This is embarrassing...I call myself "Guitar Geek", and yet, right now, I'm getting ready to sit down and listen to The Shadows, really, for the very first time. I've known for ages how important they were to the pre-Beatlemania UK, and in particular, Hank Marvin was the original patent British guitar god who inspired many soon to be guitar gods, including Knopfler, Gilmour, May, etc. He, Bruce Welch, and Jet Harris reportedly had the first Fender guitars to arrive in the UK. And though George Harrison once claimed The Beatles really didn't take much influence from The Shadows, they did have an instrumental early on called Cry For A Shadow, which was a nod toward Hank and the lads.
I think actually I watched a few videos on Youtube like 10 years ago, but I've never owned anything by them. Until now. Rather than wimping out and just buying some CD reissue of the first one or two albums or whatever, I decided to go whole hog and bought something called The Shadows: The Early Years 1959-1966. This purports to give us all of their recordings (not counting the stuff where they backign Cliff Wassisname) from the era noted in the title, including the five songs they recorded as The Drifters before changing their name so they wouldn't get in trouble with the American Drifters (I guess they couldn't just call themselves The Drifters UK, or The English Drifters, eh?).
So what of it? Anyone else here into The Shadows?
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