Glad All Over: The Dave Clark Five and Beyond

I love all 60's music, especially the British Invasion groups. The DC5 were never musically in the same league as the Beatles, Stones, Who etc, but I find a few of their tracks toe tappingly pleasant.

My real problem with the band is Dave Clark himself - a peculiar deluded control freak whose rewriting of history would make Stalin blush. I first became aware of this trait when I watched repeats of Ready Steady Go in the 90's. Clark (who owned the original RSG video tapes) notoriously inserted clips of the DC5 from other TV shows just so his band could be seen performing between groups who actually appeared on RSG. The clips were so badly shoehorned in too. You'd have a clip shot on video tape of The DC5 performing inside a TV studio on The Ed Sullivan Show cut to non-matching audience reactions shot on film of girls screaming taken from a Beatles concert holding up I Love Ringo banners! It's blatant flim-flam like this that pervades this airbrush of a documentary.

Please google search an excellent piece called The Curious Story Of The Dave Clark Five. It nails the shadiness of Clark's character brilliantly, from his dubious songwriting credits on the band's hits, his shabby treatment of the rest of his band (especially singer Mike Smith) and his clumsy handling of the DC5 legacy. Clark thought withdrawing the band's back catalogue for decades would create a huge interest in the combo when he finally re-released a best of album in the 90's. It didn't, and he withdrew all the DC5 music again. This bonkers behaviour means his band aren't as fondly remembered today as other 60''s groups because people couldn't hear or buy their music for years. Sadly this documentary reeks of being Clark's last desperate attempt to try and stop The DC5 being largely forgotten from music history. An unfortunate case of too little, too late.