My British Invasion by Harold Bronson

Author:Harold Bronson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-06-16T00:40:02+00:00

The History of The

Dave Clark Five

The Dave Clark Five were among the better bands of the mid-sixties British Invasion. As with The Beatles, it took them a few years before they developed their sound and had success. They had no grand ambitions. The band formed for the temporary goal of making enough money to afford passage to Holland for Dave’s youth club soccer team. Members of the team played instruments, but there was no drummer, so Dave bought a drum set for ten pounds (twenty-eight dollars) from a Salvation Army outlet and learned the rudiments.

The band was good and gained a following, appearing often at the Tottenham Royal Mecca Ballroom. As exciting as the group was live, they weren’t convincing when they auditioned for record companies. There were few labels interested in signing the group, and those that did wanted to furnish the songs and define how they were to be recorded. Dave, though, believed in the band’s ability to make exciting records. He realized that he could control the repertoire if he paid for the sessions himself. He used the £300 ($840) he made for two days of stunt driving in a movie—crashing cars for a character played by singer Adam Faith—to pay for the recording. He then made a deal with EMI’s Columbia Records in the UK (and Epic in the US), and bluffed the label into giving him a high royalty by asking for three times the going rate, thinking that would give him more room to negotiate when the company made a lower counter offer. Columbia didn’t have to risk the expense of recording, so, to his surprise, they agreed. He also asked for the masters to revert to him after ten years, and they agreed to this as well. Nobody thought that this music would have longevity.

Dave left school at fifteen. His family was poor. He wasn’t academically inclined. Somehow, though, he had a natural instinct for making good business decisions. He learned from his agent, Harold Davidson, and others. This led him to form a publishing company for the band’s compositions. Income from songs was usually split 50 percent for the writers, 50 percent for the publisher, which meant that Dave made money not only from the songs he helped to write, but also from the publishing. It’s one thing to take note of what songs dancers respond to, and another to eavesdrop on them between sets to pick up on phrases around which to build songs. Such eavesdropping resulted in the band’s first two big hits, “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces.”

The importance of band-composed songs was brought home in October 1963 with their first charting record. The group loved American rock ’n’ roll, and recorded a cover of The Contours’ 1962 hit “Do You Love Me,” which skirted the Top 30 in the UK. Dave had seen the Motown vocal group perform it live on tour in Britain. But it was bested by a contemporary, beat group (i.e. like The Beatles) arrangement by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, which made it to number one.

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