruce was standing there he was tall and slim and had uh those glasses national health classes he looked even more like buddy holy than buddy holly did you know bruce he always reminds me about the smile on his face a little about like elvis presley around around the mouth of the way smiles so i took the guitar at the school i mean in play time you could have a little jam with somebody or sing along can you show me the chords to whatever rock island line great you know you show you the fingering and that's how we learn [Music] in the middle of the 1950s african-american roots music inspired an unlikely british craze when kids all over the country fell hard for skiffle everybody wanted to be in a skipper group soon a uniquely british take on this sound was giving birth to some inspiring homemade music i loved skiffle and rock and roll all the songs of the day you know we were still going to school but in the evenings we would go and play in pubs and clubs with our skiffle group the railroaders they said john and joined the group russia yeah because the group he was in the older guys who had jobs connected with the mines most of them followed after coal mines we entered a national skiffle competition and we got into the finals in london and we went down with high hopes of winning for young musicians serious about their career london was the only place to be it was where the record labels were the exciting bands the talent spotters and crucially virtually all the recording studios in britain [Applause] i was caught up in this frenzy of wanting to leave and get down to london and see the big city and get into the music industry we lost the contest we came third in this particular thing and that was a sunday night and the other guys in the band said we're going home tomorrow and hank and i said we think we'll stay and we just had this dream you know like a dream that we wanted to be in this somehow this new business you know the rock and roll business and the theater manager he said so where are you going to sleep tonight i said we don't know you know this was like nine o'clock at night on a sunday night and he said hang on a minute he'd phone this lady he said mrs bowman i've got two geordie boys here who got nowhere to sleep tonight nowhere to go and by a freak she was a geordie and she said they can come and stay with me we went there and she made her sandwiches with cup of tea put us up in the front room and put a put your bed down and we were there for probably about six months and for a young musician with the ambition to get ahead in music the only place to be in late 1950s london was a coffee bar [Music] we went to this place called the two iced coffee bar in soho and the tommy steele had been discovered there i take everyone into the loo you know [Music] a fan made this for me this is original plaster work from the two ice coffee bar the seller [Music] it was hot it was sweaty it was fun and we were 16. it was a melting pot of people who loved music who loved rock and roll music and who wanted to play it one of those people was 17 year old brian bennett he was her strummer at the two eyes and already making a name for himself as one of the best players in town it was throbbing it was the first live place in london for rock and roll it was just like a basement there was nothing there but once the music started and the people started coming and they loved the music you couldn't dance i think they invented the hand jive down there because they couldn't die they used to do this crazy hand jive thing but it was good music and it was different every night people would come and sit in it's just a little bit bigger than this toilet the boys grabbed any opportunity to belt out a tune and people used to get up and just jam hank and i thought we were the heavenly brothers until we heard ourselves singing and realized we weren't you know so we became an instrumental band it's much easier we met brian bennett licorice locking jet harris and tony meehan and we played with them in that summer without realizing what was going to happen in the future because they all became the shadows at one stage that's where i first saw cliff saying i was selling orange juice at the back of the coffee bar at the time [Music] history history his single move it was hailed as one of the first authentic rock and roll singles made outside america and reached number two in the charts in summer 1958. for the two boys from newcastle it seemed like success they could only dream of until i was at the tourist coffee bar when a tall man came up a young man and he said i'm looking for a guitarist for cliff richard we've got a tour starting in three weeks time so hank played him all the licks of the day [Music] he said well i'm clifford's manager he said i'd like you to do the tour and i said you need a ridden guitarist i said my friend plays good with me tara can i bring him along he said yeah bring him along we went round the corner up flight of stairs in dean street to a tailor and there he was the boys walked in and there i was at my arms like this with a pink jacket on and they're thinking oh my god you know i was the first bad taste dresser in rock he looked a bit like elvis you know he had the sideburns he had the lip you know home yeah and cliff said will you come back to my and we'll have a rehearsal like an audition when they came to the council house my mum and dad were there and my sisters would have been around somewhere we put our little lamps down and got the guitars out we did a whole lot of shaking and we in my living room played together bruce started playing the rhythm and hank played the lead i was singing and i just thought they were fantastic and we loved it we got on well together in october 1958 the boys joined existing band members ian samwell and terry smart and hit the road as what was