Clem Cattini: My Life, Through The Eye of A Tornado by Clive Smith & Bip Wetherell

Author:Clive Smith & Bip Wetherell [Smith, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mango Books
Published: 2019-04-15T23:00:00+00:00

7

It’s All Over Now

‘It’s New Year’s Day, It’s Number One, It’s Top of The Pops!’ – DJ Jimmy Savile’s opening salvo on Wednesday, January 1st 1964, broadcast for the very first time from BBC Television’s studio in Dickenson Road, Rusholme, Manchester. Top Of The Pops was starting out on a journey that would last for over 42 years.

If he was sitting at home watching, Clem Cattini may have been forgiven for thinking his time had passed for appearing on this show that would become an established weekly event for the next four decades. Was he destined to become consigned to the waste bin of pop history with a host of other pre-Beatles artists? Clem couldn’t have dreamt that by the end of the decade he would become a major component of the show as resident drummer with The Top Of The Pops Orchestra for over thirteen years, and play with a multitude of superstars as diverse as Michael Jackson, Tom Jones, Stevie Wonder, Abba, The Wombles and Benny Hill.

The Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan’s third album, was released on January 13th 1964. That they certainly were. The Vietnam War was escalating and more and more US servicemen were being drafted and sent to South East Asia; many never to return home, many maimed for life. Images seared across our television screens brought the horrors of ‘Nam right into our living rooms. Our ignorance can be bliss. How many can own up to not even knowing where Vietnam was back in the early Sixties? America had problems. The Civil Rights Movement Act was passed in July, but violence and murders in the southern states continued. The Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, fuelled the trouble with his infamous speech ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’, as the fight for desegregation gathered apace with Martin Luther King Jr at the spearhead.

The Times They Are a-Changin’ included songs of injustice and hard times: ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’. ‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’ told the story of American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi and to enact social justice and voting rights. He was murdered by a Klansman in 1963.

With all of this going on, was it any wonder that America, still deep in shock over the Kennedy assassination, embraced the coming of The Beatles and the ‘British Invasion’ of pop groups this year as a twinkle of light in an era of abject gloom? The Beatles took America and the world by storm. Beatlemania went into overdrive as they released a succession of hit singles, albums and their film A Hard Day’s Night, which featured a brief cameo appearance from Clem Cattini on the soundtrack, something The Tornados drummer had long forgotten about until it was recalled by an unnamed studio engineer in the 1990s:

It was during the scene when the ‘man on train’ was taking a seat in The

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