vox & the shadows
HANK ON HOW SCREAMING CROWDS GAVE RISE TO THE AC30…
Did you choose Vox or vice versa? “We did a gig with the John Barry Seven and I’m pretty sure that Vic Flick had a Vox amp. So somehow we managed to obtain Vox amps; whether Cliff’s management got onto them I don’t know, but we got some AC15s which we started using. They were way better than the little Cornflake packet of a Selmer I had been using, but with the amount of screaming for Cliff we couldn’t hear ourselves on stage. I spoke to Dick Denney and asked him if it was possible to make the amps twice as loud; I said, ‘Can’t you put two of these together?’ and he said, ‘It doesn’t quite work like that!’
“He went off and a little while later we had a call saying that he’d designed this new amplifier, an AC30, which was quite a lot louder than the AC15. So they knocked us up a couple and we started using those.”
Did you have to have them flat out? “From memory the amp was never flat out because it would start to distort which, at that time, was not a sound that was considered pleasing to the ear. I would just set up my amp for the sound I was trying to achieve, which was a clear sound with a bit of guts in it. If you listen to Man Of Mystery and a couple of the others you can hear a little bit of distortion in the amp. I didn’t always have the guitar full on, sometimes I’d back it off just a touch.”
What was Vox like to deal with? “They were always on the case and Tom [Jennings] was very hands-on with us, as was Dick Denney. Once we started having all that success with Cliff and Apache and the subsequent records took off, everyone seemed to be interested in having the equipment that we were using, such as Fender guitars and Vox amps – and I can understand that.
“But they were definitely ready to oblige. We found that on stage, if the amps were on the floor, depending on the venue, you could get a bit more bottom end out of the amp, but also it was harder to hear them. So we ended up putting them on chairs so we could hear them and that led to us speaking to Tom – ‘Any chance of making a stand?’ and that’s when those chrome stands came out, which I think The Beatles had as well.”
Were the amps voiced specially for you? “As far as I know they were just absolutely standard amps and it was a question of fiddling with the tone controls until I got the sound I was trying to achieve and that was it, really. I think, in those days, they didn’t think of those things.”
What did you think of the later Top Boost variants of the AC30? “They said, ‘Hey, look we’ve got a little improvement on the amp, it’s a Top Boost – you can get more top with it.’ They brought them along and we tried them out and it just gave a little extra sparkle, but it was a dangerous knob because you could make it absolutely ear-splitting. I think you had to be quite discerning about it and not overcook the Top Boost.”
Did you set your amps up differently when you were in the studio? “Again, I just used to set the volume to sound good to my ears. That’s all I did, but Norrie [Paramor – The Shadows’ and Cliff’s producer] went to the USA at some point and he was doing some research while he was over there and he went to quite a few recording sessions. He came back and said he was surprised by how quietly the session musicians were playing in the studio. I remember after that we talked about it and we decided to back off a little bit in volume in the studio, to see if it would improve things.
“Bearing in mind that we all recorded together and the only thing separating the amplifiers was a baffle board about four feet high in between. Separation was not easy, and I guess the louder you play, the less separation you’re going to achieve. So that was one of the advantages of laying back a little bit. As I say, with some of the stuff, I can hear it on the records, where there’s just a hint of distortion beginning to happen.”
You told us recently that you’ve now come full circle and used Vox amps on your latest record. “I have used them before on the previous album, Hank, and when we did the reunion album [Cliff Richard And The Shadows Reunited, 2009] and we did all those Cliff and the Shads things, I used Vox on that. I had someone look at the Vox just a couple of weeks ago and he couldn’t find anything wrong with it; it was working perfectly.”