then called cliff richard and the drifters he was 17 we were 16. young people around britain were getting to see this new music performed live by new british music stars who were just like them i think most people who grew up in rock and roll in the early stages were all very sort of down to earth normal kids you know just working class people and suddenly fame knocks on your door and away you go i think it was 21 nights or something like that of course it was it was exciting for us you know we hadn't been to manchester or liverpool of stoke and you know bournemouth and all these places it was so exciting for me to hear my first what i would call proper rock and roll they were well dressed they were natty you know clifford had his pink jacket we'd only ever seen elvis and color hadn't we they were just different sometimes to save money we slept on the touring coach and sometimes in the theaters i can remember sleeping at sheffield city hall because it was warm it was quite plush backstage and we went to newcastle city hall which was the big date in newcastle and we were back parents were very happy to see me and that i was working our mates from the band were in the audience the ones that had come home and all our school friends were in the audience i know bruce and i were really quite chuffed to be able to get on that venue that we've been to ourselves to see other people and it's got a great atmosphere and we had a great time just thinking hey we've well we might not have made it forever but for now we've made it [Music] it's a long way from newcastle although there is a newcastle in new south wales [Music] hank marvin has lived in perth western australia for 33 years when i was growing up newcastle i never dreamt that we would uh that i would end up living in another country hasn't quite got the elegance or the gentility of newcastle in the northeast nor the accent some people say you have to have a sense of humor to live there but that's beside the point thank you for the music hello how are you protesters why do you hate a 57 fiesta red strap right why why you played fiesta red 57 it's actually it's in the hands of bruce at the moment it actually belongs to cliff everyone say apache yeah what's that bruce this is a guitar this is the stratocaster the fender strat the famous fender strat the first stratocaster in the uk um cliff bought this for hank to play in uh 1959 so it's the first one in the country and hank played lots of the hits on it and um cliff paid about 140 units for it 140 150 quid thereabouts and it's worth worth more than that now and he'd like it back how have you got it i stole it [Music] the band returned to london at the end of the uk tour in november 1958 and continued to back cliff however the original band members soon decided to move on and hank and bruce drew upon their contacts from the two eyes coffee bar they signed up babyface drummer tony meehan and ace bassist jett harris crawling around the darkness of the seating vital dungeon the band were occasionally being booked for gigs on their own which weren't quite as frenzied as the shows that played with cliff here the drifters are supporting a beat poet he rolls to the end meanwhile cliff's management had selected his next song to be living doll but they wanted it to be released as an orchestral number bruce had other ideas we said can't release even dull like that cliff it's you know can't do that it was a sort of it was like a big ban awful we sat around and i got my acoustic guitar and i said why don't we do it like this you know just go got myself you know acoustic guitar like a country like a country song i got to do my best to please her just cause she's living and went to number one cliff's first million seller cliff's record without the shadows would have been very different records and the sound of the boys playing behind him it needed what they gave it [Music] cliff convinced management to give his talented backing band their own contract to record their own music they were part of my success and i just thought that there's too good not to try something else i mean i did want them to be a success now i'd like to introduce my group to drifters for the very very first recording feeling fine hank and bruce stepped out from cliff shadow for the first time in this rare recently discovered footage from 1959 [Music] but the drifters first efforts to launch their own single as a band hit the buffers almost immediately when a strongly worded letter arrived from lawyers in america we'd try to release a record in america as the drifters we didn't really know but it was a huge vocal group the drifters i think we're number one in america at the time and we were releasing this little english record you know they said you can't uh you can't use the drifter's name you know we are we are the drifters so we had to come up with a name change [Music] hank and jett went off on their scooters just thinking of names you know the four jets the this the that and jet said we're always in the shadows behind cliff with the spotlight connect that's a great name their first release as the shadows with saturday dance it was also the first outing for hank's red stratocaster but the record buying public showed little interest in cliff's backing band's attempts to make their own music we'd had about three flops as the band without cliff the band were an urgent need of a hit that's the apache gold record you sell a million records you get a gold record it's not real gold otherwise i would have melted it down by now [Music] sixty years ago hank marvin bruce welch jett harris and tony meehan walked into studio 2 at abbey road to record the song that would make them famous bruce is on his way back there abbey road another place like home spent so long there so often that became part of the furniture the inspiration for