The Shadows Shadows Shadows Shadows

1. 1949

   In Newcastle, eight-year-old Brian Rankin, the future Hank Marvin, starts piano lessons. Bruce Welch, also eight, is given a ukulele by his uncle.

2. 1953

   In Hampstead, ten-year-old Tony Meehan of the 11th Hampstead Scouts gets a drum kit for Christmas.

3. 1955

   Terry Harris from Willesden, an apprentice welder making milk churns, buys a clarinet to play jazz. He is already called Jet, after his speed on the running track.

4. 1956

   Jet gives up on the clarinet, takes up the double bass and plays modern jazz near Leicester Square for £2 10s a night. In Newcastle, Bruce pays £4 19s 6d for a guitar and joins a skiffle group, The Railroaders.

5. 1957

   Hank buys a banjo from his French teacher, paying it off at half a crown a week. On his sixteenth birthday his parents give him a Höfner Congress guitar, and he joins Bruce in The Railroaders on terms nobody ever disclosed.

More in Chris's chapter: Timeline

1. 6 April

   Hank and Bruce come down from Newcastle with The Railroaders for the final of a talent contest. They come third. They book one night at Mrs Bowman's boarding house in Holly Park and stay until the end of 1959.

2. Spring

   With drummer Pete Chester they form The Chesternuts and record Teenage Love, the first record with Hank and Bruce on it. It very nearly charts. Pete's mum keeps them fed with poached eggs and crinkly chips, which Hank had never seen in Newcastle.

3. The 2i's, Old Compton Street

   The coffee bar doubles as an unofficial job centre for musicians. Hank works the new orange-juice machine (he says he was the first ever to use it), Jet serves coffee and plays bass in the cellar. The first three Shadows probably met somewhere near that machine.

4. Summer

   A pale schoolboy in a Gene Vincent cap pays his way into the cellar and asks to sit in on drums. It's Tony, and it's the first time all four play together. At first they think he's too jazzy. Within days Hank reckons he's fabulous.

5. October

   Cliff Richard's road manager comes to hear a different guitarist and signs Hank instead. Hank asks if Cliff needs a rhythm guitarist too. He does. Hank first meets Cliff at a Soho tailor's, where Cliff is being fitted for his pink jacket. Within days Jet is asked to take over on bass.

6. 5 October, Hanley

   On the tour's first night Cliff crouches lower and lower through Move It, and the band follow him down until they are flat on their backs. They drop that bit of the act. Getting up again was too difficult.

More in Chris's chapter: Timeline

1. January

   Tony, fifteen but claiming sixteen, replaces Terry Smart on drums. At his debut, in Manchester's Free Trade Hall, he knocks his kit over during the third number and keeps the beat with one hand while picking up drums with the other.

2. 5 February

   EMI signs The Drifters. Jet is the group's named leader but, at nineteen, still a minor, so his dad signs the contract. The first single, Feelin' Fine, flops so completely that Hank later said it wasn't released so much as escaped.

3. The Strat

   Cliff pays to import the most expensive guitar in the Fender catalogue: a flamingo-pink Stratocaster with gold-plated fittings and a tremolo arm. When it arrives in its velvet-lined case, Hank can't bring himself to pick it up. Serial number 34346.

4. On the road

   Seven tours in a year, mostly in Joe Lee's slow, draughty Bedford coach. When there were no digs they slept in it, and told anyone who asked that they were staying at the Bedford, which sounded like a posh hotel.

5. Pranks

   Cliff books Jet a 5 a.m. alarm call with no tea. In Blackpool Jet and Tony get even, filling Cliff's bed with an old sandwich, ashtrays and nuts and bolts, and tying knots in his pink pyjamas.

6. July

   An American group called The Drifters objects to the name. Riding their Lambrettas to Ruislip Lido for a swim, Jet and Hank stop for a drink at The Six Bells pub. They are always in Cliff's shadow, Jet says. So why not The Shadows?

7. November

   Saturday Dance, the first single with the Strat, gets good reviews and stalls at No.31. They were sure this one was the hit.

