Trowbridge isn’t exactly known locally for being the birthplace of any famous people, or for at some point having been the home of some notable names. Sure there’s a few… Sir Isaac Pitman, who developed Pitman shorthand, was long commemorated with the name of a pub in the town centre. Taunton-born multi-millionaire Deborah Meaden graduated from John of Gaunt, as many will readily tell you. Hugh Cornwall’s time in Trowbridge inspired a crap song that exhibits the bland, cynical sense of humour people seem to have about the places they live. Maybe that’s all. Dave Dee, from Salisbury, attended what was once the Adcroft School of Building. A real pop star was educated here in the town…
And yet no one here realises except myself. Why have Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich been allowed to slide into a relative obscurity, despite their eight top ten hits and thirteen top 40 hits? 1966’s second-biggest selling band in Britain? We can start with the name; songwriters Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley (together known as Howard Blaikley) encouraged them to change it from Dave Dee and the Bostons to something more distinctive (discarded names included The Lions and The Actions, the latter presumably as it was virtually identical to The Action). While the Monkees, superstar Americans, have had plenty of attention in the ensuing years, the unspoken snub affixed to Dave Dee and co is as they so readily set themselves as fun and feathery from the name down, rather than what was becoming known as rock. And yet behind that joyful veneer is music of great, unprecedented adventure. Their innovations are mistook for just gimmicks (whereas in truth they are both). Put simply, they were far greater and more impactful than radio programming – which pushes the 60s’ unsalvaged stalwarts ever further away – would have you believe.
Emerging from Salisbury’s club scene, their Bostons-era sets comprised an array of comedy, pop and close harmony covers, all talents which would prove central to their work on the other side of the name change, and they were fortunate enough to be playing a venue in Swindon when Denis D’Ell of the Honeycombs spotted their potential and introduced them to Blaikley, who with Howard had written them a chart-topper with “Have I the Right?”, and the pair negotiated them a deal with Fontana and a move to London (although the group remained Salisbury royalty and regularly found themselves back in the city for business or pleasure). Having spent a decade expanding pop’s sonic lexicon into uncharted worlds, Honeycombs producer Joe Meek was hired to oversee their first session, but his revolutionary plans to tape the band at half-speed so he could then accelerate the recording playback and pile on the idiosyncratic effects which likely only made sense on paper to him was thwarted by, inevitably, the difficulty the band faced in playing so slowly. But what couldn’t have been foreseen by anyone at this early point is that eventually their records would reach otherworldly standards worthy of Meek’s singular vision.
From the outset, Howard Blaikley were to write every single for the band with the belief that they should all seem effortless, even as songs later became highly intricate. Anything that felt too laboured had to be binned. Moreover, past the early singles, the plan was to make every single “a little bit different”, as guitarist Tich Amey put it. Dee would explain in 1968: “We go to the sea for one, Mexico for another, to Russia for another. But we also aim for simplicity, especially on stage, for the reason that we want to get through to the fans, not leave them wondering what it’s all about”. Their flamboyant music was matched visually by their dress senses – and that’s whether being themselves or promoting a specific release (although in their downtime they fancied themselves for a while as mods) – ditto their very physical performances which played up the special novelties of each single.
Baby steps. Bobbie Graham replaced Meek for their debut single, January 1965’s “No Time”. A repetitious, stripped back number with an almost symmetrical attraction, already Howard Blaikley’s global flavours were apparent, due to the song’s waltz time, whistling and – as authors Frogg Moody and Richard Nash put it – “a hint of the Munich beer halls” (the band had toured Germany in 1964 and it remained their largest market to the end), but such impulses would subside for a while thereafter. Unexpectedly for a gang of part-time mods, this first outing seemed to plant its flag far from rock and roll. Wishing to earn a bit of cash from songwriting themselves, the band would frequently write B-sides and album tracks, and so it proved from the outset with “Is It Love?”, a swooning, jangling ballad evoking Beatles for Sale. The single flopped (except in Singapore, where it reached the top three), as did the ensuing “All I Want” which exhibits a comparatively straightforward beat style.
