Garage-Mania
Dave Clark Five
They Tried Real Hard
Clark, born in 1942, was somewhat of a daredevil and worked in over 40 films as a stuntman. When his soccer team, the Totterham Hotspurs, needed money in 1960, he decided to form a band. He bought himself a set of drums and learned to play them. The band started out as a backup group for singer Stan Saxon and eventually evolved into the Dave Clark Five with Mike Smith, Dennis Payton, Rick Huxley and Lenny Davidson. The group signed a record deal on Ember/Pye in 1962, and their popularity grew. Their music was described as the Tottenham Sound because of the number of gigs they played locally in Tottenham, a suburb just north of London. Their first released was “Mulberry Bush,”. which went nowhere; but their second a cover the
You Love Me,” - the lower reaches of the English charts in the fall of 1963. However the Tremeloes released their version at the same time and had a bigger hit, and that was when the band decided to write and record their own material.
On January 18, 1964, the DC5 got the luckiest break ever in showbiz. “Glad All Over” topped the English charts, replacing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as number one. At this time, Clark was just 22 and all the members were still holding down full-time jobs. The band was promoted as the Beatles—beating giant, and this image was marketed to America. “Glad All Over” quickly shot up the American charts, reaching #6.
The band took the U.S. by storm, spearheading the British Invasion. In 1964, six more records made the top 15 in the country: “Bits and Pieces” (#3), “Can’t You See That She’s Mine” (#4), the power ballad “Because” (#3), “Do You ‘Love Me? (#1 1) and “Everybody Knows” (#15). Just like with the Beatles, girls all over the world broke into tears
just at the sight of them. For a while, the group was truly the Beatles’ number-one competitor and the world’s second-biggest band. In fact, my favorite DC5 song, “Bits and Pieces,” was banned at their live concerts. Fans worked themselves into a frenzy, jumping up and down to the song’s stomping beat. Promoters feared that this would damage the dance floors.
In 1965, they appeared in their own movie, Having a Wild Weekend, which also starred Barbara Ferris. It was the band’s answer to the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night. This marked the directorial debut of John Boorman, who later directed Deliverance and Exorcist II. The movie's title song, “Catch Us If You Can,” charted at #4 in July 1965.The band played stuntmen escaping the big corrupt city.
In 1965, the band had success on both sides of the Atlantic with more hits: “Reelin’ and Rockin”(# 23), “I Like It Like That”(#7) and their only American number-one hit, a cover of Bobby Day’s “Over and Over.” In 1966, they had hits with the excellent “Try Too Hard” (#12) and “You Got What It Takes” (#7), a cover version of Mary Johnson’s hit. By 1967, the band started to fade slowly away with lesser hits. “Nineteen Days” (#48) and “You Got What It Takes,” which reached number 7 in March 1967, were their last big American hits. The band had several hits in England in 1970 before disbanding for good later in that year.
Unfortunately, none of the original 14 American albums has ever been released on CD. In the United States, the only licensed significant CD is A History of the Dave Clark Five, which includes 50 songs on two CDs. I own that CD; I waited for years for it to come out. Sadly, it has been out of print for years. In England there is just a single CD compilation called Glad All Over Again. There are a few Japanese and Australian bootleg CDs out there, but they are relatively hard to find and are of poor quality. DC5 fans deserve better than this; we are still waiting after 40 years for more releases of the band. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that so many young people today do not know who this band was or how they changed the course of music history.
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