Glad All Over: The Dave Clark Five Story

Picture this. It's January nineteen sixty four. Britain is in the grip of Beatlemania. John Paul George and Ringo are untouchable, the biggest thing to hit British music in living memory. Their single I Want to Hold Your Hand is at number one on the UK Singles Chart. The whole country is singing it, and then on the fourteenth of January it gets knocked off the top spot. Not by an American, not by a veteran, by five lads from a working class neighborhood in North London, from a place called Tottenham. The song was called glad all Over, the band was called the Dave Clark Five, and for the next three years they would go on to become one of the most successful acts in the entire world, selling over one hundred million records, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show more than any other British group in history, and pioneering a sound so unique it got its own name, the Tottenham Sound. I'm Michael and this is educating Isabella. Rock and roll one oh one, here's a rock spring and religards sold from Risks to the rigs and rivels, Cosie and soul of it all today in episode nine of series one, we're continuing our British Invasion mini series and we're heading to North London. This is the story of the Dave Clark Five. To understand the Dave Clark Five, you need to understand where they came from. And they came from Tottenham, a working class area in the north of London that in the early nineteen sixties was about as far from the glamour of the West End as you could get while still being in the same city. Now you've heard of Tottenham today, probably most people know it as home to Tottenham Hotspur football club, but in nineteen fifty eight it was also home to a young man named Dave Clark who had a problem. His local football team needed money for new kit and travel expenses. Dave Clark needed a His solution was rock and roll. Specifically, he decided to form a band to raise funds. The only catch he wasn't actually a musician, so Dave Clark bought himself a set of drums, taught himself to play, and assembled a group of young players from the surrounding area. It started as a backing band for a local North London singer called Stan saxon, gigging around pubs and clubs. By nineteen sixty two, the lineup had settled into the classic five that would take the world by storm. Dave Clark on drums, Mike Smith on lead vocals and organ, a man with one of the most powerful, raspy, soulful voices in all of British pop. Lenny Davidson on lead guitar, Rick Huxley on bass, and Dennis Payton on saxophone and harmonica. Now pay attention to that lineup because it tells you everything about what made them different. Sachs organ, thundering drums mixed to the front. This wasn't the guitar driven sound coming out of Liverpool. This was something altogether heavier, more muscular, more stomping, and it was entirely their own. They honed their craft the hard way, playing the Mecca Dance Hall Circuit, a grueling chain of ballrooms across the UK where you played long sets multiple nights a week to demanding audiences. In nineteen sixty three they won the Mecca Circuit's Gold Cup for the best live band in the entire United Kingdom. They were also playing American military basses in England, and it was there that they fell in love with American rock and roll, Chuck Berry, Bobby Day, Little Richard, songs they would later record and take back to American audiences. Let's talk about glad all Over. Released in December nineteen sixty three, it arrived at a moment when the British public had been saturated with Merseybeat, the Beatles, Jerry and the Pacemakers, the whole Liverpool scene. Glad all Over sounded nothing like that. It opened with a thunderclap of Clark's drums, almost tribal in their insistence, before Smith's vocals roared in over a churning organ and Peyton's sacks. Football terraces across the country adopted it as a chant. When it knocked the Beatles off the top of the UK chart, the British press went wild. Headlines screamed, has the Merseybeat been beaten by the Tottenham sound? The rivalry was born, though, as we'll discuss shortly, it was largely a press invention rather than a genuine feud. The follow up Bits and Pieces hit number two in the UK and kept the momentum rolling, and then came America In February nineteen sixty four, the Beatles had their historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Seventy three million Americans watched the British invasion had officially begun, and the very next month, in March nineteen sixty four, the Dave Clark Five became the second British group to appear on Ed Sullivan, Capitalizing on the enormous appetite the Beatles had created trivia moment. The DC five would ultimately appear on The Ed Sullivan Show eighteen times eighteen The Beatles, who essentially created the appetite for British acts, appeared twelve times. No British invasion group ever appeared on that show more often than Dave Clark and his bandmates. Between nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty seven, the Dave Clark Five placed seventeen singles in the US Billboard Top forty fifteen consecutive top twenty hits in three years, second only to the Beatles. Because can't you see that She's mine? Do you love me? Catch us? If you can, I like it like that everybody knows over and over, which went to number one in the United States on Christmas Day, nineteen sixty five, one hundred million records sold worldwide. They