UK success would wait until the Top 30 hit “You Make It Move” at the end of December, a instantly alluring proto-glam stomp stapled by a mechanical beat only pronouncing its inherent innuendo. This was their only single with producer Howie Condell but he presents an important step in the band’s development – a momentary solo for Tich Amey’s scratchy fuzz guitar and a piano that sounds as though abandoned in the roomiest of gymnasiums marking a particular step towards the band’s more expansive, studio-based future.
But emotionally drained by restless touring unreconciled by any real commercial success domestically, the group considered splitting. It was a final throw of the dice, “Hold Tight”, that single-handedly reinstated their enthusiasm when it made inroads through the hit parade, peaking at No. 4 in April 1966 and establishing an almost unbroken chain of eight consecutive top 10 hits. A furious yet lovable thrash, it destabilises the ear instantly with its hypnotic drums, pounding bass drones and a menacing, single-note guitar slitting its way into the sonic picture (a noise-terror brutalism achieved by Amey utilising a Coloursound Fuzz Unit, making him only the second guitarist after Jeff Beck to own one). New and long-time producer Steve Rowland made sure every sound on the song was mixed for maximum impact, while Dee – using a breathless football terrace chant for its melody (its a chicken and egg scenario as to which came first, but he was inspired by a rhythm which their German fans would bang on tables at Hamburg’s Top Ten Club) – becomes more frantic with each round, the song a staircase for every bar to ascend, until he and the band fall back into a chorus of harmonic – not to say libidinous – ecstasy.
A follow-up, “Hideaway”, spent three consecutive weeks at No. 10 in July and was another distorted, relatively uncomplicated rocker to prelude the band’s debut album. Released that summer and charting at No. 11, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich was designed to cohere particularly well as a pop album as was becoming the norm. Although mostly composed by Howard Blaikley alongside other professional writers, “All I Want to Do” stood out as an excellent band composition with busy percussion and stop-start windows on its funky bassline, and while much of the record straddles the line between beat and freakbeat, no one would have expected “DDD-BMT”, the intro track in which Kenny Everett can’t remember the band members names, or the Meek-ish space whistle breaks on “Frustration”, as though Dee’s romantic anxieties had become so gruelling they physically shoot upwards from his head (underscored by his reduction into quivering insanity in its final moments). The sexual politics of “Nose for Trouble”, sung by Beaky, have not aged well but who could resist its old-time violin fundament and general sense of mischief (could this be their ‘Ringo’ song)? And then Tich leads the band through the Rowland-written 007-themed R&B of “Double Agent” to finish. Some strange yet logical sequencing arrives when “Hold Tight” is paired with its mirror image, “Hard to Love You”, since both use the same leapfrogging, chanting structure, two different ways of getting to the same climax.
But if “Hold Tight!” had been barely subtle in its bedroom evocations, the suggestiveness of the group’s next single, “Bend It!”, was enough to corner some mainstream awareness and criticism, although not even this stopped it reaching No. 2 in October (if anything it likely helped). What could the title, and the ever accelerating-and-decelerating flow of the song possibly be a metaphor for? But here is where things went from great to magnificent. It wasn’t enough to simply structure a pop song around carnal cadence – getting faster and faster until, suddenly, it pauses (and the quaintness of Dee’s flagrant, wriggling little finger in adverts for the single stops it seeming too gross) – as this was where the group, Howard Blaikley and Rowland properly began treating each single as an offbeat experiment in itself, each hit from hereon in inspired by a different musical mode from somewhere in the world. “Bend It!” structurally parallels the Greek “Zorba’s Dance” (a No. 6 hit a year earlier for Marcello Minerbi & His Orchestra) and doubles up this impression by Tich achieving the sound of a bouzouki or balalaika by exploiting the possibilities of his electric mandola (key to imitating the instrument in concert).
Their penchant for the ‘exotic’ stringed instrument was, perhaps inadvertently, reflective of the times as pop and rock groups looked to for similar augmentation (and then, much like Dave Dee and friends, pose with their new discoveries in press shoots). Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours icily brought the autoharp to the top ten in February with “Mirror, Mirror” (the secret progenitor of the Manics’ “So Why So Sad”?), while 1965 saw an epochal sequence of hits that recreated sitar drones on guitar – the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride”, the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” and the Kinks’ “See My Friends”. Only three weeks after “Bend It!” left the No. 2 spot, the spot was occupied by its close sibling “Stop Stop Stop” by the Holies, who ran banjo through delayed tape echo to achieve their own balalaika drone. It seemed like mining new areas in pop, however tentatively, was by now fully on the cards.
