Chart entered : 23 December 1965
Chart peak : 26
Number of hits : 13 ( Dave Dee had one solo hit and the others had one without him as D.B.M & T).
This lot arrived in the charts dated on my first birthday and hung around for the rest of the decade.
We've already encountered the perma-grinning Dave Dee ( actually Harman ) as the unlikely beneficiary of Eddie Cochran's fatal accident. A couple of years later he quit the police and formed his own band, Dave Dee and the Bostons with fellow denizens of Wiltshire, Trevor Ward- Davies ( Dozy ) on bass, John Dymond ( Beaky ) on guitar, Ian Amey ( Titch ) on guitar and Michael Wilson ( Mick, imaginatively enough ) on drums. Dee handled lead vocals.
The band honed their craft in Hamburg and like The Barron Knights developed a comedy routine in their act but failed to get signed in the wake of the Beatles. They were playing summer season at a holiday camp in 1964 when they got their lucky break with a chance to support temporary sensations The Honeycombs who had just hit number one with Have I The Right. Their managers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, two songwriting polymaths, liked them and got them a deal with Fontana. They decided on the band's name change in a not entirely successful bid to emphasise the members' individual personalities by publicising their nicknames ; a group of girls would have rather more success with this tactic thirty years later. Their first recording sessions were with Joe Meek but they weren't able to play at half speed as he required; Meek threw one of his hissy fits, stormed out and the session came to an end.
They recorded their first single "No Time" elsewhere and it was released in January 1965. It's a beat heavy pop number somewhat reminiscent of the Dave Clark Five . There's an interesting acid guitar line that pops up every now and then but it's lacking a strong chorus. It got them onto Ready Steady Go but no further.
"All I Want" followed in June and is a competent Hollies impersonation that sounds a bit tinny and primitive given what else was around at the time. Dave Dee later said the band were at the point of breaking up when it flopped.
They gave it one more shot with "You Make It Move" another Howard - Blaikley song. Blessed with a sledgehammer beat, a generous-helping of Satisfaction -style fuzz guitar and harmonies that sound pretty similar to Get Off Of My Cloud , it did the trick despite a confused middle eight where the keyboard player appears to be playing a different song. Like Hot Chocolate in the following decade they were never destined for critical plaudits but maintained their position by assimilating current sounds as here.
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