Podcasts about Young Romance

Si je vous demande de penser à un super-héros de chez DC Comics, il y a fort à parier que Batman, Superman ou Wonder Woman vous viendront à l'esprit avant Green Arrow. Aujourd'hui, on parle justement des aventures de Green Arrow par Jack Kirby, qui n'ont pas du tout plu à DC Comics ! La période séparant l'Âge d'Or de la bande dessinée américaine de l'Âge d'Argent est aussi riche que troublée. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les ventes des titres mettant en scène super-héros et super-héroïnes déclinent aux États-Unis. Les justiciers costumés n'ont plus la côte, et le genre super-héroïque, jusqu'alors prédominant, est peu à peu remplacé par d'autres. La romance, l'horreur, le western et la science-fiction évincent les ersatz de Superman et de Batman des kiosques à journaux, tandis que leurs modèles peinent à garder la tête hors de l'eau, et que les artistes doivent s'adapter pour continuer à gagner leur croûte. Dès 1947, Joe Simon et Jack Kirby, déjà derrière la création de Captain America, avaient pressenti la transmutation du marché avec leur titre Young Romance, présentant des aventures sentimentales prétendues réelles, participant grandement à l'évolution des tendances. Mais s'estimant de plus en plus spoliés par les éditeurs, Simon et Kirby décident de lancer leur propre maison d'édition, Mainline Comics, en 1953. Au programme : quatre titres surfant chacun sur un grand courant de l'époque. Malheureusement pour eux, ils ont assurément choisi le pire moment possible pour initier leur projet. À partir de 1950, l'éditeur EC Comics, avec à sa tête Bill Gaines, s'est engagé dans une surenchère d'horreur gore et de violence morbide pour attirer les jeunes lecteurs en manque de sensations fortes, appâtés par des couvertures toujours plus choquantes. Généralement accolées à un discours politique et social, certes implicite, mais extrêmement critique envers la fameuse “American way of life”, les histoires de EC Comics deviennent pour certains et certaines l'incarnation du danger représenté par la bande dessinée, qui pervertirait la jeunesse en la poussant au crime. La panique morale autour des comics de crimes et d'horreur, entretenue par des figures publiques comme le politicien Estes Kefauver et le psychiatre Fredric Wertham, devenu célèbre chez les fans de super-héros pour son livre Seduction of the Innocent, mènera à la création du Comics Code Authority, et surtout à une crise éditoriale majeure, qui verra disparaître près des deux tiers des bandes dessinées publiées à l'époque. Et qui dit moins de comics commercialisés dit moins de travail pour les imprimeurs et les distributeurs. Ce marché fragilisé, dont les différents acteurs font faillite les uns après les autres, couplé à des soucis juridiques avec leur précédent employeur, Crestwood Publications, forcera Jack Kirby et Joe Simon à baisser le rideau de Mainline en 1956, avec seulement quelques publications concrètes au compteur. Cet échec aura épuisé les deux artistes sur tous les plans et émoussé leur longue et solide collaboration. Tandis que Joe Simon décide de quitter le monde du neuvième art pour celui de la publicité et de la presse magazine, Jack Kirby rejoint les rangs de National Comics, qui deviendra DC Comics, avec une toute nouvelle série de science-fiction : Challengers of the Unknown. Une série souvent attribuée au seul génie de Kirby, mais sans doute nourrie de ses derniers échanges avec Joe Simon, et également des idées du scénariste Dave Wood, l'un des créateurs de Animal Man. 1956 est une année charnière pour le genre super-héroïque, la banqueroute de Mainline coïncidant fortuitement avec le retour des héros costumés sur le devant de la scène, en partie à l'initiative de DC Comics. Dans le quatrième numéro du périodique Showcase, l'éditeur présente une nouvelle version de son bolide écarlate, The Flash. Le succès est au rendez-vous, et si le retour en grâce des surhommes costumés va prendre encore quelques années, DC va amorcer un rafraîchissement créatif et éditorial de plusieurs de ses super-héros, dont bon nombre sont cantonnés à des anthologies comme World's Finest, Adventure Comics ou More Fun Comics, faute d'intérêt du lectorat. C'est notamment le cas de Green Arrow, présent à la fois au sommaire de World's Finest Comics depuis 1941 et de Adventure Comics depuis 1946. Il faut dire que le personnage, loin d'avoir rencontré le succès d'un Batman ou d'un Superman, n'a jamais eu droit à une publication à son nom, et a moins souvent l'honneur d'être représenté en couverture. Créé en 1941 par le scénariste Mort Weisinger et le dessinateur George Papp dans les pages de More Fun Comics #73, ce héros à gadget, expert en archerie, s'inspire à la fois de Batman, de Robin des Bois et du serial The Green Archer, diffusé dans les cinémas américain à partir de 1940. C'est dans More Fun Comics #89, publié en 1943, que les origines de Green Arrow et de son sidekick adolescent Speedy nous sont racontées pour la première fois. Oliver Queen, collectionneur d'armes et d'objets des peuples natifs américains, rencontre Roy Harper, un jeune orphelin élevé par une tribu amérindienne isolée après un crash d'avion dont il est le seul survivant. Après avoir déjoué les plans de pilleurs d'antiquités, nos deux héros, tous deux archers accomplis, décident de faire équipe pour combattre le crime, finançant leur croisade avec l'or d'un trésor qu'ils ont découvert dans la réserve indienne. Une origin story qui n'a pas grand-chose à voir avec celle que nous connaissons actuellement, mais on va y revenir. En 1946, le personnage et son acolyte sont transférés de More Fun Comics à Adventure Comics, où son co-créateur George Papp dessinera pendant de nombreuses années ses aventures, accompagné du scénariste Ed Herron, notamment considéré comme le créateur de Red Skull dans les pages de Captain America. Seulement, en 1958, quand George Papp succède à John Sikela au dessin sur Superboy, Green Arrow se trouve dépourvu de dessinateur attitré. L'éditeur Jack Schiff, connaissant les capacités de productions de Jack Kirby sur Challengers of the Unknown, lui propose de reprendre le titre. Kirby n'a alors jamais lu une seule aventure de Green Arrow, mais il a besoin d'argent, alors il accepte et lit quelques épisodes fournis par Schiff pour se faire une idée. Peu convaincu par les illustrés en question, Jack Kirby se dit qu'il pourra quand même faire quelque chose du personnage, pour peu qu'on lui laisse un peu de liberté. Et si cela va s'avérer beaucoup plus difficile qu'il le croit, l'artiste va quand même donner un sacré coup de jeune à Oliver Queen. La première histoire de Green Arrow dessinée par Kirby paraît dans Adventure Comics #250, durant l'été 1958. Écrite par Bill Finger, le co-créateur de Batman, “The Green Arrows of the World” nous permet de découvrir que l'archer vert n'est pas le seul justicier à utiliser un arc et des flèches, bien au contraire. Ayant fait des émules partout sur la planète, Oliver Queen reçoit la visite de différents homologues venus du Japon, de France, ou encore du Mexique. Il y a là un recyclage évident d'une thématique déjà exploitée par Batman quelques années plus tôt, notamment avec l'épisode intitulé “Batmen of All-Nations”, publié en 1955. C'est à partir du numéro suivant, avec “The Case of the Super-Arrows”, que la patte de Jack Kirby commence réellement à se faire sentir. Flèche Verte et Speedy s'y aventurent sur un territoire jusqu'alors rarement exploré au cours de leurs péripéties, celui de la science-fiction. Durant onze épisodes ; écrits alternativement par Ed Herron et Dave Wood, et largement enrichis par les idées de Jack Kirby ; le personnage de Green Arrow s'éloigne peu à peu de l'univers dans lequel il macère depuis sa création pour explorer d'autres mondes et d'autres dimensions, comme dans l'histoire “Prisoners of Dimension Zero”, dont la publication en deux parties est plutôt avant-gardiste pour l'époque. Avec “Green Arrow's First Case”, dans Adventure Comics #256, Jack Kirby et Ed Herron revisitent les origines du super-héros de Star City, oubliant son côté Robin des Bois et son rapport plus que discutable aux natifs américains pour en faire une sorte de Robinson. Désormais, le playboy milliardaire Oliver Queen est devenu Green Arrow après être tombé par-dessus bord lors d'un voyage dans les mers du Sud. Parvenant à atteindre Starfish Island, un îlot vierge et hostile, Oliver y survit en recyclant ses anciens vêtements pour se confectionner un équipement et devient un excellent archer à force d'entraînement. Il utilise alors la végétation pour se fabriquer une nouvelle tenue, ce qui permet de justifier la couleur verte de son accoutrement de vigilant masqué une fois revenu à la civilisation. Il y a quelque chose de particulièrement symbolique dans cette nouvelle origin story, où un jeune occidental fortuné quitte son costume pour renouer avec la nature et repartir à zéro autant humainement que socialement. Certes, la recette n'est pas des plus surprenantes, mais ça sonne toujours mieux que de s'enrichir en volant le patrimoine amérindien, si bien que cette version restera la base de toutes les réécritures suivantes, jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Contrairement à ce à quoi on pourrait s'attendre, les responsables éditoriaux de DC Comics ; Mort Weisinger, le co-créateur de Green Arrow, en tête ; n'apprécient pas du tout l'approche de Jack Kirby. Pour eux, le personnage n'a rien à faire dans des récits de science-fiction et, pour d'obscures raisons, ils préfèrent visiblement conserver son statut de "sous-Batman avec un arc". Kirby se fâche finalement avec Jack Schiff, pour une sombre histoire autour du strip Sky Masters, publié dans la presse, et c'est Lee Elias, connu pour ses provocantes couvertures gores chez Harvey, qui le remplace pour dessiner Green Arrow. Jack Kirby retourne chez Atlas, qui prendra très bientôt le nom de Marvel Comics, et ne remettra plus les pieds chez DC Comics avant 1970, pour développer son Quatrième Monde dans des séries comme Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, New Gods, ou Mister Miracle, y réutilisant notamment des concepts esquissés dans ses épisodes de Green Arrow. À partir de 1961, avec Stan Lee et Steve Ditko, Kirby va œuvrer à la création de pratiquement toutes les figures majeures de l'univers Marvel, qui continuent de nos jours à vivre moult aventures sur le papier et remplissent les salles de cinéma de blockbuster en blockbuster, depuis plus de deux décennies. L'artiste s'en donnera à cœur joie dans les pages des Fantastic Four ; sorte d'évolution super-héroïque des Challengers de l'Inconnu ; ou de Thor, dans lesquelles la célèbre "Méthode Marvel" de Stan Lee lui laissera une très grande autonomie créative. Que seraient devenus Green Arrow et l'univers DC à l'orée du Silver Age si le Roi des Comics était resté chez l'éditeur ? Se souviendrait-on d'Oliver Queen autrement que comme d'un second couteau utilisant des flèches-gadgets un brin kitsch ? Malgré les travaux de Neal Adams et Dennis O'Neil, de Mike Grell, Phil Hester, Kevin Smith, Jock, ou Jeff Lemire, et la longévité non négligeable de la série télévisée Arrow de la CW, l'archer vert reste, encore de nos jours, loin derrière la sainte trinité de DC comics en termes de renommée et d'impact sur la culture populaire. Pourtant, découvrir, ou redécouvrir, les aventures de Green Arrow, c'est aussi traverser les différentes périodes de l'histoire des comic books et en appréhender les tentatives et les tendances sous un autre jour. Une expérience que je vous recommande si vous voulez ajouter une corde à votre arc ! N'hésitez pas à partager cet article sur les réseaux sociaux s'il vous a plu ! Recevez mes articles, podcasts et vidéos directement dans votre boîte mail, sans intermédiaire ni publicité, en vous abonnant gratuitement ! Get full access to CHRIS - POP CULTURE & COMICS at chrisstup.substack.com/subscribe