For the follow-up “Save Me” (No. 3 in December), the mood of the day was Latin music as foregrounded by the metallic syncopation and drum fills provided by Beaky and session player Dennis Lopez. Yet put the record on and once that heavy four-floor beat thwacks in time with the samba you’d be forgiven for thinking you were hearing Latin disco – indeed, you can momentarily imagine this being 1982 Modern Romance, as my friend Huw Thomas has it. This isn’t something you could say about Unit 4+2’s baião-flavoured number one “Concrete and Clay” (1965), the only real precedent for “Save Me” in terms of beat bands in search of that Brazilian top-up. At the other end of the song, an ominous drone starts to encroach the music as Dee begins hysterically screaming as Barry Ryan will in a few years hence before everything is hurriedly and distressfully shut off, just to make the song even more compelling and inscrutable.
Both “Bend It” and “Save Me” appeared on the rush-released second Dave Dee et al album, December 1966’s If Music Be the Food of Love… Prepare for Indigestion, which bottomed out at No. 37 during the first week of January. The quick turnover potentially reveals why its quality threshold is not as high as the debut, but it still is diverting enough to contain two band compositions: the gothic, Yardbirdsian “Shame!” (already the “Save Me” B-side) – closing with a vicious slash of saturated guitar that emanates in and out of its decay – and “Master Llewellyn” which by querying whether their schooldays were all that fantastic makes it a dry-run for “Baggy Trousers”. Away from the two hits, the Howard Blaikley highlights are “Hands Off!”, an R&B number taken with a rumbling bass drone and metronomic beat which combine for at times an almost motorik totality, and best of all the march band novelty “The Loos of England”, a celebration of the crapness of English crappers relative to those in other countries, sung in a cod-highbrow manner to a concert hall arrangement centred on bass, mandolin and violin. Originally intended for Patrick Kerr but turned down by CBS for obvious reasons, it instead led the only DDDBM&T EP and provides a useful stylistic bridge between Flanders & Swann and the Bonzos.
It didn’t matter too much at this point that the albums were selling poorly, because the hit singles kept coming. “Touch Me, Touch Me” is pumped up freakbeat that forewent overt timbral for structural playfulness – that is, it speeds breathlessly through 12/8 verses. Released in March 1967, the song only peaked at No. 13 but the group resumed their run in the upper echelons of the charts with “Okay!” (No. 4 in June), which returned to the Greek/Eastern European modes of “Bend It!” through Tich’s quivering balalaika and Beaky’s accordion. Dee’s frustration that his continental romantic fling cannot last is underscored in the music, particularly in how certain beats are stressed by the band stomping together on a wooden floor (an idea Howard Blaikley borrowed from Meek’s production of “Have I the Right?”) As if to invert the anxiety, the B-side is a very evocative, group-composed mod banger named “He’s a Raver”.
Even these adventures feel relatively innocuous next to “Zabadak!” The title, although feeling somewhat exotic, is actually as meaningless as many of the lyrics, but almost subliminally spilling from them is a solitary yet vital line, “Look for meaning not in words but the way you’re feeling”. At the end of 1967, a year in which the ‘meaning’, use and interpretation of pop songs had far accelerated, this comes over like a declaration of pop’s principles, its essence – the importance of nonsensical words in pop, the barely-between-the-lines joy they represent, the way they make you feel. But also, note that line about drawing meaning in “the way you’re feeling”. In the middle of an apparently senseless pop song, the feeling can only be emphasised – nay, originated – with the music.
