Graham Reid | | 1 min read
In the way that only the UK press could manufacture, the second the Dave Clark Five emerged with their hit Glad All Over which nudged the Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand off the top of the charts, they were immediately posited as “the Tottenham Sound” and a few scribes heralded the end of the Mersey Beat style.
To be fair, their drum-heavy sound from leader Clark was very influential and many American drummers point to primitive songs like Bits and Pieces as extraordinary for their time.
In some ways the DC5 were actually quite retro in that in their set and on albums they would play Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Rumble, Stay, Blue Suede Shoes and other songs from the Fifties.
Having a saxophonist in the ranks was distinctive at the time however.
And Clark with raw-voiced singer Mike Smith were sound if unadventurous songwriters.
They did a nice line in ballads alongside the tub-thumping pop like those hits and the raucous treatment of Berry Gordy's Do You Love Me? here (3406 and the close harmony Crying Over You now included on this remaster and rejigged version of their debut album).
Clark was a canny operator (naming the band after himself was smart, he owned the masters of his recordings, he bought the rights to the TV pop show Ready Steady Go!) and for quite a while the DC5 were the second most popular and commercially successful British group in the US after the Beatles.
The evidence for that in the form of snappy singles, dancefloor pleasers and ballads on this, their reconfigured and improved version of their US debut album now available on vinyl.
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You can hear this album on Spotify here.
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