Hank’s for the memories
AS I’M sure you don’t need me to tell you, the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest was won by a Dutch band called Teach-In, performing a magnificent number called Ding-A-Dong.
“Ding-a-dong every hour, when you pick a flower,” it went, “even when your lover is gone, gone, gone.”
Sound advice indeed.And when a piece of music has managed to blend an infectious melody with such sharply observed lyrical content (“There will be no sorrow when you sing tomorrow,” Teach-In also assured us, “and you walk along with your ding-dangdong…”), it’s no surprise to see it blowing the opposition out of the water.
The UK act that year had to settle for the runners-up spot. (This, as I say, was the 70s, when a Eurovision runners-up spot was still something for which we’d settle rather than sell our grannies).
But where are Teach-in now, eh? That’s what I’d like to know (although admittedly not to the point where I can be bothered to check).
The bunch who came second, on the other hand, or three of them at least, can be found on BBC Four tonight with an entire documentary all to themselves.
Mind you, it’s The Shadows, so they jolly well deserve it.
THE SHADOWS AT 60
(9.30pm) is tremendous stuff. There’s the odd bit near the start, I grant you, where you fear it may get bogged down in the muso technicalities (both Queen’s Brian May and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour wax lyrical about the guitar-playing technique of Shadows legend Hank Marvin) but it soon shakes that off to become a fascinating snapshot of pop history. Or, rather, several snapshots stitched together.
The 60s bit, the 70s bit, the splits, the comebacks, the what-are-the-chaps-up-to-now bit etc.
This is a band, bear in mind, who emerged long before The Beatles – initially backing an Elvis-ish dude called Cliff Richard, and then enjoying a parallel career of their own.
But it’s also one whose fluctuating fortunes have reflected the fickle, whimsical nature of the music industry, from the early 60s chart-toppers to the movies with Cliff (Summer Holiday, The Young Ones etc., proper classics), from panto at the Palladium with Arthur Askey to packing it all in, from trying other projects that the critics quite liked but the fans couldn’t give a monkey’s about, to getting back together and being told by John Peel that they were cool but that he’d never admit as much in public.
And yes, Eurovision 1975. So agonisingly close to glory and yet so far. But the tiniest hiccup in a career that still had decades to run.
Ding-a-Blooming-Dong indeed.