More in Chris's chapter: Travelling Light

1. January–February

   Their first American tour: a month of one-night stands across Canada and the States, overnight by Greyhound bus. They are bottom of the bill, Cliff's name is misspelt and the band isn't mentioned at all. Nobody can drink. They're all still minors, and Cliff's dad has come along as the responsible adult.

2. Spring

   Back in Britain, a young singer-songwriter on the same tour, Jerry Lordan, strums his ukulele and hums them a tune. It's called Apache. Lordan later insisted, for the record, that Jet was the first to hear it.

3. 17 June

   Recorded at Abbey Road in four takes. Cliff plays the Chinese drum at the start and finish, and Bruce borrows Cliff's Gibson acoustic for the jangle.

4. A side or B side?

   EMI thought it was a B side. Norrie Paramor's teenage daughters voted for the A side. Jet's window cleaner preferred Quatermasster's Stores (spelt that way as a nod to the TV serial Quatermass) and the milkman backed Apache. A radio producer's promise to play it settled the matter.

5. 20 August

   Apache knocks Cliff's Please Don't Tease off No.1. It stays in the charts for 21 weeks and sells over a million. Their boss takes it well.

6. Summer to Christmas

   They play nightly with Cliff at the London Palladium but aren't allowed to perform the country's best-selling single, because it doesn't fit the show. Princess Margaret asks Hank how much his guitar weighs.

7. Late 1960

   Screaming fans drown out their 15-watt amplifiers, so they ask the makers for something twice as powerful. The result, the AC30, becomes one of the most famous amplifiers ever built.

More in Chris's chapter: Shadowmania

1. February

   FBI, written by Hank, Bruce and Jet in the Finchley flat Hank and Bruce shared with their wives, charts in time for Valentine's Day. For contractual reasons it's credited to their manager, Peter Gormley.

2. The walk

   Taking a cue from The Treniers and The Dallas Boys, they work out some steps so the audience has something to watch: to the side, to the back, and a kick. It becomes the Shadow Walk. The silhouettes at the top of this page are doing it now.

3. 2 March

   On Tony's eighteenth birthday they fly out to Rhodesia and South Africa. Six thousand fans meet the plane in Bulawayo. Johannesburg is so mobbed that Cliff spends a day sunbathing on the hotel roof. When they leave, eight of the South African top ten are theirs or feature them.

4. Summer

   Filming The Young Ones at Elstree. Bored between takes, they race toy boats and fish for newts in the studio lake.

5. September

   Their first LP, The Shadows, spends 57 weeks in the album chart. It includes Nivram, Jet's showcase. Gonzales took 58 takes; Big Boy took one.

6. 29 September, Blackpool

   Tony turns up late once too often, sidling on to the stage just as FBI finishes. After a row in the dressing room he walks out. Bruce phones Brian Bennett, who has just accepted a £25-a-week West End job, and offers him double. Two days later Brian is in Birmingham, miming to Kon-Tiki for television.

7. 7 October

   Pop history. Kon-Tiki is No.1 in the singles chart, The Shadows is No.1 in the LP chart and The Shadows to the Fore is No.1 in the EP chart. That week, Tony's drumming can be heard on 48 different tracks in the charts, and he has already left.

More in Chris's chapters: 1961 Live and Kicking · Tony Quits The Shadows · Hello Brian!

1. March

   Wonderful Land, another Jerry Lordan tune, goes to No.1 and stays there for eight weeks, still the record for a guitar instrumental. Setting Hank's guitar against a big string orchestra had been Tony's idea. It's the last single with the original four.

2. 15 April

   At the NME Poll Winners' Concert Jet wins Solo Instrumentalist, and the same day Hank and Bruce tell him he's out. His drinking had become a serious problem, and he walks away in tears.

3. Spring

   Brian "Licorice" Locking, Brian Bennett's friend from the 2i's, takes over on bass. Bruce says his smile filled a theatre. A working family in Liverpool writes to welcome him and tell him he's all right.

