Shadows of the Sixties

Last Friday night when surfing my Freeview, I landed on a much-neglected channel named Yesterday. I had oft landed upon it before and found little reason to hang about, but this night I found a sixties’ party in full swing. At first I thought it was a spoof. Surely that wasn’t Helen Shapiro, resplendent in pink trouser suit, singing Walkin’ Back To Happiness? What threw me was that her clothing and the dancers that she was surrounded by looked all too right; the mini skirts, knee-high boots and headbands, the hood-like hairstyles and ‘Cleopatra’ painted eyes. It was as if a filmmaker had hired a designer to authenticate every detail. But as the show wore on, I realised that this was no director’s fantasy.
The dancers were too pale and plump to be even considered for onstage work today. The outfits of the performers were without irony and most significantly, apart from the main players, there were no individual ‘looks’ screaming for attention. Nope, this was the genuine article, the paisley-patterned decade itself. We saw a monochrome Tom Jones sing Delilah, then Cilla Black in a full length, bright yellow shirt waister rendering Anyone Can Have A Heart for all her worth. The Shadows treated us to one of their guitar-strumming instrumentals, then were joined by a young Cliff Richard singing Batchelor Boy and Congratulations. It ought to have been hilarious, yet it was somehow refreshing to hearken back to a time when young people sought to dress uniformly, instead of the eternal clamouring to be an ‘indivudual’.
The four Shadows wore identical suits and the movements of their three guitarists were spookily well synchronised. Pertinent question: why were they called the Shadows? Sure, they were Cliff’s original backing group but after he had long flown, they continued to perform as a group, with no-one coming to the fore. Even today, I can’t name a single Shadow – maybe that is my lack of nous? There was much more to the sixties, I suspect, than free love and home-grown mushrooms. However, this was the calm before the storm in the form of the sequinned, psychedelic seventies when young men donned tinsel and giant spectacles in order to look different. That, as they say, is another story.