GLAD ALL OVER AGAIN

Alan Clayson asks the leader of The Dave Clark Five about a new greatest hits collection and what remains in the vaults

For a good half of my ignominious career at grammar school, I lived my life through The Dave Clark Five, affiliating myself to them as other lads might to a soccer team, rejoicing in their triumphs and lamenting their setbacks as if they were my own.

To this day, I can reel off the most obscure biographical and discographical details about them. Off the top of my head, bass player Rick Huxley is Mick Jagger’s cousin by marriage; in 1961, Denis Payton replaced saxophonist Jim Spencer, who became a solicitor; Lenny Davidson was once guitarist with The Impalas; Dave had a dog named Spike (subject of a regular newsletter from an unofficial fan club of about 15,000 – mostly US – members), and Tommy Cooper asked a member of the audience to hand him a fiver in order that he could list how many song titles he could make from what he saw. There’d be Rule Britannia and maybe a few others, and then Tommy would tear the bank note into shreds, and conclude with Bits And Pieces.

It wasn’t until 1967 that I let the fan club subscription lapse, and shrugged them off, a phase through which I’d had to pass. Yet stumbling upon a Five single – Won’t You Be My Lady/Into Your Life – in a car-boot sale in the mid-90s was akin to colliding with a former ‘serious’ …

by Alan Clayson
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