24 March 1968
As a young man called David Harman, Dave Dee was a police cadet who was called to the scene of Eddie Cochran’s fatal car crash in Wiltshire in April 1960. Back at the police station that night, he strummed Cochran’s famous red Gretsch electric guitar. Now there’s an essential rock n’ roll factoid for you.
Less essential, despite their considerable ’60s chart success, is the oeuvre of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. The whimsy of their band name is mild sauce compared to the gimmickry of their records – ‘Bend It’, for instance, combines end-of-the-pier innuendo with a speeding-up bouzouki tempo, like a Benny Hill version of Zorba The Greek. Here, ‘The Legend Of Xanadu’ features not the Cochran twang or Cretan jangle but a whiplash and yes, that’s a real whip: in concerts Dave Dee himself performed that part live. The rest of the track is an odd mixum-gatherum of fey English beat pop and wild-eyed mariachi-tinted US western soundtracks. Inventive and colourful, yes, but anything more than a minute of it gets a bit tiresome. There ain’t no cure for the Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich blues.
Irish Number Ones 