the song came in the form of an unassuming singer-songwriter called jerry lorden who happened to be on tour at the same time as the shadows he said are you guys going to do any more recordings on your own as the shadows we said yes and he got this ukulele out that she fortuitously had with him and just started them ding ding ding ding dang dang dang dang dang dang dunk and so went on and we thought general i looked at you so this is different i'm thinking of almost like a movie you know where you see these the apaches galloping along in arizona somewhere they said what do you think which is great teach us the chords and i'll learn the tune and we'll do an arrangement and record it bruce is meeting up with brian bennett who wasn't on the original recording of apache that has been the shadows drummer for 58 years can you use some shadows wow we need a lion how are you i'm all right yeah yeah i couldn't see it we're going to go all out yesterday all our yesterdays all over yesterday and the zebra crossing is still home across we'll get killed on this okay the patchy we've got the tune there's no intro to it everything needs an intro any piece of music you hear has some kind of introductory passage just almost like two people meeting you know ideally becomes recognizable as soon as you hear it bang so i came up with this this intro idea which everyone seemed to like and we had the boom [Music] strong and that's basically into the tune there oh over here look at that this is where we used to put all our stuff remember overnight there used to be a cupboard under the stairs where all the percussion used to be was it this one uh this used to be full of percussion or was it that one this one oh yeah the little one it's full of other junk now this is very rare this thing here is very rare it's probably locked oh no it's not locked ah look at that celeste [Music] that's all very well but can you play some holiday the job baffle boards are the same member hey all the all the screens are they're the same they're exactly the same yeah nothing's changed well all we need is is hank and cliff and a few others brilliant oh look it's an acoustic guitar i felt thrilled that they were going to do it finally do something that was good and having heard them rehearse and everything it sounded to me like a hit cliff came along played on the chinese drum at the beginning of it as well and they said why don't you play so i did that and then as soon as they took off and started playing it i just they faded me out [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] following the recording session at abbey road hopes were high for a big hit but there was one thing standing in their way apache came out three weeks after my record please don't tease cliff was already at number one with his hit please don't tease backed by the shadows [Music] apache went into the charts at number 19. it faced an almighty battle to depose the master from the top spot what's the trouble it's gonna be a shoot we decided to try to do a few things that might help with the record hank and the boys launched a guerrilla marketing campaign in the music press to help things along they're coming apaches coming it caught your eye because it was something different is it going to do anything is it going to do anything and then you're up to number nine this week oh great great yeah then it's number seven in the charts couldn't believe it you know we were so excited and then i think it moved up to three the next week make it fast slippery this is your last draw you're up to number two my record was number one for three weeks [Music] and apache knocked it off and we were absolutely thrilled you better get them over to the doctor it was a bit of a shock but we were planning for them to be a hit but none of us i don't think even they thought they were going to be number one apache stayed at number one for five weeks and sold over a million copies if i had a pint for every time i played apache on radio 2 i would be a very rich girl that big country feel you know could wing you away on your fantasies it was such a hit it's regarded as one of the most influential british singles ever changing the possibilities of what homegrown music could sound like and inspiring a generation to start making music for themselves it's very very hard to go back to imagine the sort of thrill and the excitement of listening to a tune like that because it's a simple guitar tune struck a chord with me i really liked it wanted to learn how to play it [Music] and while hank marvin's guitar playing usually gets all applauded for one 15 year old trudging home in the reign from rehearsals it was bruce who proved the inspiration for a life in rock and roll the first song that i ever memorized was apache when it came out walking back down the uxbridge round singing listening going through my head over and over again apache so pivotal it was as pivotal as my first orgasm as pivotal as first getting stoned on marijuana far far better than my first drink it's like it was more pivotal for me than elvis presley the thing about apache is it was us it was the british british it was our music it was our band and i think you were the glue that knit this other stuff together so i studied what you did very very carefully which is why i think in my career i've ended up as more of a rhythm player than a than a lead guitarist i see it as a kind of a rod going through my musical career it woke me up [Music] following apache the shadows were rarely out of the spotlight unleashing a string of hits that would come to define the sound of the early 1960s including man of mystery contiki shindig and atlantis four young men who have been hitting the hit parade where it really cuts the shadows we started having this success separate from cliff as well as sharing in his tour degree it was