And put bluntly, nothing in else in pop sounded like “Zabadak!” Nothing in pop 54 years later does, either. Until now, every single – no matter how daring – was crafted carefully enough so as to be recreated on stage, but that rule of thumb was merrily, irretrievably binned, for there are fewer pop productions of the 1960s as flat out strange, as inclusive or layered as this, Rowland and the band fully exploiting, as was quickly becoming the want for the time, the worlds of the studio. Vaguely inspired by something from Arabic radio, the ‘African’ tribal beat – which appears out of an already thick soundscape of birdsong – is in fact four drummers (including Mick Wilson) double-tracked to become eight, using a log drum, two Zamba drums, kettledrums and jawbones (some likely played by other hands). Underneath the rhythm somewhere are a cued up piano, string bass and three acoustic guitars, while a 20-piece orchestra (most of which are violinists but there are multiple cellos and violas to be detected too) eventually makes itself known. 25 vocalists – from the band to Rowland and members of neighbouring groups like Howard Blaikley’s new clients The Herd – sing in wonky harmony. No electric instruments appear anywhere.
And it is an absolute riot with no peer, like a Jon Hassel fourth-world study getting gatecrashed by the most drunken (or, more accurately, highest) gang of mates, a group that grows in number until suddenly what started off as an earthy soundscape has become the most inclusive psychedelic happening this side of “A Day in the Life”. The hand percussion sticks out and falls from the mix like narcotic free-improv while the unutterably heavy low end – coupled with the extremely cavernous sound (this takes pop to new worlds of echo) – threatens to crack the ground completely, dragging this most delirious party with it (and gives this listener premonitions of dub). A No. 3 hit in November, this was a new beginning for pop, because although nothing truly sounds like it, you can feel its kinship everywhere through decades of experimental pop (Brian Eno, Fun Boy Three, The Creatures, The Orb, Super Furry Animals, Animal Collective). It may just be the greatest record the band ever released. Plus, the similarly absurd B-side “The Sun Goes Down” – written by Dee, Dozy and Beaky – is a gothic psych-rock masterpiece with drowsy guitars, tolling bells, backwards equipage and a truly submerged Dave Dee delivering swooning melismas from another ether. Had it been a one-off single by some obscure chancers, it would fetch today for £1,000 and line no shortage of record collector psych compilations.
Consolidating on their winning streak in March 1968, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich finally achieved a UK No. 1 with “The Legend of Xanadu”. They had now turned their attention to spaghetti westerns and mariachi, and this was their most explicit story song to date, reflecting the popcorn TV they may have watched as youngsters (but although Howard Blaikley had began stirring songs away from romantic and sexual encounters – not only for Dave Dee et al but their other groups, most notably The Herd, whose “From the Underworld” is among 1967’s greatest singles – “Xanadau” still plays out a gun-slinging duel of love, foreshadowing or maybe even influencing “Rocky Raccoon”). The trumpets are ablaze enough if taken in isolation but the song’s real fire comes from Dave Dee cracking his bullwhip, slicing holes into the music every time and repeatedly ramping up the excitement. In reality, the whip was yet more studio absurdity from Rowland, achieved by slapping huge planks of plywood together while a beer bottle was ran down a fretboard.
The ensuing album, If No One Sang, is the band’s masterpiece, and is every bit the equal of Blossom Toes’ We Are Ever So Clean or similarly beloved cultish records. As Sgt. Pepper radicalised the role and contents of the pop LP, so it was that If No One Sang hung loosely on a threadbare concept – namely one prompted by fan-mail that imagined a miserable world without song. To this end, the album is bookended by proto-“One of These Days” (or even disc two of Echoes) winds enveloping both halves of the titular title track, which ponders such a reality through a distinctly haunted folk idiom, one reminiscent of the sort of thing the Bee Gees would be doing a year hence. Between them, 12 songs – “Zabadak!” and “Xanadu” wisely among them – push the group into all manner of new territory and a whole workshop of instruments, presenting something of a variety show as though Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick & Tich had been made into that television series which was sometimes proposed. So just as you’re settling into the brassy “Where From Where To”, you’re propelled into the calypsonian music hall jaunt of “I’ve Got a Feeling” and then the Parisian romance of “In a Matter of a Moment”, almost every song relocating you in as different a milieu as before. And since this is 1968, what better than a character study, namely one tea party goer named “Mrs. Thursday”. Inspired by the Kathleen Harrison comedy-drama of the same name, the bandstand brass band the band fancy themselves as (and this is a Dee, Dozy and Beaky composition) are also placed in the centre of the drama (or lack thereof, since little happens), while cutaways to indecipherable ambient chatter (one cue as well – “all the people talked and talked!”) suggest a particularly deep “Yellow Submarine” influence.