This Valentine's Day, we welcome back comic book podcaster, George, from "Shortbox Summary" to discuss the Eisner award winning book, Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzuchelli. Plus we look back at the other comics & movies released in the summer of 2009 as well as another exciting of chapter of "Young Romance" as part of our comic book theater series! Host: Andy Larson  Co Hosts: Chad Smith & JA Scott Guest Panelists: Nicole Larson & George from Shortbox Summary (@purplebird616)  Subscribe to Shortbox Summary here: https://www.shortboxsummary.com

Welcome to the (Not So) New 52, a real-time retrospective of DC Comics' New 52 imprint! Discussed this week: 0:00:00 - Intro 0:03:07 - Animal Man #17 (Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder and Timothy Green II) 0:11:13 - Swamp Thing #17 (Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire and Andrew Belanger) 0:20:22 - Detective Comics #17 (John Layman and Jason Fabok) 0:29:26 - Batwing #17 (Fabian Nicieza and Fabrizio Florentino) 0:37:55 - Earth 2 #9 (James Robinson and Nicola Scott) 0:46:33 - Green Arrow #17 (Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino) 0:55:40 - Worlds' Finest #9 (Paul Levitz and George Pérez, Yildiray Cinar, Cafu) 1:04:05 - Stormwatch #17 (Peter Milligan and Will Conrad) 1:13:04 - The Phantom Stranger #5 (Dan DiDio, J.M. De Matteis and Brent Anderson) 1:22:29 - Dial H #9 (China Miéville and Alberto Ponticelli) 1:32:13 - Human Bomb #3 (Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti and Jerry Ordway) 1:40:09 - Young Romance #1 (Various) 1:58:17 - Next Week's Books patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mildfuzztv twitter: @DCComicsPodcast (Use #New52) discord: https://discord.gg/8fbyCehMTy

Amir and Jason were intrigued to read the romance comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, so they dug out their copies of the 2012 Young Romance anthology and read a couple of the stories from that volume. And the stories weren't just good - they were great! Hear the guys rave about these amazing comics and then come back next week for more fun conversation about the most suprising romance comics ever published. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/classiccomics/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/classiccomics/support

By the time this YA novel begins, Siena and Patrick have already been dating for three years. With college in the near future, Siena is ready to let go and move on — to give herself a chance to grow. But before she can break up with Patrick, he breaks the news that he's moving out of state. Hoping that their relationship will break apart over time, Siena agrees to date long-distance ... which might have her re-thinking her feelings for Patrick altogether. YA author duo Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (#Wibbroka) explore the complexities of long-distance dating and young romance in their new YA novel, With and Without You. Being high school sweethearts who survived a long-distance relationship, you could call them experts on the subject! Wibbroka sits with Chelsea Regan to dive into their latest YA novel in this episode of Bookmarked. This episode is sponsored by Libro.fm. Buy audiobooks while supporting your local bookstore. Libro.fm has a special offer for Bookstacked readers. Get TWO audiobooks for the price of one with your first month of membership when using the code Bookstacked. Click here to get started. Get in touch … Let your voice be heard! There are several ways you can get in touch with us and interact with the show. Your messages might be included in the next episode! Record and send us a voice message! Follow and talk to us through Twitter! Send us an old-fashioned email! Follow the guests and host … Emily and Austin: EmilyAndAustinWrite.com Emily Wibberley: @Wibbs_Ink (Twitter), @wibbs_ink (Instagram) Austin Siegemund-Broka: @ASiegemundBroka (Twitter), @austins_b (Instagram) Chelsea Regan: @pluckybookmark (Instagram), @chelsearegan17 (Twitter)

Here’s the February episode of our indiepop radio show. 12 brilliant new tracks released in the last few weeks, framed by two older favourites coming from Young Scum and Young Romance. New music by Mattiel, Ramesh, The High Water Marks & more, plus the new single by Bobby Wratten’s Lightning In A Twilight Hour. Just … Continue reading "Indiepop Radio Episode 22-02"

Welcome to Jack Kirby Month 2021 Celebration on Kirby's Kids! We have a jam packed month of "King" sized goodness planned! In this episode Angus feels the love and reviews Young Romance with a special emphasis on a historical overview of 'Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics'. Young Romance https://www.comixology.com/Young-Romance-Simon-Kirby-1940-1950-1/digital-comic/44999 Please join us for our additional reads to celebrate Jack and his comics legacy: Black Magic - August 11th https://www.comixology.com/Black-Magic-1973-1975-1/digital-comic/839724 Two-Gun Kid - August 14th https://www.comixology.com/Two-Gun-Kid-1948-1977-60/digital-comic/582675 Not Brand Echh - August 18th https://www.comixology.com/Not-Brand-Echh-1967-1969-7/digital-comic/605310 Kudos Kirby - Machine Man Issue 5 - August 21st https://www.comixology.com/Machine-Man-by-Kirby-Ditko-The-Complete-Collection/digital-comic/405687 Destroyer Duck - August 25th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StltOEhtx0I The Kirby Roundtable Takes On The Demon - August 28th https://www.comixology.com/The-Demon-by-Jack-Kirby/digital-comic/582106 https://www.comixology.com/Demon-Knights-2011-2013-Vol-1-Seven-Against-the-Dark/digital-comic/56798 Leave a message via the anchor app at Kirby's Kids. www.anchor.fm/kirbyskids Join the Community Discussions https://mewe.com/join/kirbyskids Please join us down on the Comics Reading Trail in 2021 https://kirbyskidspodcast.blogspot.com/2020/11/holiday-special-kirbys-kids-giving.html Intro and Outro segments from 'NEW GODS ft. Jack Kirby' by Akira The Don https://akirathedon.bandcamp.com/track/new-gods-ft-jack-kirby For detailed show notes and past episodes please visit www.kirbyskids.com

This is probably the weirdest Action Comics episode so far...and that's saying something! Why is Superman murdering Jimmy Olsen on that cover? Find out as Davis returns at the Superman Desk with a story that's all over the place! Covers Action Comics Vol. 2 #19-24, and stories from Young Romance #1 and Superman Annual Vol. 3 #2 Superman Desk: Michael Davis - @teamdavis https://www.dccomics.com/graphic-novels/action-comics-2011/action-comics-vol-4-hybrid-0

➤ Young Romance ~ My kid and step kid seem to be romantically curious. Listen to caller's personal dramas four times each week as Dr. Kenner takes your calls and questions on parenting, romance, love, family, marriage, divorce, hobbies, career, mental health - any personal issue! Call anytime, toll free 877-Dr-Kenner. Visit www.drkenner.com for more information about the show.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Roosevelt over Zoom audio! After causing a stir in June with “Sign”, his first new studio recording since 2018 which Stereogum called “a thumping house-pop jam with an emotional ballad at its gooey center”, acclaimed artist and producer Marius Lauber AKA Roosevelt recently released the follow-up single “Echoes”. This late summer special showcases a totally different side of Roosevelt – a space disco opus with layers of vocals revealing a wide narrative arc that simultaneously taps into euphoria and nostalgia.“I often see the recording process as an experiment as to how much of a band sound I can create on my own. It still really excites me to produce something that sounds larger than my little recording studio, so even when I could hire musicians to come in and play parts, to me there's something magic about doing it all by myself with my sometimes mediocre skills on some of the instruments I record. 'Echoes' is a good example, as I wanted to create a really rich and lush production, a 'disco orchestra' kind of sound, with lots of layers of sound.Something I did on Echoes, which I haven't done for quite a long time, was to have a musical and lyrical resolution as a second part of the track, that works as a reply to the beginning. While the first half is about being worried about never being able to forget a person that was important to you, the second half is about coming to terms with the fact that you've made these memories, knowing you can always slip into your memory to dive back into those feelings you once had. It builds into a very nostalgic and euphoric moment and turns dealing with the past into something positive and ecstatic.” Marius LauberThe song, which Billboard said “balances '80s-inspired synth, disco, driving beats and cinematic textures into a musical amalgamation that simultaneously manages effervescence and heft,” pays homage to early house and vintage pop and is already streaming in the millions.Roosevelt is and always was a dedicated music lover, with a rich knowledge of several decades of music, from yacht rock to Balearic textures, house euphoria to sub-zero techno, he’s drawn to all forms of dance music. Guided by the emotional and physical connection to music, he uses his outstanding skills in electronics to create music that pushes and pulls between the body and the mind. It’s the warm emotional touch that drives his music and made people fall in love with his tunes since his very early singles, his outstanding debut album ‘Roosevelt’ (2016) and the bold, addictive follow up ‘Young Romance’ (2018). And it is Roosevelt’s warm emotional touch that also drives ‘Sign’ forward again. When not locked in his studio cranking out the hits, Roosevelt is also an in-demand producer, collaborating with Classixx and Washed Out or remixing artists like Rhye, Chvrches and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Alongside his successful live career, relentlessly touring with his band all over the world, he has also DJ’d at landmark clubs like Berlin’s Panorama Bar and London’s Fabric, rocked festivals such as Primavera Sound, Glastonbury, while also appearing on Boiler Room.We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com.www.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod  #foryou #foryoupage #stayhome #togetherathome #zoom #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetwork

En Terminal Pop, revista de actualidad musical en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es ; sábados, 22,00 a 24,00h). Suzanne Vega estrena "new york is my destination", nuevo adelanto de An evening of new york songs and stories, Echo & The Bunnymen celebrarán sus 40 años en una gira especial, Public Enemy han regresado a escena con la publicación de una nueva canción titulada State Of The Union, Kelly Lee Owens deja ver su lado más dream pop y personal en ‘On’, Androgynous Mary, el debut de la banda de Los Ángeles, Girl Friday, saldrá el 21 de agosto, Blossoms publica una versión de 'Dreaming of you" de The Coral. Marius Lauber, también conocido como Roosevelt, regresa con el primer single nuevo desde su segundo álbum Young Romance de 2018. “Sign” es una pieza reducida de digitalismo hiper melodico, una balada cinematográfica sobre la pérdida y la esperanza, JULIE ET JOE es un nuevo proyecto de Julie Big (LE SUPERHOMARD) y Joe Moore (THE YEARNING). The Weeknd estrena el vídeo de ‘In Your Eyes’, Doves regresa con “Carousels”. Khruangbin publican hoy Mordechai, su enciclopédico y gozoso nuevo disco, la cantante islandesa Björk aparece en el disco de Arca leyendo un poema de Antonio Machado en su idioma original, el español, habiendo sido su pronunciación supervisada previamente por Rosalía . Fenne Lily anuncia BREACH, su nuevo disco, con el indie rock motorizado de "alapathy"

Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Apache”, by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Handy Man” by Jimmy Jones. My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources   As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, this six-CD set contains every recording the Shadows made on their own between 1959 and 1966, for a very low price. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Some of the information on Royston Ellis and Norrie Paramor comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. This volume contains Royston Ellis’ two very slim books, one on Cliff and one on the Shadows, written for a teen audience in 1960 and 61. They are more of historical interest than anything else. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at the group that, more than any other, made the guitar group the standard for rock music; the group which made the Fender Stratocaster the single most popular guitar in the world; and who dominated the British charts for much of the early 1960s. We’re going to look at the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows: “Apache”] We talked about Cliff Richard four months ago, but we’ve not yet looked at his backing group in any great detail. That’s because his group at the time of “Move It”, the single we looked at back then, was not the group that would end up becoming famous for backing him. We only mentioned in the last few minutes of that episode how his original backing band, the Drifters, were replaced one at a time by Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, most of whom had been members of the Vipers at one point or another during that group’s commercial decline. This group, still calling themselves the Drifters, went into Abbey Road studios with Cliff in February 1959, to record Richard’s first album — a live album in front of a studio audience. The album was mostly made up of rather anaemic cover versions of American records, though drawing from a rather wider pool than one might expect — as well as ballads like Ritchie Valens’ “Donna” and rockabilly covers like “Baby I Don’t Care” and “That’ll Be the Day”, there were also attempts at styles like Chicago blues, with a cover version of “My Babe”, the song Willie Dixon had written for Little Walter: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “My Babe”] The album also featured two instrumentals by the Drifters, one of which was “Jet Black”, named after Jet Harris, who was the de facto leader of the band at this time. Harris was a very experienced musician long before joining the group. He had played bass with Tony Crombie and the Rockets, the very first ever British rock and roll band, and Crombie had told him about a new instrument — the electric bass guitar. Harris had obtained one, and seems to have been the very first British musician to play an electric bass. His bass was a signature of the band’s early work, and it gets the spotlight in “Jet Black”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Jet Black”] It was around this time that Hank Marvin ended up being the first British musician to play a solid-body electric guitar — and a Fender Stratocaster at that. At the time we’re talking about, there were import restrictions on many goods from America — at the time, most economies were a lot more protectionist than they are these days, and the doctrine of free trade hadn’t taken a foothold — and so there were literally no American electric guitars in the UK, and there were no British manufacturers of them. Every British electric guitar player was playing a hollow-bodied guitar — what we’d these days call a semi-acoustic or electro-acoustic guitar. But Cliff Richard was determined that his guitarist was going to have the best instrument. An instrument that was suitable for his music. While Cliff was portrayed as England’s Elvis, and always credited Elvis as his inspiration, he had another favourite American singer, Ricky Nelson, whose softer style appealed to him, and was closer to the music that he ended up making: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Poor Little Fool”] Nelson’s lead guitarist was James Burton, who Hank Marvin admired almost as much as Cliff admired Nelson. Burton had got his start playing on Dale Hawkins’ “Suzy Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Suzy Q”] But at this point, as well as playing for Nelson, he was making a reputation as the best session guitarist on the West Coast of America — so much of a reputation that even musicians in Britain knew his name. So it made sense that they should get Marvin the guitar that Burton played. They knew it was a Fender guitar, but they didn’t know anything else, so they got themselves a Fender catalogue sent over from the US. Looking through it, they recognised one guitar, the Stratocaster, as being the one Buddy Holly played. It was also the most expensive, and the coolest-looking, so it must be the one that Burton played, right? As it turns out, Burton didn’t play a Stratocaster, but a Telecaster, but they didn’t know that until much later, and so Cliff Richard sent off the equivalent of several months’ worth of Marvin’s salary to have a Stratocaster shipped over and pay the import taxes. While they were waiting for it, though, there were records to be made — and some of those records were ones that nobody involved was particularly interested in making. Cliff had started up a film career in parallel with his musical career. His first film was an attempt at an “issue” film, about teen pregnancy and false rape accusations, which featured him in a very minor role as a juvenile delinquent. In the film, he had to sing three songs written by Lionel Bart, who had written Tommy Steele’s hits, and he didn’t realise until afterwards that his film contract stipulated that one of them must be released as a single. The one that was chosen was “Living Doll”. The problem was that Richard loathed the song. He thought it was an attempt at sounding like an American rock and roll record, but one that completely missed everything that made American rock and roll exciting. He flat-out refused to do it. And then Norrie Paramor came up with an ingenious scheme. Paramor was Richard’s producer at EMI, and in a couple of years he became notorious in Britain when a jealous colleague, George Martin, leaked one of his scams to the TV presenter David Frost. Paramor would regularly write songs under pseudonyms, and get his artists to record them as B-sides, so he would get the same royalties from the record sales as the composer of the hit on the A-side. He apparently used thirty-six different pseudonyms, and was so widely known for this in the industry that people would sing of him “Oh I Do Like To See Me On The B-Side”. Paramor earned enough money from his songwriting sideline that he owned a speedboat, a second home at the seaside, and an E-type Jag, while George Martin, ostensibly on the same salary, had a second-hand Mini. But for once, Paramor was going to be able to get the A-side to a single, and present it as doing his artist a favour. He explained to Richard that one way to be sure he’d never have to put out “Living Doll” as a single would be if he’d already put out a single with a similar name. So if, say, Paramor were to write him a song called “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”, then there’d be no way they could put out “Living Doll” — and, if anyone had seen the film and *did* want “Living Doll”, well, that would be free promotion for Paramor’s song. “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll” went to number twenty on the charts: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”] But, as it turned out, the contracts didn’t say anything about only releasing a single if you didn’t have a good reason not to. Cliff still had to release the song he’d sung in the film. But he decided he wasn’t going to release that recording — he was going to get the band to rearrange it into something that he could live with. The band members put their heads together, and decided that the song might work in a country direction, perhaps with a little of that Ricky Nelson soft-rock feel that Cliff liked. So, grudgingly, they recorded a slowed-down, acoustic version of “Living Doll”. Which promptly became Cliff’s first UK number one, as well as becoming a minor hit in the USA: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Living Doll”] Meanwhile, the Drifters were doing some stuff on the sidelines by themselves, too, including backing a beat poet. British popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely, if not solely, made up of poor imitations of American pop culture, usually without any understanding of what that culture was. The phrase “cargo cult” is one that reinforces a number of unpleasant stereotypes, and as far as I can tell the story on which the phrase is based is a gross misunderstanding, but if you imagine the cargo cult as it is popularly imagined, much of British pop culture was a cargo cult imitation of America, with signifiers yanked completely out of their contexts and placed in wholly new ones. The British musicians we’ve looked at so far have been the ones that were the most innovative, the least tied to their American inspirations, and yet I’m sure you’ve been able to detect even in them the sense that they were the ersatz version of the American rock stars, the Cheez-wizz to Elvis Presley’s fine mature Stilton, a collection of sneers and hip swivels and “uh-huh”s performed in the vain hope that by doing so they could invoke some of the magic of the King of Rock and Roll. But it wasn’t just popular culture that was like this — even the Bohemian underground were trying desperately to copy American models. We’ve already seen how the skiffle craze came out of trad music, which was in itself an attempt to replicate the music made by black American musicians in New Orleans some thirty or forty years earlier. In the visual arts, there was Pop Art, which was, to start with, a purely British artistic phenomenon, but it was one made up of recycled Americana. A work like Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? was made up entirely of images found in American magazines sent over to Britain. Pop Art was interested in commenting on mass culture, but Hamilton wasn’t interested in commenting on culture that British people would have any experience of — he uses an image of a Young Romance comic cover, drawn by Jack Kirby, rather than Biffo the Bear or Desperate Dan, and the advert the collage was based on was from Ladies Home Journal, not Home Chat. And so in the late 1950s Britain got its own Beat Poet, Royston Ellis. Ellis was a bearded bisexual teenage speed freak, who hung around in Soho, which was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the gayest place in Britain, the most ethnically diverse, the artiest, and the place where every fifties British rock and roll artist came from. For all that the dozens of identikit Larry Parnes artists were made to a showbiz formula, British rock and roll was still fundamentally intertwined with the Bohemian subculture, and there were usually at most only two degrees of separation between some spotty bequiffed youth pinup in the teen magazines and a bearded folk-singing physics lecturer who went on Ban the Bomb marches every weekend. Ellis managed to parlay being willing to say controversial things like “many teenagers quite like drugs” and “some teenagers have sex before marriage” into a “spokesman for his generation” role, with regular appearances on TV. And so when he decided that he was going to copy the American Beat poets and perform in front of musicians, he wasn’t going to just go for jazz musicians like they did. He was going to continue being the voice of a generation by performing the music that would go with his talk of sex and drugs — he was going to perform his poetry backed by rock and roll music, what he called “rocketry”. And when you think of sex and drugs and rock and roll, obviously your first thought is of Cliff Richard. And so it was that Royston Ellis struck up a friendship with Cliff. Ellis’ first book of beat poetry was dedicated to Cliff, and Cliff’s first attempt at autobiography was dedicated to Royston. And Cliff’s backing band became Ellis’ backing band: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis and the Shadows, “Gone Man Squared”] That wasn’t all the Drifters were doing without Cliff. They were encouraged by Cliff to make their own records — it made him look better if his backing band were famous in their own right, and it would make the tours more attractive if both Cliff and the Drifters were star names, and so they went into Abbey Road themselves to record their first single, which is actually strikingly like the Merseybeat music that would become famous a few years later — Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies, but with the electric guitar more prominent than on the Everlys’ records, and sung in an English accent. Even the scream as they went into the guitar solo sounds very familiar if you’ve spent a lot of time listening to records from 1963 and 64. Remember again that this is 1959: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Feeling Fine”] That was unsuccessful. By this time, though, Hank Marvin’s Fender had arrived, and he was using it on records like Cliff’s second number one, “Travellin’ Light”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Travellin’ Light”] That single was also the first to bear a new credit — rather than by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, it was credited to Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It turns out that if you want to release records in the US by a new group made up of geeky-looking white British teenagers, putting it out under the name of an established black vocal group who are climbing the charts with their own massive hit is a good way to get legal letters and have to withdraw the release. Jet Harris and Hank Marvin went to the pub to discuss a new name, and Harris suggested “The Shadows”, because they were always standing in Cliff Richard’s shadow. Their first single under the Shadows name, “Lonesome Fella”, was a hybrid of country and doo-wop, with backing vocals that were more than a little reminiscent of the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go With Me”: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Lonesome Fella”] That was also unsuccessful, and it seemed that for the time being the Shadows’ time was best spent working as a backing group, either with Cliff Richard or Royston Ellis. But Ellis worked with other musicians too. For example here’s a TV appearance with John Betjeman from very early 1961, where Ellis is accompanied by a single guitar: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis, “Lumbering Now”] The guitar there was played by a young musician Ellis had discovered named Jimmy Page. And in summer 1960, Ellis went up to Liverpool and met a band there that had been formed by a couple of art students and their younger friends. He got them to back him on stage and introduced them to drugs (showing them how at the time you could open up an inhaler to get at the amphetamine inside). He was impressed enough by them that in July 1960 an article appeared about him in Record Mirror, reading in part “the bearded sage of the coffee bars has not always been satisfied with the accompaniment provided, so he’s thinking of bringing down to London a young backing group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. The name of the group? The Beetles!” When Tony Meehan saw that, he got annoyed — Meehan was the Shadow who, more than any of the others, was interested in being properly artistic. He’d thought that they were doing something worthwhile with Ellis, and didn’t appreciate having their accompaniment dismissed like that in favour of some nobodies from Liverpool. Ellis had to write to the Record Mirror “clarifying” his previous remarks: “These remarks were not intended as disparaging comments on the many excellent groups I have worked with on television and stage shows — groups such as Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the London group The Red Cats. For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that “The Beetles” (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill. However, I am looking forward to working with other groups as well, and plans are at the moment underway for