Review: The Dave Clark Five - Weekend In London (1965)

Tracks: 1) Come Home; 2) We’ll Be Running; 3) Blue Suede Shoes; 4) Hurting Inside; 5) I’ll Never Know; 6) ’Til The Right One Comes Along; 7) I’m Thinking; 8) Your Turn To Cry; 9) Little Bitty Pretty One; 10) Remember, It’s Me; 11) Mighty Good Loving.

REVIEW

The Dave Clark Five opened up 1965 on a much softer note than they closed up 1964: ‘Come Home’ is almost a tear-jerker of a ballad, starting off slowly, with a little intriguing interplay between Huxley’s bass and Clark’s quietly hissing cymbals, then quickly growing in intensity to become the band’s finest exercise in the art of pleading. (Some have noted the synchronicity between the song’s theme of separation and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that had just been passed a few months back, but I don’t think we should really go that far). Amusingly, I think that the song’s biggest hook comes not from the melody or the lead vocals, but from the convincingly desperate "oh yeah!" backing vocal in the chorus (Lenny Davidson?) which, for a couple of seconds, brings the song close to «blue-eyed soul» territory. Other than that, it’s still a little stiff, like most of the band’s hits, to stir up genuine emotion. A decent enough counterpoint to ‘Any Way You Want It’, though.

For the follow-up, however, they came up with a fairly strange choice: Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’, the first and, I believe, also the last time when they selected a classic rock’n’roll track as an A-side. It’s certainly not the worst choice that they could have made: ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’ is lightweight, playful fun without any rebellious, aggressive, or anthemic qualities to it, and it fits the Dave Clark Five aesthetics to a tee. But unlike Chuck himself, who would constantly breathe new life into the song by adding or improvising new verses on stage and milking his «teasing clown» image for what it was worth, the DC5 hardly come up with anything unpredictable — the song sounds exactly how you’d expect it to sound with the big DC5 sound, extra sax and keyboards and rowdy group harmonies and all, and once they get past the first verse, you’ve pretty much heard it all. More importantly, this was a bad sign to show to the audiences: everybody knew that the band’s strongest selling point was its own songwriting, and if they had to fall back on old Chuck Berry songs, right at the time when UK covers of US artists were quickly going out of fashion, what was even the point of going on?

Interestingly enough, they decided not to include ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’ on the upcoming album — probably because it failed to crack the US Top Twenty, for the first time since the band became a regular on the Billboard charts. Rather tellingly titled Weekend In London (not sure if this means they were offering their US fans a weekend in London or if it hints at the fact that by now, they were spending the other five days of the week in Miami), the album does include a couple of totally unnecessary covers: their take on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, as could be expected, never threatens the dominance of either Elvis or Carl Perkins, and their cover of Bobby Day and Thurston Harris’ ‘Little Bitty Pretty One’, while expectedly «thicker» and glammier than the Fifties’ original, does nothing to properly one-up the original versions’ level of exuberance, although it at least cannot be said that it does not sound different from the originals.

But if you purge the (already quite short, as usual) album from the covers, it can easily be noticed that the band’s own songwriting — with Mike Smith now returning to form as one of the primary composers — begins very heavily leaning toward the softer, balladeering side. Of the loud-and-proud, booming-and-bashing DC5 anthems à la ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘Any Way You Want It’, there is only one: ‘We’ll Be Running’, with a nicely crafted hook emphasizing the "running" mood of the song (and by "running", I’m pretty sure they mean "fucking", but those resonant r’s and n’s just work a little better within the context of the chorus than obstruents, which you just can’t draw out and roll in your mouth at will. Oh, what do you mean by "it was 1965, for God’s sake?" It’s all just a matter of phonetics!). The nasty problem is that they use the same vocal tricks as before — the drawn-out "you’ll be wasting tiii-iiii-iiii-iiime" sounds just like "so glad you’re miiii-iii-iii-iiine", and this, too, reinforces the impression that the band is starting to go around in circles.

In the serenading department, we can just as well detect attempts at self-repetition in ‘Your Turn To Cry’, whose use of organ and group harmonies bears a strong resemblance to ‘Because’ — meanwhile, the slightly jazzy guitar sound of that song is re-enhanced for ‘Hurting Inside’, almost as if the collective goodness of the band’s finest musical moment was split in two and used up to make two inferior recreations. I really like ‘Hurting Inside’ (even if it has the audacity to steal a musical hook from the Beatles’ ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’), but it feels like a conscious attempt to repeat the accidental magic of ‘Because’, and these things never truly work the way you want them to. Meanwhile, ‘Remember It’s Me’ is an even more blatant attempt to slavishly rewrite ‘Come Home’, merely replacing the song’s minimalistic bass intro with keyboards — what, they couldn’t at least have waited to include it on their next album, so it wouldn’t share the same LP space with its naturally superior role model?

Perhaps the oddest inclusion is ‘Til The Right One Comes Along’, which is, in itself, just another typically DC5 pop ballad, but recorded here without the typical DC5 pop sound — just Lenny Davidson on acoustic guitar and group harmonies accompanying Smith’s lead vocal. There is nothing too special about the chords or the mood, but the approach is curious: not even the Beatles, by that time, had dared to record anything so minimalistic, sending Ringo out on a smoke break. Maybe they were trying to score with the folkies (a little too late for that, though); in any case, they should have probably tried out a different band member for the lead vocal as well (something like Phil Collins on ‘More Fool Me’, remember that one?), because Mike Smith’s timbre is just... I don’t know, a bit too flat, maybe, for such a stripped-down, «intimate» affair. He’s definitely not John Lennon, who had a good flair for both loud and quiet; Smith is emotionally uninteresting in «quiet» mode, though I admit that these are all rampantly subjective judgements.

Anyway, the good news is that Weekend In London is, in its worst moments (‘Blue Suede Shoes’, etc.), merely expendable rather than cringey, and in its best moments, perfectly listenable as yet another product of the DC5’s hit-making pop machine. The bad news is that the pop machine has all but ceased churning out new ideas, and is now more about recombining the best bits of old ideas in new variations — some of which work better than others — which is, of course, particularly disappointing for the spring and summer of 1965, when the age of brilliant idea-making in pop music was just beginning to cross over the threshold. The band may have been "running, running, running", but mostly on the spot: Weekend In London pretty much sounds like a 1964 album, totally unaware of the waters around them having grown — so we’ll just have to accept it that soon they’ll be drenched to the bone. Which they will.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Dave Clark Five