“Mama, Mama” convincingly goes the route of compressed boogie with walking bass, ecstatic piano glissandos and “Keep on Running” party ambience, only to be sidelined by an increasingly Motown-bordering sprint through Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter”. Not even these constant diversions can fully foresee the torment of “Look at Me”, an intense and febrile waltz where our hero, an actual and metaphorical clown, demands that you acknowledge and penetrate the lonely, brokenhearted alcoholic keeping up the veneer. There is something of the Robin Gibb lost-little-boy to his vulnerability, maybe also a splash of Anthony Newley’s happy-go-unlucky, yet it sounds remarkably prescient of the tortured high-camp of Simon Warner (while, argues Huw, something of Lionel Bart is in its DNA). You can almost imagine Gilbert O’Sullivan about to lean into the mic when “Break Out” begins and yet its explosive chorus packs a inclusive maximalism that would sooner rather herald 1970s soul, while the shadowy flamenco, intricate chordal passages and rinky-dink trumpet commentary of “Time to Take Off” help invent another contemporary (of which more anon).
Released in June 1968, the album missed the charts entirely; although they never had much of a foothold there to begin with, it helped reflect – on a different ratio – the group’s impending downturn in fortunes. Although many fans claim “Last Night in Soho” as the group’s masterpiece, it only climbed as high as No. 8 that August and the band would never see the inside of the top ten again. The public’s loss, as “Soho” was an ominous epic vivaciously detailing a criminal unable to keep from transgression even with a lover to tend to. The strings are laid on but seek not to comfort the listener but instead instill a shrill dizziness, and one wonders if this isn’t all a metaphor for something seedier, given the locale. When “The Wreck of the ‘Antoinette'” arrived in October but climbed no higher than No. 14, one could at least claim the band were battening down obscure galleries. Set where else but the ocean bed (!), its dissonant and formless introduction over which Dee doing his best condemned Arthur Brown booms menacingly over sonar squeals and deconstructing guitars take the listener aside and reminds them never too get too comfortable. Just as suitably, the song proper couldn’t be more dissimilar, opting for elementary yet salacious pop.
As the band entered 1969 it was clear to them and their entourage that their template was potentially reaching an end, and that the public’s goodwill was sadly – and unnecessarily – running out. But the year’s first new single, “Don Juan” (No. 23 in March), could be and was argued to be little more than ‘Xanatwo’, hence the disinterest. But been there, done that? “Juan” wasn’t really a rehash, finding the group not in the Wild West but 17th century Spain, Dee playing the part of libertine matador who would rather bin his demeanor for true love, provided this bull fall at his feet (but does he? This fatal ending is something the song has in common with the three 1968 singles and arguably reveals symmetry between Howard Blaikley’s story songs and the death discs popular at the earlier end of the decade). As usual, cinematic strings are incongruently sprinkled in to load up on enticing textures, pushing the song into narcotic marching band enclaves. A final single, May’s “Snake in the Grass”, also climbed no higher No. 23 and although inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice actually styles itself as what I can only describe as flutey ska. The superficial lightness is highly deceptive, since the unavoidable impression upon close listening is the narrator is actually the rapist. It’s understandable the public would be perturbed by this entryist pop (although given the slightly earlier success of the Hollies’ “Stop Stop Stop”, and slightly later success of Hurricane Smith’s “Who Was It?”, it’s likely they never noticed).
These were the sounds of a group falling apart, and yet the corresponding album was named Together (just as unconvincingly titled as the Country Joe and the Fish album of the same name). Rowland by now more preoccupied with his own Family Dogg, his only other production jobs besides the two modest hits were “Run Colorado!” – a plucked and orchestrated bluegrass sway that nonetheless makes much room for momentary tinsel that leave as quickly as they arrive (notably the jerky, all-round-entertainer brass and seconds of a foreboding church bell) – and “Margareta Lidman”, in which Dee can’t decide whether he’s turning into Barrett (“where are you gowwwwiiiiing”) or the Newley-affected Bowie (“got your leettahhhh”) as he comes over all twee and smitten about his new girlfriend. The latter was one of three Dee/Dozy/Beaky numbers, alongside a late and by now somewhat anachronistic beat exercise in “Bora Bora” (although its essential bubblegum is still not far removed from the sort of studio MOR with which the Blue Mink and White Plains would soon find success) and the not dissimilar, fuzzed-up “P. Teaser” (although the sensual moans of its closing moments may exist to pastiche or even demystify “Je t’aime”).