already a busy life because we were working pretty much non-stop and now it got even more intense [Music] as hank continued his experiments with the now famous red stratocaster the band developed what came to be known as the shadow sound [Music] i wanted us to be recognizable as something different that we had a sound that was different [Music] might have been based on american music on american rock and roll so far but it had developed into something different the feel was recognizable so and i think it worked because people ah that's the shadows you know [Music] it was a beautiful clean sound but it was a very metallic sound and no one had ever quite heard it framed in that way before he doesn't just play notes every note has a beauty of its own every note starts in the right way continues in the right way with a certain amount of vibrato from his whammy bar or whatever and ends in the right way it's treated in the right way has this beautiful panorama you know rock is about power and passion and emotion but melody has to be there as well [Music] such a wonderful sound to me and i'd have been looking at how hank played trying to watch his fingers see how he did things look at his gear a vox ac30 amp and a stratocaster and some sort of delay unit so i decided to do a damped effect which means you put your heel of your hand on the bridge and you get this you stop the note but i had the echo in such a way that the echo is going to continue to get [Music] and that was part of that beautiful tune [Music] and as distinctive as the shadow sound was the shadows look turning their backs on the leather jacketed 50s rock and roll style in favor of sharp suits and their very own dance moves we'd also been on tv in 1958 with an act called the dallas boys and they they were sort of copying the american black groups like the temptations and all that sort of thing you know and that looked great as well they did sep so we said let's do some steps like that it became known as the shadows walk you know the little kicks and we did all that you know it was just to make it you know and then we'd swing around on fbi background and all that stuff but that's where it came from to make the instrumentals more interesting for the audience [Music] with the look and the sound in place the shadows took their music to the world this is hank marvin's home movie footage from an early tour to southern africa [Music] we had our own career as well as working with cliff so it was a series of tours both in the uk and internationally of tv shows more hit records it's just moving along and then we got this guy on the group who's basically causing a lot of problems tony great drummer tony mia but he missed two or three shows he wouldn't get out of bed to come home from south africa so he left his ticket on the bed the feeling in those days was you can't mess people around producers and tv producers they're going to put you to one side so we thought no we've got to keep this going things came to a head in october 1961 in the middle of a uk tour when tony turned up halfway through a show i went apeshit you know really had a go at him hank had a bit of a go and we had a rap big row in the dressing room and he said get yourself another drummer [Music] the van needed a top-notch drummer fast they raided the competition bruce and hank were both a bit nervous because they were on stage the next night and they didn't have a drummer and i said brian what you what are you doing he said well where are you working he said i'm just about to go in the pit with tommy steele i'm going to play with tommy steele he said um we want you to join the band i said i i'm not sure he said what are you getting in in this show he said i said i'm getting 25 quid a week i said double it and get on the train come and join the shadows the band he joined was reigning supreme able to unite royalty the clergy their sometime front man and hundreds of east london teenagers at this gig in a youth club in hackney for one of the east end boys this new addition to the shadows lineup proved life-changing he's a great drummer it's influenced so many people including me please responsible for some of the things that i've ended up playing there's no final drama as well as being skilled musicians working with cliff gave the band a new sideline back in the main man on the silver screen it was expected to be a film premiere such as the west end had never seen before but that turned out to be putting it mildly it was an eye-opener really and you become a movie star in the eyes of the public because you're in a movie it seems to put you into another plane all together eyes there's a girl in every part the band appeared in five films alongside cliff richard including the young ones summer holiday and wonderful life more importantly for the shadows though it meant the possibility of writing music for the movies the synopsis basically said something about the idea is going to be you know three guy four guys uh hire a london bus and drive throughout europe you know on a holiday meet women on the way and all that and and i just went [Music] stop then one two three [Music] and that's how it was done we started making money because we started composing the tunes well it was amazing we were the first band to actually uh make a really good living out of rock and roll music throughout the 60s it was like christmas every day for some reason i bought a rolls royce the biggest rolls royce you could buy at the time what was that then i was 23. it had beautiful walnut bar with the crystal chandelier not crystal chandeliers crystal glasses and decanter branching out into films and television was not just a perk of working with cliff it was part of a concerted strategy by the band's management to make the most of what they assumed would be a short career the general consensus