Tracks: 1) Shadoogie; 2) Blue Star; 3) Nivram; 4) Baby My Heart; 5) See You In My Drums; 6) All My Sorrows; 7) Stand Up And Say That; 8) Gonzales; 9) Find Me A Golden Street; 10) Theme From A Filleted Place; 11) That’s My Desire; 12) My Resistance Is Low; 13) Sleepwalk; 14) Big Boy; 15*) Apache; 16*) Quartermaster’s Store; 17*) Man Of Mystery; 18*) The Stranger; 19*) F.B.I.; 20*) Midnight; 21*) The Frightened City; 22*) Back Home; 23*) Kon-Tiki; 24*) 36-24-36.
REVIEW
Unlike their mascot Cliff Richard, the Shadows very strictly distinguished between singles and LPs: of their first several charting singles, starting with ‘Apache’, not one is included on their self-titled debut LP, which makes it a bit confusing for collectors — compilations of the band’s materials are usually oriented at singles, so there is relatively little overlap between them and the LPs. Ultimately, I simply generated for myself a special homemade deluxe edition of The Shadows, with its 14 LP-only tracks, plus 10 more tracks covering the A- and B-sides from ‘Apache’ all the way to early 1961.
And this is where we start, since the legend of the Shadows as something more than just a backing band for Cliff Richard lies with the major success of ‘Apache’. Their previous three singles made no impact whatsoever on the British market, but with ‘Apache’ they somehow caught the vibe — even though Jerry Lordan’s composition has little to do with any sort of rock’n’roll, sounding more like a mix of Ennio Morricone and Dick Dale. These days, it would be quite hard to understand what all the hype was about, and in the US, there was no need for this even back in the day — although the Shadows broke big all over Europe, they never conquered the overseas, what with the American market already being saturated with surf-and-Western instrumental music. But perhaps for those British and other European kids, as well as some of their parents, stuff like ‘Apache’ did provide an easy approximation of the magic of That Other World. The mystical tribal drum sound, the haunting, echoey guitar sound of battle signals and horses galloping over the prairie, the general tense atmosphere of wariness and subtle danger — and mixed, perhaps, with a slight touch of patriotic pride, what with the local boys now being able to materialize their own version of the Old West without the need to import it straight from the source.
But as nice and dreamy as ‘Apache’ is, it also gives us a glimpse into the main problem of the Shadows — the problem which prevented them from becoming not just the instrumental Beatles or Stones, but even placed them well beyond their main American competition, the Ventures. Hank Marvin and the rest of the boys did quickly establish themselves as Britain’s tightest, best-oiled, most decidedly professional instrumental pop band, the one that could easily play everybody else under the table with their ferocious discipline and technique. Yet each and every second of their recorded output feels as if this is precisely what they were always about — discipline and technique prevailing over passion, excitement, spontaneity. Across the ocean, the Ventures were able to find a solid middle ground between professionalism and sheer fun, but the Shadows took a strictly academic approach to it all.
This is perhaps even better observable on the B-side to ‘Apache’, a rock’n’roll arrangement of the traditional British song ‘The Quartermaster’s Store’, probably intended as the homeland counterbalance to the American worship of the A-side. It is fast, it is tight, it is perfectly produced, with the gruff chugging rhythm guitar and the ringing lead guitar ideally complementing each other, yet somehow it all sounds too perfect, like a performance from a bunch of A-grade musical college students passing their final exam. This is not a crime, but in the end it transforms the song into a perfect soundtrack for your local dance party, or into decent background music for chores — hardly into some sort of self-sufficient groove which might make you drop everything else and just get carried away to a different place.