television appearances with both Bert Weedon and with The Shadows.” As it turned out, Ellis never did bring the Beatles down to London — when he turned twenty, he declared that as he was now middle-aged, he could no longer function as the voice of the teenagers, and turned to travelling and writing novels. You’ll notice that in Ellis’ apology, he refers to “Cliff Richard’s Shadows”, because at this point they were still just Cliff’s backing band in the eyes of the public. That was going to change that same month, and it was about to change, in part, because of someone else Ellis mentioned there — Bert Weedon. Weedon is someone who, when I pencilled in my initial list of songs to cover, was down as a definite. I was going to look at his record “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] But unfortunately, it turned out that the tiny amount of information about Weedon available made it impossible to write a full episode about him, even though he had a career that lasted sixty years and was one of the most important people in British music history. But to boil it down to its basics, Bert Weedon was a jazz guitarist, at a time when the guitar was not the prominent instrument it has been since the sixties. When he was growing up in the twenties and thirties, as he would put it, the only time you’d see a guitar was being held by a singing cowboy in a film. There were almost no guitarists in Britain, and he soon became the first-call session player any time anyone in Britain was making a record that needed guitar. Then came both rock and roll and the skiffle boom. Most of Weedon’s contemporaries were bitterly contemptuous of the new music, but the way he saw it, for the first time in his lifetime people were starting to make a decent living out of the guitar, and he wanted in. While his jazz friends started sneering at him and calling him “boogie Bert”, for the first couple of years of British rock and roll he played on almost every record that came out. But his biggest contribution to music came with a book called “Play in a Day”. That book was the first guitar tutorial published in the UK to attempt to show young players how to play the instrument in a way that got them playing songs quickly. While it’s creakily old-fashioned today, Weedon did know that what kids wanted was to learn a couple of chords so they could accompany themselves playing a song, rather than to have to practice scales for months before moving on to anything more interesting. These days there are much better books, and Weedon’s book looks exactly like all those older books it was replacing, but at the time it was a revelation. A lot of guitarists are credited as having learned from Weedon’s book, some of them almost certainly apocryphally. But while it’s been superseded by many better books, it was a massive seller in its time, and sold over two million copies. It’s safe to say that at the very least every British guitarist we look at over the next hundred or so episodes will have had a look at Weedon’s book, and many of them will have learned their first chords from it. Weedon had been a session musician and writer, but not a star musician in his own right, until he released his single “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” in 1959. It was a cover version of a hillbilly boogie called “Guitar Boogie”, by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, and Weedon’s version became a hit, reaching number ten in the UK — the first British guitar instrumental to make the top ten: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie”] Dick Rowe, the boss of Top Rank Records, for which Weedon recorded at the time, had disliked that song so much that Weedon had tried to record it under a pseudonym for another label, because Rowe wouldn’t put it out. But it became a hit, and started a run of instrumental hits for Weedon. After he’d had four hits along the lines of “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, Weedon was sent a piece of sheet music by the publishers Francis, Day, and Hunter. “Apache” was a song inspired by a 1954 western, and written by a young songwriter called Jerry Lordan. Lordan was a minor British singer, who’d had a recent hit with “I’ll Stay Single”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lordan, “I’ll Stay Single”] But while he was a mildly successful singer, he was much more successful as a songwriter, writing Anthony Newley’s top five hit “I’ve Waited So Long”: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “I’ve Waited So Long”] And “A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”, which had the unusual distinction for a British song of getting an American cover version, by Dale Hawkins: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”] Lordan’s song, “Apache”, seemed to be the kind of thing that Bert Weedon could do well, and Weedon recorded a version of it some time in late 1959 or early 1960: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Apache”] Weedon also started performing the song in his shows and on TV. But the recording hadn’t been released yet — according to Weedon, he was planning on releasing the single in September, because that was when the most records were sold. But Lordan didn’t want to wait until September for his song to come out on a record, so while he was on tour with Cliff and the Shadows, he showed the tune to Jet Harris on his ukulele. The group liked the tune, and released it as their second single under their new name. Hank Marvin had by this time been given a guitar echo unit by Joe Brown, who’d bought it and then disliked it. He used it on this record, along with another innovation — the tremolo arm on his guitar. A tremolo arm, sometimes called a whammy bar, is a metal bar on your guitar that allows you to bend all the strings at once, and nobody else in Britain had a guitar with one at this point, but Hank had his Fender Stratocaster, on which they come fitted as standard. The combination of the tremolo arm and the echo unit was a sound that no-one else in the UK had, but which was strikingly similar to some of the surf music being made in the US, which was still mostly on tiny labels with no distribution over here: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Apache”] “Apache” went to number one on the charts, knocking off “Please Don’t Tease”, a track by Cliff with the Shadows backing him. It stayed on the charts for five months, and became a standard performed by every British guitarist — and soon by American guitarists like the Ventures. Weedon’s version was rushed out to compete with it, but only made number twenty-four. Many versions of the song have become classics in their own right, and I won’t go through all the hit versions here because this is a long episode anyway, but I do have to mention one version — a novelty version recorded as album filler by a group of session musicians hired to make an album under the name The Incredible Bongo Band: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, “Apache”] The guitarist on that, incidentally, is Mike Deasy, who we heard last week playing with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson in various bands, and who had been in Eddie Cochran’s backing band. That track includes a drum break, with bongos by King Errisson, and drums probably played by Jim Gordon, which is probably the most sampled recording of all time, and certainly in the top ten: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, “Apache”, drum breaks] That’s been sampled by everyone from the Roots to Madonna, Vanilla Ice to Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine to Kanye West. It’s been called “hip-hop’s national anthem”, and there’s a whole ninety-minute documentary on Netflix just about that track. But getting back to 1960 and the Shadows’ version of the tune, it came as a revelation to many British kids, inspiring thousands of young boys who had already learned the guitar to start playing *electric* guitar, and making everyone who wanted to be a rock and roll star covet a Stratocaster specifically (with a few odd exceptions who reacted against what was popular, like there always are). Pete Townshend, for example, in a documentary earlier this year said that hearing “Apache” was for him even more important than his first orgasm. “Apache” stayed on the charts so long that the group’s next single, “Man of Mystery”, went to number five in the charts while “Apache” was still in the top forty: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Man of Mystery”] And while that was at number five, “Nine Times Out of Ten” by Cliff Richard and the Shadows was at number three. Between 1959 and 1965, Cliff had twenty-six consecutive top ten hit singles, of which twenty-one had the Shadows (or the Drifters) as his backing group. In the same time period, the Shadows had a run of thirteen top ten hits in their own right. They were a phenomenon in British music like nothing anyone had ever seen. They appeared in a series of films, starring Richard, who was in 1962 and 63 a bigger draw at the British cinema than the early James Bond films. Neither Cliff nor the Shadows ever had much American success, but in Europe and Australia, and from 1962 on in Canada, they were at the very peak of success in the music industry. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for Cliff and the Shadows, even when in 1961 a bizarre love triangle upended everything. Jet Harris, who was at the time the band member who was closest to Cliff, had married a beautiful young woman called Carol Costa, without realising that she had never really been interested in him, but was using him to get to Cliff. Cliff and Costa started an affair, Harris became physically abusive towards Costa, she — quite rightly — left him, and he spiralled into depression and alcoholism. Cliff and Costa’s affair didn’t last long either — but as it turned out, she would be the only woman with whom he would ever have sex. Richard’s sexuality or lack of it has been the subject of a huge amount of discussion over the years. For many decades he said he was straight but celibate because of his religious views — that he couldn’t get married without disappointing his female fans, and that he felt sex outside marriage was wrong. In more recent years he’s switched the wording he uses, saying his sexuality is his own business, that he’ll never talk about it publicly, that he has a live-in male companion, and that it shouldn’t matter to anyone what his sexuality is. Most descriptions of him from those who’ve known him over the decades have said that he was and is someone who is simply not very interested in sex. I mention this not to engage in prurient speculation about him, but to show how utterly bizarre it is that the one woman he would ever have sex with would be the wife of a friend and colleague. More in character, though, was the way he would dump Costa — as was so often the case with Cliff Richard when discarding people for whom he had no further use, he got someone else to do it. In this case it was Tony Meehan who was given the task of letting her know that Cliff had suddenly developed moral scruples. Those moral scruples would soon get a lot more scrupulous, as this affair would indirectly lead to the most famous religious conversion in all of British music history. Shortly after dumping Costa on Cliff’s behalf, Tony Meehan left the group, just before a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Meehan had slowly become disenchanted with the rest of the group, and didn’t really fit in with them — he was an intellectual who read books about the history of folk music and jazz, and wanted one day to write a history of Soho’s music scene in the style of books he’d read about New Orleans, while the rest of them just liked reading thrillers. When he left, the group’s second number one, “Kon-Tiki”, was still at the top of the charts: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Kon-Tiki”] He was replaced by Brian Bennett, who had played in the very first lineup of Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and had been in Marty Wilde’s Wildcats for a while. Jet Harris lasted in the group another few months, until April 1962, when the drink caught up with him and he was fired. Bennett suggested that the group get in his old friend Licorice Locking, who he’d played with in the Vipers, the Playboys, and the Wildcats, and who had played with Bennett on those Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent Saturday Club sessions we heard a couple of weeks back. Locking was a fine bass player, had played with most of them before back in their 2is days, and fitted in perfectly, though he had a very different playing style than Harris — many hardcore Shadows fans think the group’s golden age ended when Harris left, and he’s rated enough as a bass player that while there are currently no substantial books on the Shadows themselves still in print, there are two separate self-published biographies of Harris available. Within a month of being fired, Harris had his own solo hit, making the top thirty with a version of “Besame Mucho” modelled on the Coasters’ version, but with Harris playing lead bass instead of singing: [Excerpt: Jet Harris, “Besame Mucho”] But Locking would have an odd effect on the Shadows. Brian Bennett had been brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and even though he was no longer a believer in that religion, he’d told Locking about its beliefs — and Locking had become an enthusiastic convert. As soon as he joined the group, he set about trying to convert the other members, too. He succeeded with Hank Marvin, who to this day is a devoted Witness, and he came part way with Cliff, who never became a Witness but was inspired by Locking’s Bible-reading sessions to become an evangelical Christian, and who is now British rock music’s most famously religious person. Meanwhile, Harris had switched from bass to guitar, and was now going in a more Duane Eddy style. He teamed up with Tony Meehan, and together they recorded another Jerry Lordan song, “Diamonds”, featuring Royston Ellis’ friend Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, on his first major session: [Excerpt: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, “Diamonds”] At the beginning of 1963, Cliff and the Shadows, past and present, had a ridiculous monopoly of the top of the charts. “Bachelor Boy” by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Cliff and Bruce Welch, was at number one for three weeks, then was replaced by “Dance On” by the Shadows, which in turn was replaced by “Diamonds” by Jet and Tony. There was a brief three-week respite while Frank Ifield topped the charts with his “Wayward Wind”, then “Summer Holiday” by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Bruce and Brian. Then “Foot Tapper” by the Shadows went to number one, then “Summer Holiday” went back to the top position. They all looked unstoppable. However, while they would all chart again, it would be two years before Cliff would have another number one, and neither the Shadows nor Jet and Tony ever would. In the case of Cliff and the Shadows, this change in commercial fortunes was because of a general change in the music market, which we’ll be looking at towards the end of the year. In the case of Jet and Tony, though, that was only part of it. Jet was in a car accident which put him out of commission for a while, and when he got better he was drinking even more. He made a brief attempt at a comeback and even joined an early lineup of the Jeff Beck Group, but spent the rest of his life either working labouring jobs or playing the nostalgia circuit. He died in 2011. Jet and Tony’s touring bass player, John Paul Jones, actually auditioned for the Shadows, as Licorice Locking left the group to spend more time evangelising, but Jones didn’t get the job, and we’ll be picking up on him later. We’ll be seeing Cliff again too, as well as having a brief appearance from Tony Meehan, but this is the last we’ll see of the Shadows, who continued with a variety of different bass players, and with Brian Bennett as the permanent drummer, off and on until 2015. Marvin, Bennett, and Welch all continue to make music separately, and it’s still possible they may perform together as the Shadows one day. But even if they don’t, “Apache” stands as the moment when a million British kids first decided that they wanted to be a guitar hero and play a Fender Stratocaster.

Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Apache", by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Handy Man" by Jimmy Jones. My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  ----more---- Resources   As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, this six-CD set contains every recording the Shadows made on their own between 1959 and 1966, for a very low price. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Some of the information on Royston Ellis and Norrie Paramor comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. This volume contains Royston Ellis' two very slim books, one on Cliff and one on the Shadows, written for a teen audience in 1960 and 61. They are more of historical interest than anything else. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at the group that, more than any other, made the guitar group the standard for rock music; the group which made the Fender Stratocaster the single most popular guitar in the world; and who dominated the British charts for much of the early 1960s. We're going to look at the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows: "Apache"] We talked about Cliff Richard four months ago, but we've not yet looked at his backing group in any great detail. That's because his group at the time of "Move It", the single we looked at back then, was not the group that would end up becoming famous for backing him. We only mentioned in the last few minutes of that episode how his original backing band, the Drifters, were replaced one at a time by Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, most of whom had been members of the Vipers at one point or another during that group's commercial decline. This group, still calling themselves the Drifters, went into Abbey Road studios with Cliff in February 1959, to record Richard's first album -- a live album in front of a studio audience. The album was mostly made up of rather anaemic cover versions of American records, though drawing from a rather wider pool than one might expect -- as well as ballads like Ritchie Valens' "Donna" and rockabilly covers like "Baby I Don't Care" and "That'll Be the Day", there were also attempts at styles like Chicago blues, with a cover version of "My Babe", the song Willie Dixon had written for Little Walter: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "My Babe"] The album also featured two instrumentals by the Drifters, one of which was "Jet Black", named after Jet Harris, who was the de facto leader of the band at this time. Harris was a very experienced musician long before joining the group. He had played bass with Tony Crombie and the Rockets, the very first ever British rock and roll band, and Crombie had told him about a new instrument -- the electric bass guitar. Harris had obtained one, and seems to have been the very first British musician to play an electric bass. His bass was a signature of the band's early work, and it gets the spotlight in "Jet Black": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Jet Black"] It was around this time that Hank Marvin ended up being the first British musician to play a solid-body electric guitar -- and a Fender Stratocaster at that. At the time we're talking about, there were import restrictions on many goods from America -- at the time, most economies were a lot more protectionist than they are these days, and the doctrine of free trade hadn't taken a foothold -- and so there were literally no American electric guitars in the UK, and there were no British manufacturers of them. Every British electric guitar player was playing a hollow-bodied guitar -- what we'd these days call a semi-acoustic or electro-acoustic guitar. But Cliff Richard was determined that his guitarist was going to have the best instrument. An instrument that was suitable for his music. While Cliff was portrayed as England's Elvis, and always credited Elvis as his inspiration, he had another favourite American singer, Ricky Nelson, whose softer style appealed to him, and was closer to the music that he ended up making: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Poor Little Fool"] Nelson's lead guitarist was James Burton, who Hank Marvin admired almost as much as Cliff admired Nelson. Burton had got his start playing on Dale Hawkins' "Suzy Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Suzy Q"] But at this point, as well as playing for Nelson, he was making a reputation as the best session guitarist on the West Coast of America -- so much of a reputation that even musicians in Britain knew his name. So it made sense that they should get Marvin the guitar that Burton played. They knew it was a Fender guitar, but they didn't know anything else, so they got themselves a Fender catalogue sent over from the US. Looking through it, they recognised one guitar, the Stratocaster, as being the one Buddy Holly played. It was also the most expensive, and the coolest-looking, so it must be the one that Burton played, right? As it turns out, Burton didn't play a Stratocaster, but a Telecaster, but they didn't know that until much later, and so Cliff Richard sent off the equivalent of several months' worth of Marvin's salary to have a Stratocaster shipped over and pay the import taxes. While they were waiting for it, though, there were records to be made -- and some of those records were ones that nobody involved was particularly interested in making. Cliff had started up a film career in parallel with his musical career. His first film was an attempt at an "issue" film, about teen pregnancy and false rape accusations, which featured him in a very minor role as a juvenile delinquent. In the film, he had to sing three songs written by Lionel Bart, who had written Tommy Steele's hits, and he didn't realise until afterwards that his film contract stipulated that one of them must be released as a single. The one that was chosen was "Living Doll". The problem was that Richard loathed the song. He thought it was an attempt at sounding like an American rock and roll record, but one that completely missed everything that made American rock and roll exciting. He flat-out refused to do it. And then Norrie Paramor came up with an ingenious scheme. Paramor was Richard's producer at EMI, and in a couple of years he became notorious in Britain when a jealous colleague, George Martin, leaked one of his scams to the TV presenter David Frost. Paramor would regularly write songs under pseudonyms, and get his artists to record them as B-sides, so he would get the same royalties from the record sales as the composer of the hit on the A-side. He apparently used thirty-six different pseudonyms, and was so widely known for this in the industry that people would sing of him "Oh I Do Like To See Me On The B-Side". Paramor earned enough money from his songwriting sideline that he owned a speedboat, a second home at the seaside, and an E-type Jag, while George Martin, ostensibly on the same salary, had a second-hand Mini. But for once, Paramor was going to be able to get the A-side to a single, and present it as doing his artist a favour. He explained to Richard that one way to be sure he'd never have to put out "Living Doll" as a single would be if he'd already put out a single with a similar name. So if, say, Paramor were to write him a song called "Livin' Lovin' Doll", then there'd be no way they could put out "Living Doll" -- and, if anyone had seen the film and *did* want "Living Doll", well, that would be free promotion for Paramor's song. "Livin' Lovin' Doll" went to number twenty on the charts: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Livin' Lovin' Doll"] But, as it turned out, the contracts didn't say anything about only releasing a single if you didn't have a good reason not to. Cliff still had to release the song he'd sung in the film. But he decided he wasn't going to release that recording -- he was going to get the band to rearrange it into something that he could live with. The band members put their heads together, and decided that the song might work in a country direction, perhaps with a little of that Ricky Nelson soft-rock feel that Cliff liked. So, grudgingly, they recorded a slowed-down, acoustic version of "Living Doll". Which promptly became Cliff's first UK number one, as well as becoming a minor hit in the USA: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Living Doll"] Meanwhile, the Drifters were doing some stuff on the sidelines by themselves, too, including backing a beat poet. British popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely, if not solely, made up of poor imitations of American pop culture, usually without any understanding of what that culture was. The phrase "cargo cult" is one that reinforces a number of unpleasant stereotypes, and as far as I can tell the story on which the phrase is based is a gross misunderstanding, but if you imagine the cargo cult as it is popularly imagined, much of British pop culture was a cargo cult imitation of America, with signifiers yanked completely out of their contexts and placed in wholly new ones. The British musicians we've looked at so far have been the ones that were the most innovative, the least tied to their American inspirations, and yet I'm sure you've been able to detect even in them the sense that they were the ersatz version of the American rock stars, the Cheez-wizz to Elvis Presley's fine mature Stilton, a collection of sneers and hip swivels and "uh-huh"s performed in the vain hope that by doing so they could invoke some of the magic of the King of Rock and Roll. But it wasn't just popular culture that was like this -- even the Bohemian underground were trying desperately to copy American models. We've already seen how the skiffle craze came out of trad music, which was in itself an attempt to replicate the music made by black American musicians in New Orleans some thirty or forty years earlier. In the visual arts, there was Pop Art, which was, to start with, a purely British artistic phenomenon, but it was one made up of recycled Americana. A work like Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was made up entirely of images found in American magazines sent over to Britain. Pop Art was interested in commenting on mass culture, but Hamilton wasn't interested in commenting on culture that British people would have any experience of -- he uses an image of a Young Romance comic cover, drawn by Jack Kirby, rather than Biffo the Bear or Desperate Dan, and the advert the collage was based on was from Ladies Home Journal, not Home Chat. And so in the late 1950s Britain got its own Beat Poet, Royston Ellis. Ellis was a bearded bisexual teenage speed freak, who hung around in Soho, which was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the gayest place in Britain, the most ethnically diverse, the artiest, and the place where every fifties British rock and roll artist came from. For all that the dozens of identikit Larry Parnes artists were made to a showbiz formula, British rock and roll was still fundamentally intertwined with the Bohemian subculture, and there were usually at most only two degrees of separation between some spotty bequiffed youth pinup in the teen magazines and a bearded folk-singing physics lecturer who went on Ban the Bomb marches every weekend. Ellis managed to parlay being willing to say controversial things like "many teenagers quite like drugs" and "some teenagers have sex before marriage" into a "spokesman for his generation" role, with regular appearances on TV. And so when he decided that he was going to copy the American Beat poets and perform in front of musicians, he wasn't going to just go for jazz musicians like they did. He was going to continue being the voice of a generation by performing the music that would go with his talk of sex and drugs -- he was going to perform his poetry backed by rock and roll music, what he called “rocketry”. And when you think of sex and drugs and rock and roll, obviously your first thought is of Cliff Richard. And so it was that Royston Ellis struck up a friendship with Cliff. Ellis' first book of beat poetry was dedicated to Cliff, and Cliff's first attempt at autobiography was dedicated to Royston. And Cliff's backing band became Ellis' backing band: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis and the Shadows, "Gone Man Squared"] That wasn't all the Drifters were doing without Cliff. They were encouraged by Cliff to make their own records -- it made him look better if his backing band were famous in their own right, and it would make the tours more attractive if both Cliff and the Drifters were star names, and so they went into Abbey Road themselves to record their first single, which is actually strikingly like the Merseybeat music that would become famous a few years later -- Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies, but with the electric guitar more prominent than on the Everlys' records, and sung in an English accent. Even the scream as they went into the guitar solo sounds very familiar if you've spent a lot of time listening to records from 1963 and 64. Remember again that this is 1959: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Feeling Fine"] That was unsuccessful. By this time, though, Hank Marvin's Fender had arrived, and he was using it on records like Cliff's second number one, "Travellin' Light": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, "Travellin' Light"] That single was also the first to bear a new credit -- rather than by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, it was credited to Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It turns out that if you want to release records in the US by a new group made up of geeky-looking white British teenagers, putting it out under the name of an established black vocal group who are climbing the charts with their own massive hit is a good way to get legal letters and have to withdraw the release. Jet Harris and Hank Marvin went to the pub to discuss a new name, and Harris suggested "The Shadows", because they were always standing in Cliff Richard's shadow. Their first single under the Shadows name, "Lonesome Fella", was a hybrid of country and doo-wop, with backing vocals that were more than a little reminiscent of the Del-Vikings' "Come Go With Me": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Lonesome Fella"] That was also unsuccessful, and it seemed that for the time being the Shadows' time was best spent working as a backing group, either with Cliff Richard or Royston Ellis. But Ellis worked with other musicians too. For example here's a TV appearance with John Betjeman from very early 1961, where Ellis is accompanied by a single guitar: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis, “Lumbering Now”] The guitar there was played by a young musician Ellis had discovered named Jimmy Page. And in summer 1960, Ellis went up to Liverpool and met a band there that had been formed by a couple of art students and their younger friends. He got them to back him on stage and introduced them to drugs (showing them how at the time you could open up an inhaler to get at the amphetamine inside). He was impressed enough by them that in July 1960 an article appeared about him in Record Mirror, reading in part "the bearded sage of the coffee bars has not always been satisfied with the accompaniment provided, so he's thinking of bringing down to London a young backing group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. The name of the group? The Beetles!" When Tony Meehan saw that, he got annoyed -- Meehan was the Shadow who, more than any of the others, was interested in being properly artistic. He'd thought that they were doing something worthwhile with Ellis, and didn't appreciate having their accompaniment dismissed like that in favour of some nobodies from Liverpool. Ellis had to write to the Record Mirror "clarifying" his previous remarks: "These remarks were not intended as disparaging comments on the many excellent groups I have worked with on television and stage shows -- groups such as Cliff Richard's Shadows and the London group The Red Cats. For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that "The Beetles" (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill. However, I am looking forward to working with other groups as well, and plans are at the moment underway for television