in the in the industry was that this pop music says rock and roll beat music as we're calling it's not gonna last the men who oversaw bands at the time were often much older than their young chargers many had been through the war and had backgrounds in variety theater management and agents at the time had that attitude and and were nurturing us into being all-round entertainers and putting putting touches on i guess do tv variety shows and things like that the band was still releasing successful records jet harris making way for new basis licorice locking and then john rostill hits like danzon went to number one and stayed in the charts for 15 weeks but making music was now having to be fitted in around a demanding show business schedule they took their largest step away from their rock and roll roots when they signed up for the biggest show of the season he's hiding behind the piano oh no he's not oh yes he is powdered grains of devil stone dust we were in pantomime i had to played him pretty bad whether you're rich whether you're poor aladdin was the first one at the palladium i know we were very high up in the palladium at the time the first time we'd seen somebody off the television you see that's the thing it was uh well maybe years you know sort of thing and uh i remember cliff coming on with this little chinese hat in aladdin you know running on and uh the shadows they were wishy-washy noshy and poshy i was poshy what i've always wanted to do i was a musician and i'm suddenly being poshy being thrown through a mangle by arthur ashkey [Music] the lure for the shadows was that they were also involved with writing the [Music] score it was a big budget pantomime big orchestra lots of production numbers they wanted three or four hits in it as well so that was like right in the musical so that's exciting let's say we finished on april the 10th at the palladium on april the 11th i was on the beach in barbados 16 weeks was like a life sentence you know and we did that twice whilst we are getting thrown through mangles i would imagine the bands the new bands like the rolling stones and the beatles and i would probably up out playing rock and roll i don't think they'd be yeah you can imagine you can imagine mick jagger you know in a pantomime it would never happen [Music] i heard a record on the radio with a band i hadn't heard of before the song was called love me do and i thought i really like this record it's different it's got a bit of rawness about it i believe that we played a part in the beatles career paul mccartney said cliff and the shadows have it sewn up in britain and so they left and went to hamburg we drove them out now that's probably the best thing that ever happened to them whatever happened in hamburg came back they then blew us all off the stage we got back to liverpool and all the groups that were doing this sort of shadows type of stuff and we came back leather jackets and jeans and funny hair the beatles released their first album please please me in march 1963. that same month the shadows released one of their best love singles foot tapper went to number one in the singles chart while the shadows looked triumphant it was to be a bittersweet victory after foot topper they would never have another number one single in the uk without cliff and i was in abbey road for some reason and i bumped into george harrison he said ah love that record mates that's a great record he said you guys should stop doing instrumentals and just sing it's great that's where you should go you just got the top five feet go that direction i thought what does he know we should have taken his advice this is what happens you know pop music is a rapidly changing thing you know things whip into fashion and out of fashion here and gone in in minutes and um they had a good run and then i guess they couldn't really work out how to change with the times what to do how to move forward that's life i guess you'd say [Applause] it must have been a difficult time for you guys suddenly i don't know about cliff but for the for the shads to certainly feel that there was this other form of music where if you'd have tried to adapt if you'd have tried to have it's like me trying to rap yeah you know i can do it but i shouldn't do it you know it's like you know the shadow is suddenly thinking should we grow our hair long and wear beads you know should we should we do a pink floyd our music we'd gone from what we thought was british rock and roll to 60s pop you know like some holiday and all that the fans are out in force because this is the day when the winners of the biggest poll in the world will receive their awards the 1964 nme poll winners awards is a snapshot of an extraordinary moment in time inside the shadows play hands-on [Music] the old guard was changing and exciting new bands were leading the charge into a new era while the shadows picked up an award as a british band british small instrumental group the success of the beatles in america saw them pick up the only prize that mattered nobody's going to challenge this award the beatles voted world top local group the beatles jerry the pacemakers brian poole and the tremolos rolling stones the shadows at some some program with the only instrumental group on there i think the instrumental time was like from 1958 to about 1966 i suppose you know we were having a hit up until then and then music changes you know but what doesn't change of course is all the vocal groups kept you know because people want to hear lyrics you know they want to sing along to lyrics times change fashions change kind of music we play would be considered old-fashioned you know they want the excitement the heavier guitar sounds [Music] we could never have been part of the american invasion which happened in 64 because by then we look like frank dean martin you know