Every now and then, they offer tiny hints of being able to break out of the self-imposed robotic shells: ‘Man Of Mystery’, the successful follow-up to ‘Apache’ whose main theme sounds like a cross between a future James Bond movie and a sentimental French melodrama, suddenly erupts in a (relatively) wild, speedy, choking instrumental break where — oh the horror! — not every note seems to be perfect, only to return to the cool, calm, and collected delivery of the main theme twenty seconds later. But even when the opportunity presents itself, there is still something which always holds the band back — say, for instance, on ‘36-24-36’, the B-side to the romantic travelog of ‘Kon-Tiki’ which is probably the closest they get to «dirty blues-rock» on these early singles; and even then, when it comes to Hank breaking out the rock’n’roll lead guitar, he does this in a quiet, reserved manner, with tasty little licks played at humble volume levels so as not to offend the neighbors or anything.
So if you want to move past this skeptical mindset — the exact same one that the Beatles probably shared about the Shadows — the one thing you will probably want to concentrate on is the sheer melodic aspect. There are quite a few fun, catchy themes strewn across both the early singles and the self-titled LP itself, and they do not necessarily have to be all about rock’n’roll: ‘Nivram’, for instance, is a charming little jazz-pop shuffle whose chords and atmosphere keep reminding me of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ — since the tune does not even pretend to rock, all you have to do is sit back and relax to the silky tone of its lead guitar, as well as Jet Harris’ surprising little bass break. The cover material is typically flawless, be it the lazy-sunny-day-at-the-pool serenity of ‘Blue Star’ or the moonlit romanticism of ‘Sleepwalk’, or even a totally out-of-the-blue stab at a Hoagy Carmichael song (‘My Resistance Is Low’, which receives a smidgeon of «guitar fireworks» for the intro and the outro).
On a few of the numbers, the Shadows even dare to sing. Hank takes lead on Sonny Curtis’ ‘Baby My Heart’, showing a pleasantly warm vocal tone, but with arguably less confidence than Cliff would have; Jet Harris leads the band in quite a touching version of ‘All My Sorrows’ (certainly not any worse than the Searchers), and Bruce Welch does the same for ‘That’s My Desire’. That said, even if Hank later expressed his sorrow at not following George Harrison’s advice about moving away from the status of an instrumental band, it also seems clear enough that, had they taken it, the best they could have achieved would be to put the Searchers out of business, and even that one is questionable. On this album at least, the vocal numbers feel like harmless, useless filler next to the lead guitar-driven ones.
But enough with the sour notes, and let us end this review with just a bit of admiration anyway. Spontaneity be damned, after all, when your daily boogie dose is administered with the kind of aesthetic precision you find in the first guitar break of ‘Shadoogie’, the band’s temporary anthem of self-presentation which opens the album. Just put yourself in that one specific frame of mind, and all of a sudden the Shadows, with their perfectly produced sound, their perfectly matched tempos and tonalities, and their ideally planned stage choreography, begin to look like an early guitar version of Kraftwerk — a set of ideally groomed rock’n’roll robots, friendly on the outside, but a bit spooky and sinister on the inside. Honestly, there is a kind of weird mystique about this band which would totally be lacking in the Beatles — then again, I guess they weren’t called ‘The Shadows’ for nothing. That type of reserved distance they put between them and the audience, while not necessarily a thing to be loved, has a certain artistic significance, and it might even be argued that the attitude itself was quite influential on generations of British artists to come — hell, as much of a stretch as it would be, I’d argue that echoes of it may be seen in bands as artistically remote from the Shadows as, say, King Crimson. And to people like myself, this «don’t you dare to join together with the band» stylistics actually has quite a bit of charm.
One point that seems to be totally neglected is that Hank Marvin influenced one Ritchie Blackmore. There is a video with him playing in The Outlaws, an instrumental called Law and Order. It's a total Shadows clone, especially "the sheer melodic aspect". It's when Blackmore started to combine this melodicity with classical influences (before starting Mark I he recorded Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King) and distortion a la Hendrix that he developed his own style. The famous solo on Highway Star is one of the best examples. It's very possible to hum it, which is impossible with say Clapton and Page.