The ShadowMusic Web Community

The Beatles complete sessions is a good day to day book, it gives every recording session, radio show, tv show and concert they did from 1957 - 1970.
Doing the same for The Shadows may prove daunting however as they lasted a lot longer and probably did far more concerts than the Beatles and obviously some material may be lost due to the mists of time.

I got quite a long way with a day by day type thing for the Jet-era Drifters/Shads. I did the research myself rather than risk repeating mistakes found in books/mags/the internet. Mainly i used the music papers of the time which contained a lot of reporting of forthcoming concerts/tv/radio etc.
Rob Bradford's BBC radio work was excellent - i've done some myself and come up with a little extra information in this area as well as BBC TV.
Sadly it's much harder to get solid info for independent television as records were lost/destroyed as the various franchises changed.
Time permitting i would be more than happy to share this research on the forum. I am currently working on another project for a book i'm hoping to have published at the end of the year or next year but i think it would be a good thing to start properly cataloging a full performance history of both Cliff and The Shads at least until the band split in 1968. I don't think there can be any doubt that until the Fabs came along, Cliff and The Shads were the most important UK band, probably the first of the "Great British Beat Groups". I'll see what i can come up with over the next month or two. Would it be an idea to have a reference section on the board for such a thing ? What does anyone else think ?

ash wrote: ... Would it be an idea to have a reference section on the board for such a thing ? What does anyone else think ? ...

Sounds good to me.

Hallo Ulrich
....viel Zeit ist vergangen seit ich Bruce Welch mein erstes fertigestelltes Buch "366 Days with The Shadows" in Tilburg 2001 übergeben habe. sein Kommentar, ich bringe es sofort in Sicherheit (Hotelzimmer). Seit diesem Tag, habe ich nie einen Kommentar dazu erhalten.
Mein zweites Exemplar, überarbeitet und von der deutschen Spache ins englische Übersetzt ist in meinem Besitz.
Ein neues Projekt als Fotobuch benötigte viele Stunden und ist leider wegen gesundheitlichen Problemen erst bis Dezember 1959 jetzt fertig und wird ergänzt und in mehreren Teilbücher irgend wann........fertig.
Herzliche Grüsse aus der Schweiz.

Were ‘our’ Drifters making appearances completely independently of Cliff as early as Jan 59?
(apart from EMI recordings, of course)

There's a still in the Story of The Shadows of them appearing on Oh Boy! performing 'Feelin Fine' which would be early 1959 but the footage hasn't surfaced so could be lost.

The BBC has got some footage of The Drifters performing 'Rocketry' (Rock Poetry) with Royston Ellis at a youth club or something in Battersea. This is from 1959 I believe and is probably the first footage of them without Cliff.

This image was taken from a clip of BBC news footage of the performance by Royston Ellis, accompanied by the Drifters (still, just) at Battersea Town Hall on 30th July, 1959, one of a series of Thursday "jive-nights" for teenagers staged by the local authority! Bruce is playing his Vega, Jet with Framus, Hank with the new Strat, Tony with Premier (?) kit.


Bill

I think Tony's kit in that period was an Ajax set. He played that brand until mid-1961, when he got the Gretsch kit seen in the film "The Young Ones".

Ajax was a popular British-made brand, owned by the distributor Boosey and Hawkes (see: http://englishrogersdrums.co.uk/History%20ER.html and http://ukdrums.weebly.com/ajax-1935-67.html)

[For the benefit of Continental readers - especially those from The Netherlands - the name "Ajax" is pronounced in English as "Ey Jacks" and not iAxe!

Fenderman wrote:There's a still in the Story of The Shadows of them appearing on Oh Boy! performing 'Feelin Fine' which would be early 1959 but the footage hasn't surfaced so could be lost.

I believe that there is some saved footage from an "Oh Boy!" show which was rescued because it was used in the TV programme "The ABC of ABC" in 1966.

ABC was a an English television broadcaster which operated under that name between 1956 and 1968. In 1966, the company celebrated its tenth anniversary by making that programme. It featured Cliff and The Shadows watching themselves performing Mean Streak on ABC's "Oh Boy" from 1959 (and maybe Feelin' Fine as well), before performing their latest record (Blue Turns To Grey).

Clearly, the episode of "Oh Boy" which provided the clip(s) was still in existence in 1966 and must have been wiped or otherwise destroyed later than that.

The whole programme of "The ABC of ABC" (containing at least one 1959 clip) still exists and a copy can be found in the British Film Institute.