sammy david again we were all you couldn't invade america looking like four guys in tuxedos looking like they're doing las vegas [Music] music has a time i reckon it has a time so by about 1966 we weren't having hit singles we were having albums hit albums but not hit singles 10 years 1958 to 1968 i thought we'd done absolutely everything you know we had huge success as the band we had huge success back in cliff we were in the films with cliff young ones and summer holiday and after 10 years i i thought i had enough in december 1968 bruce played a final show with the shadows at the london palladium and then bowed out we became different people we're only 20 in our 20s you see so we got to the stage where i needed to try something else out it came as a shock also sense of relief in a way we lost the the creative juices had gone we were probably marking time in many ways and it was time for a change time to go and do something different i find it difficult really well why they are such a great team together but i you know i've always been fairly philosophical about things and i had very quickly said to myself look it's what happens to bands it's happened to other bands and um it will happen over and over again the remaining shadows lineup soon petered out bruce took a year off music however the twang of the guitar soon proved irresistible and he picked up the phone to his old pal it was quite a long time doing nothing got itchy fingers you know and i said to hank do you fancy doing something different you know a bit different not the shadows [Music] by the early 1970s pop music had taken another huge turn singer-songwriters were stripping back their sounds and charting emotional and political landscapes [Music] the boys had been listening to artists like crosby stills and nash and joni mitchell and felt inspired to pick up their guitars again and begin a new musical journey [Music] [Applause] [Music] instead of looking at it as an instrumental course let's make it a vocal of course and we'll we can sing harmonies sing a songwriter stuff i reckon what we should do is get a third person because it would give us more interesting harmonic possibilities in in the vocal harmonies hank and bruce teamed up with respected australian songwriter john farrow they felt a deep need to get as far away from the shadow sound as possible and together they embarked on the most personal songwriting project of their lives called marvin welsh [Music] it's all about psychology and what goes through people's minds and what the world is doing to us and i wanted to sing it a much sort of harder voice than my normal voice to give it an edge which i did [Music] writing the songs pushed them well beyond their comfort zone of guitar instrumentals and echo boxes for me was very exciting challenging too the idea of primarily singing as against playing and writing the songs [Music] i love the the concept with this tiny robin and his love and and it's an unrequited love really and uh the beautiful harmonies that we were able to achieve and john farr arranged those harmonies and uh it's it's does the heart good john farah is now a hollywood music producer it really went well as far as the critics were concerned the public weren't so thrilled and we just had a problem because every time we came on working you know with three acoustic guitars we'd get about three songs into the act and somewhere to yell at blair pachi and we couldn't escape the shadows couldn't escape it wasn't an easy period you know coming up with something we thought had value and it wasn't really really cracking it the band had to face the difficult truth that although critical acclaim was good for the eagle they just weren't selling the records they wound up the marvin welsh and farah project in 1972 however a year later a chance meeting gave hank reason to feel optimistic that his music might be on the verge of a renaissance john peel the radio presenter said to me in the 70s when we did his show he said look he said i used to love the shadows he said then as the 60s went through he said it became uncool to say you like the shadows he said so i never mentioned it he said but i have to tell you he said it's actually becoming cool again this was probably about 73. he said it's becoming cool again to say you like the shadows he said you you watch this is a sight to stir british hearts bruce hank brian and john the shadows be confident wired a little bit perhaps by spain holland and literally and even luxembourg aware of their huge following in europe the head of light entertainment at the bbc bill cotton asked the shadows to reform and represent the uk at the 1975 eurovision song contest well thank you very much indeed and i wish you all the very best of luck let me be the one who's loving you tonight united kingdom four pawns oh you have four points ten points we're in the lead six points [Music] twelve points the band came a valiant second to the dutch entry dinya dong but what it meant was that after a few years out of the spotlight the shadows were back on our screens but not in the charts [Music] two years after eurovision punk ripped a hole through british music the familiar comforting guitar melodies of the shadows felt further away than ever however a brilliant young music fan and budding record executive made a striking discovery although punk was grabbing the headlines something interesting was bubbling under the surface i realized there was a huge audience that were crying out for the sounds of their youth particularly the unique sound of the shadows brian gathered together focus groups around the country and asked them about the music that made them happy what they told him confirmed his suspicions the feedback was very interesting they felt that there was a great nostalgic even it's 15 years ago it's a great nostalgic feel for the