Review: The Dave Clark Five - Return! (1964)

Tracks: 1) Can’t You See That She’s Mine; 2) I Need You I Love You; 3) I Love You No More; 4) Rumble; 5) Funny; 6) Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah; 7) Can I Trust You; 8) Forever And A Day; 9) Theme Without A Name; 10) On Broadway.

REVIEW

I love ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ — I really do. It might just be my personal favorite tune in the entire Dave Clark Five catalog. I love how it is so tight, intense, punctuated by these sharply accentuated staccato guitar chords. How the rhythm section just chugs along like it’s some very serious business, unnerving and metronomic and without any signs of showing off. How Mike Smith contributes to the sternness of the proceedings by allowing himself to forget that the English language is in possession of long vowels — except for the third syllable of each opening line ("can’t you se-e-e-e-e that she’s MINE?"), imitating regular outbursts of irritation and frustration. How Denis Payton’s saxophone break smoothly emerges from the general fray, marks the atmosphere with several well-placed shrapnel rounds and then packs itself back into its suitcase.

I mean, while it is still a pop song, ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ actually bothers about adding a new dimension to the Dave Clark Five’s sound: where ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘Bits And Pieces’ were both shiny-happy screamy anthems promoting lovesick giddiness, this follow-up adds a snarky defensive bite to the loud ecstatic bark. Perhaps they were explicitly thinking that their equivalent of the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ needed to be followed by their equivalent of a ‘She Loves You’ — or perhaps they weren’t thinking anything, and it just came out that way. Whatever be, it is easily their punchiest number of all time, and if only they’d bothered to follow it up with more compositions in a similar vein, their artistic reputation, if not necessarily their commercial impact, might have gotten a serious boost.

The song was actually taken as single from the band’s first UK LP, called A Session With The Dave Clark Five; two months later, with two of the songs that had already been released on Glad All Over lopped off, the album was issued as The Dave Clark Five Return! for the American market. Once again, seven out of ten tracks were bona fide originals, confirming the band’s desire to keep up with the Liverpool competition at least on that front; however, with the world already living in the age of A Hard Day’s Night, the distance between the Fab Four and the Fop Five was growing quite rapidly. Nevertheless, if you agree to slow down time and judge Return! by the standards of 1963 rather than 1964, it certainly holds up to the level of the previous album — at the very least, it has fewer straightforward embarrassments such as ‘No Time To Lose’ or ‘Doo Dah’.

In fact, ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ gets extra support from at least two following numbers. ‘I Need You, I Love You’ has one of the band’s catchiest vocal melodies, a shiny, upbeat pop tune which gets its hooks into you not through the tribal drum cannonade of a ‘Glad All Over’, but through a beautifully constructed vocal sequence where the verse rises to high heavens on the wings of group harmonies and then gets firmly, but gently conducted back to earth by Mike Smith’s solo performance. In contrast to the joyful chivalry of this tune, ‘I Love You No More’ is crunchier, dirtier, closer in spirit to the Stones than the Beatles, and gives Smith a nice opportunity to play some mean bluesy chords on the organ — the «nastiest» DC5 tune to that date, a surprisingly rare occasion given their reputation for arch-cheerfulness.

Side A closes with a pretty impressive cover of Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’: the very decision to cover one of rock music’s most important instrumentals is worthy of admiration, but the band also does a good job injecting some of its spirit into the melody — Payton’s sax, charged with an odd distortion effect that gradually transforms its sound into that of a Jew’s harp (no, really!), is at the forefront here, as important as the power chord guitar, and by the time they really rev it up, the Dave Clark Five almost transform themselves into a noisy predecessor of the early Who. Finally, Clark and Payton’s ‘Funny’ is another harmless, danceable piece of pop fun, closest in atmosphere to the early big hits but strangely deprived of their booming, wall-of-sound production.

The bad news is that Side B hardly ever lives up to the potential of Side A. After an honorably rocking start, here the band largely just mellows out and fizzles away. First, the inclusion of ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’, the good-time anthem from the controversial Song Of The South, is, I believe, intended as a sequel nod to ‘Doo Dah’ — there is no way this could be just a coincidence — although, admittedly, the sequel is more interesting from a musical perspective, what with the group harmonizing not against a steady beat, but against a slow, rhythmic, minimalistic-as-hell sequence of power chords: not so much a «wall of sound» as a «rubble of sound». Next, we have the fairly unmemorable, Searchers-style folk ballad ‘Can I Trust You’ which really does not work; the Mersey-style pop ballad ‘Forever And A Day’ which had already gone out of style; the slow-waltzing orchestrated instrumental ‘Theme Without A Name’ whose guitar melody seems to be copying the Shadows (come on, not in mid-’64!); and the oddest choice of all — a faithful cover of the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’. Mike Smith sings the song reasonably well, but the band adds nothing to the original; honestly, I think they must have included it in their repertoire specially for their American visit or something.

Still, the very fact that Return! tries to build its image without resorting to the anthemic, wall-rattling sounds of ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘Bits And Pieces’ deserves a bit of respect; it is not a carbon copy of the first album, it is not a collection of intentional filler, and it tries out a few new ideas that sometimes work, sometimes do not, and sometimes you can’t really tell because they are so small and barely noticeable. It is not true that the Dave Clark Five bluntly refused to progress; it is simply that theirs was a decidedly micro-progress, far more suitable to the conditions of 2020 than 1964. But hey, maybe all the more reason to give them a 2020 type of aesthetic reassessment?..

• Only Solitaire: The Dave Clark Five reviews