11. The Shadows20 Golden Greats
The Shadows were the second group I ever saw live. The first group was a Shadows covers band, who I saw on a family holiday at a camp in Jersey. They were pretty good, and it must have been the time when the Shadows Golden Greats album was out. I’d got that album and it was the music that spoke to me like nothing ever had before. I was nine or ten. It was music that was full of mystery and fear, and it was quite intoxicating. I was quite obsessed with it, and the titles ‘Apache’, ‘Man Of Mystery’, ‘The Frightened City’, things like ‘Wonderful Land’, these aching, mysterious titles. Then a year or so later I was taken to see them live, and I’d have to say it was the best and the worst gig I ever went to. They were terrifyingly loud, it was the loudest fucking gig I have ever been to. There were no pictures of them on Golden Greats, so you imagined they looked like Lee Van Cleef because they played this Spaghetti Western music. The Shadows weren’t on the telly much in the 70s and so if I wanted to know what they looked like I had to get an encyclopedia of rock, which I wasn’t going to do. They came on and I think Hank had a red velvet jacket on, he was doing these faces, emoting, and then he’d do banter between songs. They were light entertainment comedians, and it wasn’t good. It was the big reveal of rock music: it’s all smoke and mirrors. Even at that age, it was a disappointment, which is maybe why I chose Mark Bolan. As a dead rock star, I could never go and see him.