4. Summer

   Across Europe filming Summer Holiday, which puts the band in the uniform of the Greek Royal Guard. Jet goes solo on Decca, with Tony drumming uncredited on his records.

5. November

   On the children's programme Crackerjack, Tony promises that anyone who writes to him with a stamped addressed envelope will get a signed photograph. Every single one.

More in Chris's chapter: 1962 Jet Goes Solo

1. January

   Jet Harris and Tony Meehan's Diamonds, one more Jerry Lordan tune, goes to No.1, knocking both Cliff and The Shadows off the top.

2. All year

   Cliff, The Shadows, or Jet and Tony are in the singles chart every single week of 1963, and in the Top Ten for 47 of them. Dance On!, Summer Holiday and Foot Tapper all reach No.1; Atlantis reaches No.2.

3. Summer Holiday

   When the film script arrives, Bruce and Brian write the title song in about twenty minutes and put it straight onto Brian's Starlight tape recorder. It wins Brian his first Ivor Novello Award.

4. Blackpool, summer

   Bruce's worries about tuning spiral. He arrives at three o'clock to tune for the 6.15 show and still thinks he's out by six. His doctors tell him to leave the group. Licorice leaves too, to devote himself to his faith.

5. Autumn

   Jet is badly hurt in a car crash in September, and the Jet and Tony partnership falls apart. John Rostill, an old boy of Rutlish Grammar in Wimbledon, joins The Shadows on bass, and Bruce decides to stay after all.

6. 28 November

   The Beatles are at No.1 with She Loves You. The times are changing.

More in Chris's chapter: 1963

1. 1964

   Theme for Young Lovers and The Rise and Fall of Flingel Bunt keep them in the charts, and for a while Hank, Bruce and John swap their Fenders for white Burns guitars. They will never have another UK No.1 single on their own.

2. Summer, Great Yarmouth

   They make Rhythm and Greens, a short comedy film about the history of Britain's beaches in which they play cavemen, Romans, pirates and legionnaires. Chris thinks it's just plain silly.

3. 8 November

   The Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium, and a queue to shake hands with the Queen.

4. 22 December

   The pantomime Aladdin opens at the London Palladium, with a score written by the band. It runs until April, two shows a day, ten hours a day at the theatre.

5. 1965–1967

   Stingray and The War Lord reach the charts. In Finders Keepers a young Jimmy Page plays harmonica on their Ivor Novello-winning Time Drags By, and in 1966 they turn up as puppets in Thunderbirds Are Go. Maroc 7, in April 1967, is their 25th chart hit in a row, and their last for almost eight years.

6. 1968

   A season at the Talk of the Town has three different line-ups. John collapses from exhaustion and Licorice steps in, then Brian goes into hospital with appendicitis and Tony plays the last week.

7. 14 December 1968

   After one row too many, the last show, with Cliff, at the London Palladium.

More in Chris's chapters: 1964 · 1965–1968

1. 31 December 1969

   Back together with Cliff for the BBC's end-of-decade show, Pop Go the Sixties.

2. 1975

   Joined by John Farrar, they represent the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest and come second with Let Me Be the One.

3. 1977

   20 Golden Greats goes to No.1 in the album chart, at the height of punk. Hank, Bruce and Brian go back on the road.

4. 1979–1983

   Don't Cry for Me Argentina reaches No.5 and Cavatina, from The Deer Hunter, No.9. In 1983 comes Going Home, from Local Hero.

5. 2004

   Bruce and Brian are appointed OBE. Hank turns his down for personal reasons. The Final Tour runs into 2005.

6. 2009

   It wasn't final. Cliff and The Shadows reunite for The Final Reunion tour, including The O2. Chris is there, 48 years after Brian joined.

7. Remembered

   John Rostill, who died in 1973. Tony Meehan, who died in 2005 aged 62, after retraining as a counsellor and while close to finishing a PhD in psychology. Jet Harris MBE, who died in 2011 aged 71. Licorice Locking, who died in October 2020 aged 81.

More in Chris's chapters: What Happened After · Up Close and Personal