appearances with both Bert Weedon and with The Shadows." As it turned out, Ellis never did bring the Beatles down to London -- when he turned twenty, he declared that as he was now middle-aged, he could no longer function as the voice of the teenagers, and turned to travelling and writing novels. You'll notice that in Ellis' apology, he refers to "Cliff Richard's Shadows", because at this point they were still just Cliff's backing band in the eyes of the public. That was going to change that same month, and it was about to change, in part, because of someone else Ellis mentioned there -- Bert Weedon. Weedon is someone who, when I pencilled in my initial list of songs to cover, was down as a definite. I was going to look at his record "Guitar Boogie Shuffle": [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie Shuffle"] But unfortunately, it turned out that the tiny amount of information about Weedon available made it impossible to write a full episode about him, even though he had a career that lasted sixty years and was one of the most important people in British music history. But to boil it down to its basics, Bert Weedon was a jazz guitarist, at a time when the guitar was not the prominent instrument it has been since the sixties. When he was growing up in the twenties and thirties, as he would put it, the only time you'd see a guitar was being held by a singing cowboy in a film. There were almost no guitarists in Britain, and he soon became the first-call session player any time anyone in Britain was making a record that needed guitar. Then came both rock and roll and the skiffle boom. Most of Weedon's contemporaries were bitterly contemptuous of the new music, but the way he saw it, for the first time in his lifetime people were starting to make a decent living out of the guitar, and he wanted in. While his jazz friends started sneering at him and calling him "boogie Bert", for the first couple of years of British rock and roll he played on almost every record that came out. But his biggest contribution to music came with a book called "Play in a Day". That book was the first guitar tutorial published in the UK to attempt to show young players how to play the instrument in a way that got them playing songs quickly. While it's creakily old-fashioned today, Weedon did know that what kids wanted was to learn a couple of chords so they could accompany themselves playing a song, rather than to have to practice scales for months before moving on to anything more interesting. These days there are much better books, and Weedon's book looks exactly like all those older books it was replacing, but at the time it was a revelation. A lot of guitarists are credited as having learned from Weedon's book, some of them almost certainly apocryphally. But while it's been superseded by many better books, it was a massive seller in its time, and sold over two million copies. It's safe to say that at the very least every British guitarist we look at over the next hundred or so episodes will have had a look at Weedon's book, and many of them will have learned their first chords from it. Weedon had been a session musician and writer, but not a star musician in his own right, until he released his single "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" in 1959. It was a cover version of a hillbilly boogie called "Guitar Boogie", by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, and Weedon's version became a hit, reaching number ten in the UK -- the first British guitar instrumental to make the top ten: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie"] Dick Rowe, the boss of Top Rank Records, for which Weedon recorded at the time, had disliked that song so much that Weedon had tried to record it under a pseudonym for another label, because Rowe wouldn't put it out. But it became a hit, and started a run of instrumental hits for Weedon. After he'd had four hits along the lines of "Guitar Boogie Shuffle", Weedon was sent a piece of sheet music by the publishers Francis, Day, and Hunter. "Apache" was a song inspired by a 1954 western, and written by a young songwriter called Jerry Lordan. Lordan was a minor British singer, who'd had a recent hit with "I'll Stay Single": [Excerpt: Jerry Lordan, "I'll Stay Single"] But while he was a mildly successful singer, he was much more successful as a songwriter, writing Anthony Newley's top five hit "I've Waited So Long": [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "I've Waited So Long"] And "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring", which had the unusual distinction for a British song of getting an American cover version, by Dale Hawkins: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring"] Lordan's song, "Apache", seemed to be the kind of thing that Bert Weedon could do well, and Weedon recorded a version of it some time in late 1959 or early 1960: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Apache"] Weedon also started performing the song in his shows and on TV. But the recording hadn't been released yet -- according to Weedon, he was planning on releasing the single in September, because that was when the most records were sold. But Lordan didn't want to wait until September for his song to come out on a record, so while he was on tour with Cliff and the Shadows, he showed the tune to Jet Harris on his ukulele. The group liked the tune, and released it as their second single under their new name. Hank Marvin had by this time been given a guitar echo unit by Joe Brown, who'd bought it and then disliked it. He used it on this record, along with another innovation -- the tremolo arm on his guitar. A tremolo arm, sometimes called a whammy bar, is a metal bar on your guitar that allows you to bend all the strings at once, and nobody else in Britain had a guitar with one at this point, but Hank had his Fender Stratocaster, on which they come fitted as standard. The combination of the tremolo arm and the echo unit was a sound that no-one else in the UK had, but which was strikingly similar to some of the surf music being made in the US, which was still mostly on tiny labels with no distribution over here: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] "Apache" went to number one on the charts, knocking off "Please Don't Tease", a track by Cliff with the Shadows backing him. It stayed on the charts for five months, and became a standard performed by every British guitarist -- and soon by American guitarists like the Ventures. Weedon's version was rushed out to compete with it, but only made number twenty-four. Many versions of the song have become classics in their own right, and I won't go through all the hit versions here because this is a long episode anyway, but I do have to mention one version -- a novelty version recorded as album filler by a group of session musicians hired to make an album under the name The Incredible Bongo Band: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, "Apache"] The guitarist on that, incidentally, is Mike Deasy, who we heard last week playing with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson in various bands, and who had been in Eddie Cochran's backing band. That track includes a drum break, with bongos by King Errisson, and drums probably played by Jim Gordon, which is probably the most sampled recording of all time, and certainly in the top ten: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, "Apache", drum breaks] That's been sampled by everyone from the Roots to Madonna, Vanilla Ice to Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine to Kanye West. It's been called "hip-hop's national anthem", and there's a whole ninety-minute documentary on Netflix just about that track. But getting back to 1960 and the Shadows' version of the tune, it came as a revelation to many British kids, inspiring thousands of young boys who had already learned the guitar to start playing *electric* guitar, and making everyone who wanted to be a rock and roll star covet a Stratocaster specifically (with a few odd exceptions who reacted against what was popular, like there always are). Pete Townshend, for example, in a documentary earlier this year said that hearing "Apache" was for him even more important than his first orgasm. "Apache" stayed on the charts so long that the group's next single, "Man of Mystery", went to number five in the charts while "Apache" was still in the top forty: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] And while that was at number five, "Nine Times Out of Ten" by Cliff Richard and the Shadows was at number three. Between 1959 and 1965, Cliff had twenty-six consecutive top ten hit singles, of which twenty-one had the Shadows (or the Drifters) as his backing group. In the same time period, the Shadows had a run of thirteen top ten hits in their own right. They were a phenomenon in British music like nothing anyone had ever seen. They appeared in a series of films, starring Richard, who was in 1962 and 63 a bigger draw at the British cinema than the early James Bond films. Neither Cliff nor the Shadows ever had much American success, but in Europe and Australia, and from 1962 on in Canada, they were at the very peak of success in the music industry. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for Cliff and the Shadows, even when in 1961 a bizarre love triangle upended everything. Jet Harris, who was at the time the band member who was closest to Cliff, had married a beautiful young woman called Carol Costa, without realising that she had never really been interested in him, but was using him to get to Cliff. Cliff and Costa started an affair, Harris became physically abusive towards Costa, she -- quite rightly -- left him, and he spiralled into depression and alcoholism. Cliff and Costa's affair didn't last long either -- but as it turned out, she would be the only woman with whom he would ever have sex. Richard's sexuality or lack of it has been the subject of a huge amount of discussion over the years. For many decades he said he was straight but celibate because of his religious views -- that he couldn't get married without disappointing his female fans, and that he felt sex outside marriage was wrong. In more recent years he's switched the wording he uses, saying his sexuality is his own business, that he'll never talk about it publicly, that he has a live-in male companion, and that it shouldn't matter to anyone what his sexuality is. Most descriptions of him from those who've known him over the decades have said that he was and is someone who is simply not very interested in sex. I mention this not to engage in prurient speculation about him, but to show how utterly bizarre it is that the one woman he would ever have sex with would be the wife of a friend and colleague. More in character, though, was the way he would dump Costa -- as was so often the case with Cliff Richard when discarding people for whom he had no further use, he got someone else to do it. In this case it was Tony Meehan who was given the task of letting her know that Cliff had suddenly developed moral scruples. Those moral scruples would soon get a lot more scrupulous, as this affair would indirectly lead to the most famous religious conversion in all of British music history. Shortly after dumping Costa on Cliff's behalf, Tony Meehan left the group, just before a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Meehan had slowly become disenchanted with the rest of the group, and didn't really fit in with them -- he was an intellectual who read books about the history of folk music and jazz, and wanted one day to write a history of Soho's music scene in the style of books he'd read about New Orleans, while the rest of them just liked reading thrillers. When he left, the group's second number one, "Kon-Tiki", was still at the top of the charts: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Kon-Tiki"] He was replaced by Brian Bennett, who had played in the very first lineup of Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and had been in Marty Wilde's Wildcats for a while. Jet Harris lasted in the group another few months, until April 1962, when the drink caught up with him and he was fired. Bennett suggested that the group get in his old friend Licorice Locking, who he'd played with in the Vipers, the Playboys, and the Wildcats, and who had played with Bennett on those Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent Saturday Club sessions we heard a couple of weeks back. Locking was a fine bass player, had played with most of them before back in their 2is days, and fitted in perfectly, though he had a very different playing style than Harris -- many hardcore Shadows fans think the group's golden age ended when Harris left, and he's rated enough as a bass player that while there are currently no substantial books on the Shadows themselves still in print, there are two separate self-published biographies of Harris available. Within a month of being fired, Harris had his own solo hit, making the top thirty with a version of "Besame Mucho" modelled on the Coasters' version, but with Harris playing lead bass instead of singing: [Excerpt: Jet Harris, "Besame Mucho"] But Locking would have an odd effect on the Shadows. Brian Bennett had been brought up as a Jehovah's Witness, and even though he was no longer a believer in that religion, he'd told Locking about its beliefs -- and Locking had become an enthusiastic convert. As soon as he joined the group, he set about trying to convert the other members, too. He succeeded with Hank Marvin, who to this day is a devoted Witness, and he came part way with Cliff, who never became a Witness but was inspired by Locking's Bible-reading sessions to become an evangelical Christian, and who is now British rock music's most famously religious person. Meanwhile, Harris had switched from bass to guitar, and was now going in a more Duane Eddy style. He teamed up with Tony Meehan, and together they recorded another Jerry Lordan song, "Diamonds", featuring Royston Ellis' friend Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, on his first major session: [Excerpt: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, "Diamonds"] At the beginning of 1963, Cliff and the Shadows, past and present, had a ridiculous monopoly of the top of the charts. "Bachelor Boy" by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Cliff and Bruce Welch, was at number one for three weeks, then was replaced by "Dance On" by the Shadows, which in turn was replaced by "Diamonds" by Jet and Tony. There was a brief three-week respite while Frank Ifield topped the charts with his "Wayward Wind", then "Summer Holiday" by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Bruce and Brian. Then "Foot Tapper" by the Shadows went to number one, then "Summer Holiday" went back to the top position. They all looked unstoppable. However, while they would all chart again, it would be two years before Cliff would have another number one, and neither the Shadows nor Jet and Tony ever would. In the case of Cliff and the Shadows, this change in commercial fortunes was because of a general change in the music market, which we'll be looking at towards the end of the year. In the case of Jet and Tony, though, that was only part of it. Jet was in a car accident which put him out of commission for a while, and when he got better he was drinking even more. He made a brief attempt at a comeback and even joined an early lineup of the Jeff Beck Group, but spent the rest of his life either working labouring jobs or playing the nostalgia circuit. He died in 2011. Jet and Tony's touring bass player, John Paul Jones, actually auditioned for the Shadows, as Licorice Locking left the group to spend more time evangelising, but Jones didn't get the job, and we'll be picking up on him later. We'll be seeing Cliff again too, as well as having a brief appearance from Tony Meehan, but this is the last we'll see of the Shadows, who continued with a variety of different bass players, and with Brian Bennett as the permanent drummer, off and on until 2015. Marvin, Bennett, and Welch all continue to make music separately, and it's still possible they may perform together as the Shadows one day. But even if they don't, "Apache" stands as the moment when a million British kids first decided that they wanted to be a guitar hero and play a Fender Stratocaster.