For the non-Rowland songs (including the two mentioned above), Dave Dee himself took to production and does a fantastic and eventful job, having clearly learned a thing or two down the line. The opening “Below the Belt” is tastily defined by its bubbly and ever-shifting, octave-jumping horns escorting the listener back to Georgie Fame and “Get Away”, while “First Time Love” repurposes the “Snake” framework of offbeat skank and toytown flutes into a simpler love song. Perhaps its two greatest songs are, atypically, two of its most stripped back. “Mountains of the Moon” may owe something of its existence to the Apollo landings but rather than go the predictable route instead exists as a harmonic, campfire singalong, squaring the 1967 and then 1968-69 Beatles (just how McCartney is that bassline) with “When the Saints Go Marching In”. Best of all is “Love Is a Drum”, which builds as cleanly and palindromically as Orbison’s “Running Scared” (or even Simple Minds’ “Street Hassle” cover) into a spacious, huge-sounding temple to sound (and love) despite its minimal instrumentation (as spotlit by the gradualness of its build). The unwary listener would have to pinch themselves at first though that the opening bass drum throb had not materialised through a time-portal from the 1980s, or from Ariel Pink. Is anyone else reminded of OMD’s “The Romance of the Telescope”?
All in all, Together is excellent, but predictably failed to chart and spelled the end of the group. Dave Dee left at the end of September 1969 to go the route of an entertainer and returned to Salisbury. The remaining members carried on as Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich for a further four years, releasing a number of singles that range from okay to excellent, firstly at the tail end of 1969 with the cacophonous “Tonight Today”. This’ll be a tale for another day, however, if just for the sake of trying to keep this piece coherent.
But although Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich are not considered – if you will – ‘canon’, any interesting spectator can detect how their importance and innovations have percolated heavily over time. For one, they invented Moonraker art pop, with numerous Wiltshire bands and singers looking to rip pop open and explore its limits following in their wake. The lineage next visited Brian Protheroe, who similarly went the Salisbury-to-London route. You can hear lots of the old gang (who he knew in their Boston days) in Protheroe, given his similar knack for stop-start abruptness, Latin rhythmic elaboration and unlikely musical punctuation. He’s particularly visible on “Time to Take Off”, but play “Save Me” next to “Clog Dancer” to see how veins run deep. And anchoring Wiltshire in the north would soon be XTC; there’s a thin line between “Save Me” and “Generals and Majors”, but Andy Partridge made it all clear when cracking his own bullwhip on the demented “Save Your Donkey Up”, the hoedown that put the West Country back into country and western, while bruised fiddles do their thing at some odd angle. London’s Cardiacs would settle in Salisbury in their later years and a clear line runs from the likes of “Bend It!” through early XTC (“Cross Wires” et al.) and Cardiacs’ life-changing mutations of pop.
Outside of Wiltshire, there are innumerable ways to pinpoint individual songs as forebears to later careers (say, the phased jerkiness of “Bend It!” foreshadowing Bill Nelson, Split Enz, Devo and other characters), but the overall template has particular weight. I could be facetious and say they helped bring about worldbeat – many of their singles visiting a different part of the globe – but that’s not quite right. No, Howard Blaikley’s open desire to make every hit completely unique and unlike the others – experimenting through disparate styles, influences, themes, structures – is the same template Xenomania would run with for Girls Aloud. But putting aside games of legacy and connections, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich were one of the greatest and awe-inspiring of all pop groups. Every song a world unto itself. To those in love with the magic of pop, the countless ways you can lose yourself in it, DDDBM&T passionately provided a thousand entrant points, and once you’re in those irresistible clutches you’re not coming out. Hold tight.
Popluck 