shadows great with cliff and fantastic on their own they sort of dwindled out you know following beatlemania and all the northern bands they like their stage presence the banter the smiles they finally remembered the shadows as they were at their prime and that's what told us that maybe we should put together the greatest hits 20 golden greats put it on tv with an interesting tv commercial reflects what their thoughts and memories were we thought they must be nuts surely is not a market for this they done their market research so we thought okay we can't stop them anyway do it brian berg's research told him that the young people who've grown up going to shadows concerts were now more likely to be settled in front of their televisions with their families and they were most likely to be found among the 20 million people watching coronation street brian booked a slot in the outbreak emi presents the unforgettable guitar music of the [Music] of 20 shadows hits seeing that i go out going to the office the next morning i look at the repeat business coming through it's phenomenal it's gonna fly you knew it was gonna be number one it was one of the very first tv adverts for an album the record hit number one within 48 hours tv advertising if you can get a good tv campaign uh uh yourself loads of records the rise and fall of linglebon and the album sold one and a quarter million in the uk and we went what so from 77 we were back in a big way the shadows 20 golden greats as the 70s went through after the john peel episode i mentioned people coming up to me and saying ah man you're the reason i started playing guitar just great love your guitar sound man no one else sounds like that the way you play and eventually i start to think maybe they're right maybe i should go back to that while the shadows rode the wave of renewed success and started writing their own music again they found that what the public really wanted was re-recordings of the popular hits of the day but played with the shadows on inimitable sound [Music] at the end of the 1970s recordings of don cry for me argentina and the film track cavatina had given the shadows back to back top 10 hits a feat they hadn't achieved since just before beatlemania in 1963 and as important anniversaries came around in the 1980s the fact that the band was still here to celebrate them made national news those veterans of british pop the shadows celebrate three decades in the charts this week but this summer they're back together for a series of concerts and mary pet has been talking to the musicians who together virtually invented british music so isn't the money then yeah what money pardon the money you're going to get well we don't do things for nothing but no one does really uh but mainly the the initiative is to commemorate it and give 90 000 people a chance to bathe in nostalgia this is dedicated to all of you under the age of 50. the chance to circle the sounds of their youth once more inspired a generation to come together in stadiums around the country a series of comeback concerts spanning the decade culminated in the event at wembley in 1989 and there'd been a tube strike so the people to get there had had terrible times getting to wembley but there they were i've always been there always been there when records were coming out and shows to be seen and yeah it's just been a thread through our life i suppose yeah a very nice threat of course from the shadows point of view they hadn't played together for ages and there they were and of course the audience went crazy my son took this that's me on stage this is june of 1989 we did two nights at wembley clifford in the shadows was called the event you know hank and i came down to london when we're 16 as you know but this is 30 years later so we'd we'd been on this amazing journey from the two eyes to small theaters to bigger theaters to you know ten thousand you can't imagine what this is like until you walk out [Music] and when we did our part of the show the light was just beginning to go and i introduced the next tune which was the theme from the deer hunter i'm thinking this is not going to work they're here to rock and uh there's a great response from the crowd and and we started a play and it went so quiet it just it's absolutely silence and just seeing people it was one of those experiences it really brought the tears to the eye which is happening now it's beautiful [Music] in 2009 the band marked five decades in the spotlight with a series of packed farewell concerts and then they step back into the shadows as hank marvin approaches his 80th birthday he continues to stretch his musical muscles with his latest project his own gypsy jazz band in the shadows of course uh most of the music we played would be structured you've got beautiful tunes to play with gypsy jazz it does contain improvisation and you want to say something i tend to like to do melodic improvisations or try anyway and so that's a big challenge which i enjoy enormous challenge i'm not saying i'm particularly good at it but uh hey we've got to start somewhere i'm his co-writer and so i suddenly became the coolest granddad there was you know [Music] bruce welsh became a highly respected music producer and was behind two of cliff richard's biggest hits devil woman and we don't talk anymore he continues to live in london with the famous red stratocaster [Music] thank you very much thank you thank you [Music] and [Music] i

Channel: Steve Reynolds

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Keywords: Guitar Instrumental, Electric Guitar Cover, Old Guitar Monkey, Romantic Songs, Relaxing Guitar, How to Video, Steve Reynolds, The Shadows, Hank Marvin, Fiesta Red, Hank Marvin Stratocaster, Phil McGarrick, Geoffers47, Oldguitarmonkey

Id: wdU5BsKdGCc

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020