‘Glad All Over’: The song with an eerie connection to the assassination of JFK for Dave Clark
Everyone – or, at least, everyone who was alive at the time – is said to remember exactly where they were when they heard that President John F Kennedy was assassinated. For beat rock hero Dave Clark, the world-altering, era-defining event came at a rather pivotal moment in his existence.
Although they are rarely afforded the same notoriety as the likes of The Beatles, the Dave Clark Five were right at the forefront of the British invasion and beat rock period, becoming only the second British outfit to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, following their Merseyside brethren. Throughout their existence, the outfit scored an impressive 20 hit singles in the UK, but there is no doubting which one formed their defining moment: 1963’s ‘Glad All Over’.
A true beat rock masterpiece, capturing the inherent sound of the movement and boasting an inarguable influence over the subsequent landscape of garage rock, the single was short, sharp, and had an infectious call-and-response chorus which has since been adopted by everyone from The Rezillos to the football terraces. Inevitably, the single reached the top of the singles charts shortly after its release in November 1963, displacing The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – which should give you some indication of its rock and roll raw power.
‘Glad All Over’ should have been the beginning of the Dave Clark Five’s bid for world domination, opening the floodgates for a deluge of Clark’s beat rock powerhouse singles and forever committing the band to the dizzying heights of rock’s upper echelon. They had, after all, beaten the likes of The Rolling Stones to the punch, earning a number-one single months before Jagger and Richards got there with ‘It’s All Over Now’ in the summer of 1964.
As it turned out, though, the experience of achieving that pivotal number-one single was somewhat tarnished for Clark. “What I can remember – and this is quite spooky – is we first brought that song out here in England,” the songwriter recalled to Rock Cellar. “I had an old banger of a car, a jalopy, and I was with Mike Smith, the lead singer in the DC5, we were on our way to our gig at the Royal Tottenham, and we knew that ‘Glad All Over’ was gonna come on the radio.”
Being young lads in the exciting throes of the music industry, hearing your song played on the radio was an incredibly big deal. So, as Clark remembers it, “We stopped the car and in the middle of [the song] there was a newsflash that President Kennedy was killed.” That puts the date at the 22nd November, only a week after the song was first released, and it is fair to say that the mid-song newsflash took the wind out of Clark’s sails a little.
After all, the assassination of JFK was an Earth-shattering moment back in the 1960s, changing the course of the Cold War and of American politics forevermore. Given the relative popularity of the president at that time, too, the impact of the killing was certainly felt on this side of the Atlantic, too. For Clark, the timing of the assassination meant that his defining songwriting effort was, regrettably, forever tied to the momentous occasion.
To their credit, the Dave Clark Five did manage to follow up on the albeit marred success of ‘Glad All Over’ with ‘Bits And Pieces’ a few months later, which peaked at number two – kept off the top spot by Cilla Black, of all people. However, the garage rock mastery of ‘Glad All Over’ was never truly recaptured – although it’s difficult to tell whether the assassination was truly to blame for that.