The Subs are joined by Alan Williams as they review the controversial issue 31!

In this episode we review the first-ever Romance Comic story, from 1947’s “Young Romance” by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby: “I Was a Pickup!” Poor Toni got herself a bad reputation as a “pick-up” – a girl who once let herself get picked up by a boy, and now all the guys think they can take advantage of her. But all she wants is true love like any “good” girl…

This episode describes romance comic books of the 1970's and the possible influence of the genre in the poetry of teenage girls.

The Merienda Time boys chillin on this Sunday funday. The boys talk about the craziness of young love, tid bits of the fam and how Toooo much self belief is a gift and a curse

On the sixty-eighth episode of Audioface: Reviews: Roosevelt's "Young Romance", Logic's "Young Sinatra IV", and Dillon Francis' "Wut Wut". New singles of the week: BadBadNotGood & Little Dragon's "Tired" and The Japanese House's "Lilo". Tim Cook cancels Dr. Dre's unreleased show, Tekashi 6ix9ine hospitalized again. The Young Romance review. SiriusXM buys Pandora, and 2 posthumous Tupac albums are supposedly in the works. The Young Sinatra IV review. Spotify invades your privacy to make you playlists. Sexual assault allegations against a Sigur Ros member. Janelle Monáe gets a new acting role. The Wut Wut review. And a sobering reminder that Life is Beautiful. If you enjoy this weekly podcast, help us spread the word. Give us a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts or a positive rating/review whereever you're listening. It helps more people find the show. As always, thank you for listening with us.

In der neuen Folge ist der deutsche Musiker Marius Lauber, besser bekannt als Roosevelt zu Gast. Der junge deutsche Musiker erzählt im Podcast von seiner Traumkarriere, die beim Aufnehmen in seinem Schlafzimmer begann und schnell auf internationalen Bühnen seinen Lauf nahm. Durch Zufall gelang seine Musik in die Hände von Joe Goddard, Bandmitglied & Produzenten der britischen Band Hot Chip, der ihn direkt als Support Act auf Tour mitnahm. Erst danach wurde das Deutsche Publikum auf Roosevelt aufmerksam. Der 28-jährige Sänger, Songwriter und Produzent ist als Live Musiker mit Band und DJ bekannt. Roosevelt lebt in seiner Wahlheimat Köln und veröffentlichte Ende September sein zweites Album Young Romance. Im Podcast erzählt Roosevelt, wie er durch die frühe Prägung von MySpace zu seinem einzigartigen Sound, einem Mix aus strukturierter Popmusik, Dance- und Housebeats, gekommen ist und wieso es ihm wichtig ist, dass seine Musik international klingt. Dabei erklärt er auch, wie er seine Heimat Köln trotzdem musikalisch einbringt und was ihm an der Kölner Szene im Vergleich zur Berliner Partyszene gefällt. Er beschreibt den Unterschied zwischen dem DJ-Dasein und dem Schaffen als Live-Musiker mit Band. Im Gespräch mit Jakob Thoene spricht er von der Entstehung des neuen Albums, vom Songschreiben, von der Produktion bis zur Namensgebung und von der Vorfreude über die Gewissheit, dass seine Musik gehört wird. Tracks (Young Romance): Getaway | Forgive (feat. WASHED OUT)

Hello, romanticizers of four-color funnybooks! In this episode, love doctors Chris (@AceComics) and Reggie (@reggiereggie) tackle the mysteries of love, when they read the first romance comic book ever published: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Young Romance #1 from 1947! After the needed run-down on Jack and Joe, our heartstrong pair discuss the conditions that created the romance comic, and then read all four (or five?) stories contained within the first one--with special emphasis on "The Plight of the Suspicious Bridegroom" and its unconvential storytelling device. Then, after an informative break, our duo talk about other romance comics and why they practically vanished in the 1970s. All this, and some listener mail! This episode will surely make you swoon! weirdcomicshistory@gmail.com facebook.com/cosmictmillhistory cosmictmillhistory.tumblr.com @cosmictmill weirdsciencedccomics.com chrisisoninfiniteearths.com weirdcomicshistory.blogspot.com search "weirdcomicshistory" on YouTube BREAK: Coronet Presents "Are You Popular?" (1947) snippet  https://youtu.be/nyEo6hHnoq4

This week we swoon over our guest Lindsey Tyne Johnson as we talk about her and DC's relationship with Romance comics! Where did they come from? Who were they for? Are they still around? All these questions and more get answers on this week's issue! For more about Lindsey go to www.lindseytynejohnson.com Sponsored by Great Lakes Grooming Co. Intro by Aaron Barry   Prescribed Reading from Issue #44: Young Romance vol. 1 #1 – Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, this was the first ever romance comic book, and launched the entire genre. Heart Throbs vol. 1 #41 – One of the earliest DC romance comics to feature the Comics Code Authority seal on the cover. Young Love vol. 1 #113 – This giant-sized issue features the remarkably condescending “Mark…on the man’s side” advice column. Young Romance: A New 52 Valentine’s Day Special #1 – Released in 2013, this one-shot anthology features romance comic – style stories starring the heroes and love interests of the New 52 DC Universe. Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane vol. 1 – Early stories in this Lois Lane solo series were centred on her romantic interest in Superman, often with her competing for his affections with Lana Lang. Young Romance vol. 1 #189 – The Doctor’s first-ever romance comic, featuring stories and a quiz to score how independent a woman you are.   SHOW NOTES (courtesy of Josh Gill)   Lindsey Johnson Four Brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Brothers_(film) Manga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga Spiderman http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Peter_Parker_(Earth-616) DC’s Young Romance http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Young_Romance_Vol_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Romance This Isn’t Happiness (blog) http://thisisnthappiness.com/   Intro Young Love http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Young_Love_Vol_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Love_(comics) Jack Kirby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kirby Colin’s HW Spectre Vol 4 No 005 http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Spectre_Vol_4_5   Young Romance   What is your experience with romance comics? Gay Superman http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Supergirl_Vol_4_79 Comics Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority 13 Going on 18 https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Going-Eighteen-Stanley-Library/dp/1897299885 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stanley_(cartoonist)   Best piece of love advice you’ve seen in a romance comic? True Romance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_comics Young Romance #189 http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Young_Romance_Vol_1_189 Young Love Vol 1 #113 http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Young_Love_Vol_1_113 Mark on the Man’s Side   Were there ever on-going storylines? Archie Comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_comics Betty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Cooper Veronica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Lodge First appearance https://comicvine.gamespot.com/pep-comics-22/4000-137602/   How explicit do they get given the era?   Is the genre still in existence? Batman & http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Batman%27s_Love_Interests Catwoman https://www.cbr.com/batman-catwoman-complicated-romance/ Talia http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Talia_al_Ghul_(New_Earth) Poison Ivy http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Pamela_Isley_(New_Earth) Lego Batman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Batman_Movie Harelquin Novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin_Enterprises Young Romance (New 52) http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Young_Romance:_A_New_52_Valentine%27s_Day_Special_Vol_1_1   Did superheroes ever show up in romance comics? Superman & Wonder Woman http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Kal-El_(Prime_Earth) http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Diana_of_Themyscira_(Prime_Earth) Aquaman & Mera http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Arthur_Curry_(Prime_Earth) http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Mera_(Prime_Earth) Lois & Clark (TV Show) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_%26_Clark:_The_New_Adventures_of_Superman Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Superman%27s_Girlfriend,_Lois_Lane_Vol_1   Is there a place today for romance comics? Sailor Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Moon Romance manga https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/24535.Best_Romance_Manga GI Zombie http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Star-Spangled_War_Stories_Featuring_G.I._Zombie_Vol_1 http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Jared_Kabe_(Prime_Earth)   21st Century romance comics Jeffrey Brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Brown_(cartoonist) Vader and Son Scott Pilgrim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pilgrim Questionable Content (web comic) http://questionablecontent.net/   Slash fiction/Fan fiction Supernatural https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_(U.S._TV_series) https://www.inkitt.com/d/supernatural-fanfiction Literotica https://www.literotica.com/   Sequential Crush https://www.sequentialcrush.com/  