were quite simply a phenomenon, and they were smart about it. They were the first British invasion group to tour America, doing so in spring nineteen sixty four, head of the Beatles US tour that summer. They knew where the money was and they went to get it. They were also the first band to have their own private plane with the DC five insignia painted on the fuselage, in an era when most bands were crammed into transit vans. That was extraordinary. Now here's where the story of the Dave Clark five becomes not just musically interesting, but genuinely historically important, because Dave Clark wasn't just the drummer and the front man. He was also the manager, the producer, and crucially, the owner of the master recordings. In nineteen sixty three, think about that. This was years before the music industry began to properly understand what owning your masters meant. The Beatles didn't own theirs, the Rolling Stones didn't own theirs, a situation that would cause enormous heartache for decades. But Dave Clark, a self taught drummer from Tottenham who'd started the band to pay for football Kit walked into his record deal with his eyes wide open and insisted on retaining ownership of the recordings his band made. He managed the band, produced the records, co wrote most of the songs, and controlled the business. Rock historian George Frayn described the approach as building it up here, slowing it down there, changing it before the audience got bored. Clark, as conductor as much as musician, this was not the norm. This was visionary. Now, owning your masters is an incredible asset, but it's only an asset if you use it wisely. And here's where the Clark story gets complicated and for music fans, genuinely frustrating. Between nineteen seventy eight and nineteen ninety three, fifteen years, not a single Dave Clark five recording was available for commercial purchase in any format. Clark declined to license them. Why He's never given a fully satisfying public explanation. The music simply vanished from the mark. A compilation eventually appeared in nineteen ninety three, and nothing further was commercially available until two thousand and eight, when Universal Music released a compilation in the UK. Digital releases on iTunes began in two thousand and nine, the full catalog didn't properly emerge until well into the twenty tens and twenty twenties. This matters because a generation of music lovers couldn't access or rediscover the DC five in the way they could rediscover the Beatles, the Stones or the Kinks, and it's one reason, though not the only one, why the Dave Clark Five are less celebrated today than their extraordinary commercial success warrants. But the DC five's master recordings aren't the only thing Dave Clark acquired control of because after the band broke up, Clark set up a media company and in the nineteen eighties he made what turned out to be one of the shrewdest purchases in the history of British television. He bought the rights to Ready Steady Go. If you've never heard of Ready Steady Go, let me paint the picture. It was a live music program broadcast on British television from August nineteen sixty three to December nineteen sixty six. Its opening tagline was the weekend starts here and for teenagers across Britain. It genuinely was every Friday evening. It featured the biggest acts in the world performing in an intimate studio setting, surrounded by a dancing audience. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Dusty Springfield, Otis Redding, Marvin Gay, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Animals, the Kinks. If you were important in pop music in the mid nineteen sixties, you were on Ready, Steady Go. Now. A lot of those performances were wiped, as was tragically common with British television in the nineteen sixties, when tape was expensive and the archives weren't valued as they should have been. But a significant amount survived, and Dave Clark acquired the rights to the surviving recordings. He released some compilations on vhs in the nineteen eighties. He licensed footage to Channel four and the Disney Channel, but a comprehensive, properly released archive of what survived that didn't happen for decades. Music historians, archivists and fans were left frustrated knowing that somewhere in the Clark archive were irreplaceable performances that couldn't be officially accessed or commercially released. In twenty eighteen, BMG Rights Management announced they had acquired the ancillary rights to Ready Steady Go, a sign that the situation was finally beginning to be resolved. But the full story of just how much footage survives and what will ultimately be released is still being written. It's a complicated legacy. Clark's business instincts were by any measure remarkable, but the long withholding of both the DC five catalog and the RSG archive has meant that a chapter of pop history has been less accessible than it deserved to be. Let's address what is probably the most famous question about the Dave Clark Five. Were they really the Beatles great rivals? And did John Lennon genuinely fear they might surpass the FAB four? The short answer is the rivalry was real in commercial terms, but it was largely a media invention as a personal or musical conflict. And the specific story about Lenin expressing fear that the DC five might knock the Beatles off their perch, as best as historians can establish, that appears to be an urban legend, or at least