The 1960s band that lifted Tom Hanks’ soul: “It demanded you turn it up”
The worlds of music and cinema are not always that far apart. There are the icons of both mediums, there are usually both movies and albums that go down as classics for their generation…and there’s usually big business that gets in the way of both of them to make sure they get their bottom dollar before anything comes out. Tom Hanks always knew the power behind both music and cinema and when he wasn’t making iconic films, he was jamming the tunes of The Dave Clark Five.
Then again, any child of the 1960s was going to be wowed by what any of the British invasion bands were doing in the early 1960s. The massive takeover of groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones seems a bit shocking today, but it’s essential to look at where America was at the time.
The country was still in mourning over the death of President Kennedy, and the youth needed something to make them feel like everything was going to be OK. Ed Sullivan was usually the one to help cheer everyone up, and when he first introduced The Beatles to the world in 1964, it seemed like everything had changed.
Although the Fab Four made various appearances on the show, The Dave Clark Five had them beat with over 18 visits to the famous soundstage. While not necessarily the most popular band in the world, the way that the band interacted with each other, as well as the frontman’s grizzly voice, gave fans something a bit nastier than the doe-eyed grin of Paul McCartney.
While Hanks was enamoured with The Beatles and more than happy to share his love with the world, he knew that there was something different going on when he heard The Dave Clark Five, telling The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Music reaches the soul. The Dave Clark Five lifted ours with a concussive beat and a reverb echo chamber of a sound that commanded you to lean over from the back seat the moment you heard [them] on the radio and demanded your dad to turn it up”.
When looking at how Dave Clark Five slides into history, though, they have taken on a bit of a strange legacy. Their songs may have been covered by bands like Kiss in the years since, but they tend to fall somewhere between the other also-ran bands of the time that had the sad misfortune of not being born in Liverpool.
That didn’t stop them from building a legacy of their own. Dave Clark’s voice is the archetype for what the gravelly side of rock and roll offers these days, and Hanks might have just been paying a bit too much attention when he became a director. Looking at the ins and outs of a movie like That Thing You Do, there are some mysterious similarities between Hanks’s little outfit from the movie and what the Dave Clark Five were known for.
Does that mean Hanks owes the band residuals for copying their trademark sound and style? Absolutely not. Does that mean anyone watching the movie should go out and see what they’ve been missing out on all these years? Absolutely.