Chris (@AceComics) and Reggie (@reggiereggie) talk about the lives and careers of two of comics' greatest luminaries: Joe Simon and Jack "the King" Kirby! They discuss Jack and Joe's respective childhoods right up to the moment they meet, and continue along their whirlwind and somewhat unorthodox paths through comics' Golden Age. Then you'll learn about Kirby's ascendancy to rewrite the way comics were told while Simon quit comics...sort of. They also detail the late lives of the legendary Captain America creators, including the legal battle with Marvel fought by Jack Kirby's estate that was settled very recently! You'll definitely want to learn about these creative powerhouses that changed the comics industry--several times over!   weirdcomicshistory@gmail.com   BREAK CLIP: WBAI August 28, 1987 celebration of Jack Kirby's 70th birthday (snippet) SOURCES: http://www.tcj.com/the-joe-simon-interview/ http://kirbymuseum.org/biography/ Kirby’s vs. Marvel (2011-2014) http://www.copyhype.com/2011/08/marvel-v-kirby-work-for-hire-and-copyright-termination/ Simon vs. Marvel (2003) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/books/16gust.html?_r=0 Stan v Jack - Who did what http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/ff_Lee-Kirby.html My Life in Comics by Joe Simon, Titan Books, 2011   TAGS: comics, history, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Marvel Comics, Captain America, Young Romance, romance comics, Fantastic Four, Archie Comics, Harvey Comics, DC Comics, Challengers of the Unknown, New Gods, Kamandi, Thor, the Hulk

Darren and Paul talk about Teen Titans, Doom Patrol, Wonder Woman, and yes, Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes 236. The Legion fights an odd little alien, Mon-El takes a vacation, and Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl make a huge decision!

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Young Romance #1 (1947) launched the genre of the Romance comic which, at one point in the 1950s, sold more than any other genre. It's influence was felt in the early Marvel superhero comics,

What is the tomboy's allure? Bass, Marty, Furn and Siskoid dissect the phenomenon and digress a HECK of a lot, with some support from Romance Comics Theatre, "That Strange Girl" from DC's Young Romance #197 (Jan-Feb 1974). Plus, we open the male bag and read your comments! Listen to Episode 10 below (the usual filthy filthy language warnings apply), or subscribe to The Lonely Hearts Romance Comics Podcast on iTunes! Relevant images and further credits at: Lonely Hearts Ep.10 Supplemental This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK! Visit our WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/ Follow us on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our FACEBOOK page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Subscribe via iTunes as part of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK. And thanks for leaving a comment, Lonely Hearts!

Young Romance and Oscar in conversation with John Kennedy on X-Posure, XFM

If everybody jumped off a bridge, would I jump too? Apparently so! Listening to a lot of fun comic book podcasts made me get into the game! I got my friends Bass, Furn and Marty near some microphones and we started talking about comic book romances and classic romance comics. Hey, comics fans have mostly ignored this entire genre of comics! No longer! In the first episode, we introduce ourselves, talk about our favorite comic book romances, and dissect the first story of the very first romance comic, Young Romance #1's "I Was a Pick-Up!" (1947) by Simon & Kirby! Also featuring Romance Comics Theatre! Listen to Episode 1 below (the usual filthy filthy language warnings apply), or subscribe to The Lonely Hearts Romance Comics Podcast on iTunes! Relevant images and further credits at: Lonely Hearts ep.1 Supplemental This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK! Visit our WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/ Follow us on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our FACEBOOK page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Subscribe via iTunes as part of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK. And thanks for leaving a comment, Lonely Hearts!

Pechamos a triloxía sobre a "crisi" da apocalipse económica cun extra de verán para coller novos folgos e enfrontarnos ao futuro con xiria. Facemos un repaso a algunhas das cousas máis típicas do verán: os mosquitos, as cañas, o tinto de verano e os romances, o turismo e os jodechinchos. (duración: 20'59")Baixar o mp3Birdene. I will never see de sun (I will never see de sun, EP)bryyn. Going on (adianto de Tend my sheep)Kana Kapila. Sangre Joven (¡Ra! ¡Ra! ¡Ra!, EP)Mimi Lopar. Mosquitos con dióxido de carbono (Infraviviendas y cuentos de baja resolución, LP)Young Romance. Rose Tint (Lulu and the Lampshades, cover, ePop022, single)Mullet. Puerto del Sonido (Salmonete, EP) Ligazóns relacionadas: Pedaló, el documental, EardrumsPop, Esperanza Aguirre #video, Mª Dolores de Cospedal #video.

On the program today I talk about all this #CancelColbert stupidity, and a lot of other assorted television news in the world.First song: "Spock Fingers” by Spray Paint -- http://sprayingpaint.biz/Second song: Rose Tint by Young Romance -- https://www.facebook.com/YoungRomanceMusicYou can contact me by going to http://itsscubasteve.wordpress.com or by sending a tweet to @twitscubasteveSee you next time!

E você ACHAVA que o ARGCAST ia deixar passar esse assunto? Mesmo tendo sido em Fevereiro, o ArgCast homenageia o REI DOS COMICS, o IMORTAL JACK KIRBY! No dia 6 de Fevereiro de 1994, (a 20 anos atrás) morria um dos maiores nomes (se não o maior) dos quadrinhos de super-heróis! A trajetória de Jacob Kurtzberg, o jovem judeu que aprendeu a desenhar sozinho e usou as HQs para lutar contra a pobre infância. Aquele que entrou em brigas para ajudar o colega de estúdio Will Eisner. Aquele que criou, junto com Joe Simon, o Capitão América! Inventor dos gênero dos quadrinhos de guerra, de romance, co-criador da Marvel Comics (sim, ele CO-CRIOU, juntamente com o lendário Stan Lee). O artista que misturou mitologia, ficção científica e aventura com os Novos Deuses e os Celestiais. Com casa cheia, venha dizer "HAIL TO THE KING" com Daniel HDR, Rogério DeSouza, Rodjer Goulart, Luis Garavello (Quadrim), Rafael Eunuco (BdE), Victor Vaughan (O Santuário), Zweist (Superamiches) e Bruno Costa (Cinecast). Links relacionados: - Rose, Ben e o pequeno Jacob (Jack) Kurtzberg (Kirby) - em 1920; - Um Kirby moleque, de várzea, com sua modesta Gangue da Rua Yancy; - Kirby pinta de galã; - Kirby começa a namorar Rosalind "Roz" Goldstein nos anos 1940; - Joe Simon e Jack Kirby montam estúdio juntos; - A estréia de Captain America Comics, pela Timely Comics (Dezembro de 1940); - Kirby vai para a guerra. Foto de Kirby e Roz no dia que Kirby viajava para servir no front; - Kirby era um soldado de infantaria de combate, alé de soldade de reconhecimento do campo inimigo; - Kirby e Simon criam o Fighting American, (Março de 1954); - Kirby e Simon criam Young Romance: hqs de romance, gênero praticamente criado pela dupla; - Kirby vira editor - like a boss; - Kirby na ATLAS COMICS (antes desta virar MARVEL): HQs de ficção com monstros loucos como o Dragão de sunga FIN FANG FOOM; - Nasce Quarteto Fantástico; através do talento criativo de Kirby e Lee; - Logo em seguida, Thor e Hulk; - O Coisa: diálogo do autor e criação, com detalhes biográficos; - Surfista Prateado, criado por Kirby, aparece nas páginas de Fantastic Four #50; - Jack quando ainda trabalhava nas dependências da Marvel Comics, em Nova Iorque. Desenhar 5 revistas por mês, mais direção de arte de capas não te dá tempo para ser garoto propaganda da editora; - Kirby passa a trabalhar mais em casa. Mesmo quando mudou para a California, no inicio dos anos 1970, Kirby manteve até o fim de sua vida o modesto espaço de trabalho, com sua velha prancheta, cadeira e mesa auxiliar; - E mesmo desenhando o tempo todo, Kirby sempre esteve presente com sua família: veja fotos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - Kirby vai para a DC COMICS, salvando a torpe revista de Jimmy Olsen! A ida de Kirby para a DC foi um evento! - O Guardião: o conceito original criado por Kirby para o ressurgimento do Capitão América, aqui apresentado na DC; - Algumas das alterações na arte de Kirby durante sua fase desenhando Superman: 1, 2, 3; - Kirby inicia o QUARTO MUNDO, seu projeto autoral, com controle absoluto no roteiro e arte; - Os Novos Deuses, Forever People e Sr. Milagre: 3 ttulos feitos ao mesmo tempo; - Darkseid a lá ´Seu Madruga´: "Chavinho, vem cá!"; - Big Barda tomando um belo banho; - Funky Flashman - qualquer semelhança com Mr. Lee não é mera coincidência; - Corredor Negro: a morte anda de esquí no Quarto Mundo; - Demon; - Omac; - Kamandi; - Kirby volta para Marvel Comics, com desenho e roteiro na revista do Capitão América; - Kirby cria OS ETERNOS, para muitos a continuação do seu Quarto Mundo; - Mark Evanier, co criador de GROO - O Errante, na epoca em que foi auxiliar de estúdio de Kirby; - Mark Evanier e Kirby, ja nos anos 1990 - amizade e respeito etterno! Evanier é uma das maiores autoridades sobre a obra de Jack Kirby no mundo; - Kirby como artista conceitual de animação, aqui na serie THUNDARR, o BÁRBARO; - Quadrinhos e artes de licenciamento da série de brinquedos SUPERPOWERS;

The Two Guys with PhDs Talking about Comics are back for their first Previews episode of the new year. It being January, the guys begin by highlighting some of the titles that will a part of Free Comic Book Day in May. There are some great ones coming out from BOOM! Studios, Fantagraphics, Dark Horse Comics, and Drawn and Quarterly. Then they get to the nitty gritty of the episode, discussing upcoming titles such as Veil #1, Beasts of Burden: Hunters and Gatherers, and Murder Mysteries (Dark Horse); American Vampire: Second Cycle #1 and Jonah Hex: Shadows West (DC/Vertigo); Alice in Comicland and Mean Streets: A Crime Anthology (IDW Publishing); Stray Bullets #41, Stray Bullets: Killers #1, and Sovereign #1 (Image Comics); The Big Feminist But: Comics about Women (Alternative Comics); The Returning #1 and Beautiful Scars (BOOM! Studios/Archaia); Mangus: Robot Fighter #1 (Dynamite Entertainment); White Cube (Drawn and Quarterly); Henry Speaks for Himself,  Buddy Buys a Dump, and Young Romance 2: The Early Simon and Kirby Romance Comics  (Fantagraphics); All Star (NBM); The Auteur #1 (Oni Press); Aama Volume 1: The Smell of Warm Dust and The Park (SelfMadeHero); and Nemo: The Roses of Berlin (Top Shelf Productions). Also, Derek goes off on the “gimmick” of restarting series with #1s — especially at Marvel, and dismissing Brian Michael Bendis's rationalization — Andy reiterates his need to cut back on his growing stack of comics, and The Guys once again lapse into “package” commentary.