it's a quote that has never been authenticated. What is true is that in nineteen sixty three and nineteen sixty four, the Dave Clark Five were genuinely the biggest commercial challenger to the Beatles in Britain. They knocked the Beatles off the number one spot. The press loved the narrative before the media latched onto the Beatles Versus Rolling Stone's storyline, which became the defining rivalry of the decade. They had the Beatles Versus Dave Clark five. It sold papers, but the bands themselves, they were friendly. Dave Clark and John Lennon got along well. Paul McCartney, speaking decades later, were called we weren't really worried because they were different. Clark himself said at the height of their fame, the DC five had organ and sacks. The Beatles were a guitar group, completely different sounds. They weren't rivals. They were two very different bands who happened to be successful at the same time. What is genuinely true is that the d C five's chart success was real. Their US popularity was staggering, and for a window of time in nineteen sixty four, they were absolutely in the conversation. Elton John later placed them alongside the Beatles and Stones as the Big Three of the British Invasion. That's not nothing. Every major British Invasion band seemed to make a movie, and the DC five were no exception. In nineteen sixty five, they starred in Catch Us if You Can, released in America as Having a Wild Weekend. Directed by a then unknown filmmaker named John Borman, it was a more downbeat, thoughtful film than the breezy template set by the Beatles A Hard Day's Night. Borman went on to direct Deliverance, Excalibur, and Hope and Glory. Not bad for a DC five side project. By the mid to late nineteen sixties, as psychedelia swept through pop music, the DC five struggled to adapt. They had built their identity on the Tottenham sound, and that sound didn't lend itself naturally to the acid drenched experimentation of the era. They kept charting in Britain into nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy everybody knows the Red Balloon good old rock and roll, but the global dominance of their peak years was gone. They disbanded in nineteen seventy. Dave Clark moved on. He wrote and produced The West End Muse Musical Time in nineteen eighty six, a big hit in London, featuring a remarkable cast on the soundtrack, Freddie Mercury, Stevie Wonder, Cliff Richard, Julian Lennon, Dion Warwick, Burt Bacharach and he directed Sir Lawrence Olivier in his final stage performance, the Tottenham footballer turned rock drummer, directing the greatest classical actor of the twentieth century, You truly could not make it up. The band's later years were tinged with tragedy. Dennis Payton died of cancer in December two thousand and six. Mike Smith, the voice of the DC five, the man whose raspy, powerful vocals defined the Tottenham sound, fell from a latter at his home in Spain in two thousand and three and suffered severe spinal injuries. He died of pneumonia on twenty eight February two thousand and eight, eleven days before the Dave Clark Five were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rick Huxley passed away in twenty thirteen. Of the classic lineup, only Dave Clark and Lenny Davidson survive That rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in two thousand and eight, presented by Tom Hanks, a genuine passionate superfan, was recognition long overdue. The Dave Clark Five sold one hundred million records. They had seventeen US top forty hits. They appeared on Ed Sullivan eighteen times. They were pioneers of artist ownership in an era when musicians were routinely exploited by their labels. They were one of the finest live acts of the British Invasion, and they deserve to be remembered. The Dave Clark Five aren't always the first name that comes up when people talk about the British Invasion, the Beatles, obviously, the Stones, maybe the Kinks or the Who. But the DC five were there at the beginning, knocking the Beatles off the top of the charts, conquering America with eighteen Ed Sullivan appearances, and doing it all while owning their masters and running their own show. And here's a thought to leave you with. The reason I know so much about this band, the reason this episode exists is that the Dave Clark Five happened to be one of the favorite bands of a certain grandfather. I know someone who is a teenager in the nineteen sixties when Glad all Over came out of the radio and absolutely stomped its way into his life. Some music doesn't leave you. Some of it stays for sixty years in counting. And that's the brief version of the story of the Dave Clark five sixties superstars and influencers. Now, Isabella and anyone else who's playing along, your homework task is an easy one. Just look up the Dave Clark Five's album All the Hits, and listen to the whole album and play it up loud the way your grandfather still does. I defy you to sit still and let me know how you go. Remember too. You can find all the music we've talked about today in the official Educating Isabella rock and Roll one oh one Playlists, which features all the music from our episodes. You'll find the playlists available on Spotify, YouTube Music, and Deezer links in the show notes. Next time on Educating Isabella rock and Roll one oh one, we continue our British Invasion series with a very unlikely band of soft pop hitmakers. Until then, keep listening, keep learning, and stay glad all Over rock on