Whatever Happened To? Dave Clark

When the Beatles led music’s so-called British Invasion in the 1960’s, it was not the Rolling Stones who were their chief rival for the attention of teenage girls. Nor was it the Kinks or the Hollies, the Who or the Yardbirds, nor any of the other bands whose music has lived on for decades. It was the Dave Clark Five.

When the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was displaced as number one on the UK singles chart in January 1964, it was by Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over.” The Beatles arrived on these shores for a two-month tour in August of 1964. The Dave Clark Five beat them to it, starting a U.S. tour in the spring of that year. There was a much ballyhooed appearance by the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show that same year. The Dave Clark Five graced the Ed Sullivan stage 18 times. The Beatles first movie, “A Hard Day’s Night” debuted in the UK in July 1964 and in the US one month later. Within a year the Dave Clark Five were in theaters with “Catch Us If You Can” (it was released in the US as “Having a Wild Weekend”).

The Beatles popularity never seems to wane. The three surviving band members make occasional appearances and are involved in different music projects. The Rolling Stones just released a new album, their 26th studio album. It’s not unusual to turn on rock radio and hear the Kinks. The Dave Clark Five? They were done and dusted by 1970 at the age of six, rarely to be heard from again.

Dave Clark was the drummer. But he was also manager, producer and co-writer of most of the group’s songs.

Clark would later say of the 1970 break up: “‘People never understood why I did that, but I wanted to get back to being an ordinary person. I enjoyed every moment, but we’d been everywhere, done everything. I wanted to get back to being just Dave Clark, not Dave Clark Celebrity. The only thing I missed was going out on stage and performing.’ (Daily Mail, Feb. 13, 2015)

His drumming is not what led to the group’s success. In fact, it was later learned that he was not always doing the drumming on the Dave Clark Five’s records. This came out in a story by Spencer Leigh in The (London) Independent (Sept. 23, 2009) about studio session drummer Bobby Graham.

“Even at the time, it was suggested that Dave Clark was not playing on his records. Clark has never acknowledged this but Graham told me, ‘Dave wanted to produce and he couldn’t be up in the box and down in the Studio at the same time. Mike Smith had written Glad All Over with him and they weren’t too sure what they wanted from the drums. I was playing how I would normally play with the hi-hat, snare and bass and Dave asked, Bobby, can you make that simpler please? He didn’t want complicated fill-ins he couldn’t play himself on live dates as that would have given the game away.’”

What Clark did do on his own was the numbers. Jeff Tamarkin, writing for the web site Best Classic Bands, says “Clark…was an astute businessman, who, from the start of the group’s recording career, shaped their image, planned their tours and recording sessions and shrewdly negotiated to retain ownership of the band’s master recordings, a smart move that has allowed him to license out the catalog as he’s seen fit ever since.”

Clark also owns the U.S. rights to the Dave Clark Five’s music as well as the recordings of their TV appearances. His deal with EMI Records gave him a much more favorable royalty agreement than was common at the time. “We had a ‘live’ reputation, big enough where I could actually go in and see somebody at E.M.I. Records. I found out what the top rate was for an independent and asked for three times that, thinking that it left you room for maneuver, and to my amazement, they agreed.” (www.classicbands.com) Apparently, if you were a record company in the 60’s that had not signed the Beatles, you were caught in a seller’s market and Clark was savvy enough to take advantage.

It was those agreements signed while managing the band that would start Clark down the path to becoming a multimillionaire and owner of a home in West London valued at 12 million pounds.

Since then Clark has managed Spurs Music Publishing Ltd., the entity that published the Dave Clark Five’s songs. He was also involved in TV production and in the 1980’s acquired the rights to a popular British music TV show from the 60’s “Ready Steady Go!”. In 1986 he wrote a science fiction musical Time that had a two-year run on a London West End Stage. There was a follow-up album, also called Time, that featured Queen’s Freddie Mercury, among others. Clark and Mercury became life-long friends. Clark was at Mercury’s bedside when he died at home in 1991.

What he has not done, and likely never will, is a reunion tour. “I don’t think you can go back, but that’s me. You can’t go back to being a teenager or in your 20s or whatever. The people that carry on, from Elton and McCartney, Rod Stewart, they’ve never stopped. I can understand that, and good luck to them.” (bestclassicbands.com)

In 2008, the Dave Clark Five was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Tom Hanks.

Clark is now 83. He and guitarist Lenny Davidson are the only two living members of the band.

If you want to hear some Dave Clark Five, you might catch some if you tune in the English football games on Saturday morning. Manchester City fans have been known to sing a verse or two of Glad All Over with an altered lyric “cause we’ve got Guardiola” (a tribute to their manager). And Crystal Palace fans offer a hardy rendition of the song before each of their home matches at Selhurst Park in London.

Clark himself is a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. ““My one disappointment in my career is that it didn’t go to Spurs, because my company’s called Spurs Music Publishing. I tried to buy Spurs in the ‘60s and the family who owned it wouldn’t sell it. Going back to the past, the whole reason I formed the band was to raise funds so our youth team could travel to Holland. We got sick on the boat going over, won the match, came back and the rest is history. I’m flattered Crystal Palace use it [as their anthem], but I’m Spurs through and through.” (nme.com Jan. 20, 2020)

-0-

Whatever Happened To?