Malcolm Campbell talks to ShadowsFanSite about the updated and illustrated "Guide To The Shadows And Hank Marvin On CD"

The first edition of the CD Guide appeared in 1999. Why a new edition, and why now?

The Guide was privately produced and funded, and so a limited number were printed. Stocks ran out in 2003, and since then I have had a stream of e-mails and letters from purchasers of the EMI and Polydor books asking for copies of the Guide. But of course I could do nothing to help. Also, we are now five years further on, and CDs from The Shadows, and from Cliff & The Shadows, have continued to appear worldwide.

To my mind researching the recorded output of The Shadows must be a monumental task………What goes into producing such a book? 

It is pretty time-consuming, not least because so much has to be put on hold awaiting solutions as the book is being put together. The point is, Caroline, that there are lots of problems with the discographies of The Shadows and related acts, both because there is so much product, and because details like release dates etc. are often hard to pin down. But as you will see from the Preface, we have received a lot of help from experts in the field, who have generously devoted time and effort in an attempt to sort out the many difficulties. Also, and just as time-consuming, we soon realised that there was still a lot to do in the field of alternative versions. On one occasion Les and I listened on headphones to over 60 CD versions of Wonderful Land in a row. Mad? Maybe, but we found what we were looking for, something that nobody had noticed before. And that is just one example. We have been through a lot of vinyl product as well (for example, Japanese LPs of the 60s) looking for possible sources for what has turned up on CD.

The book runs to 576 pages. So is it just bigger?

No, not at all! There are many new features: for example, it has well over 400 dazzling colour images of CD product on high quality paper, and there is also much more information on alternative versions, some of them newly discovered. This time I have a co-author, Shadows expert Les Woosey, and we have considered together everything in the book to obtain maximum accuracy and wide coverage.

Is the new book bang up to date ie to The Shadows 2004 Tour?

Yes it is, up to the very end of 2004. The Final Tour double CD is in there, fully documented. In fact, that was one reason why the book didn’t come out a bit sooner, we wanted the Tour stuff in. It was also good to be able to include the three 2004 releases masterminded by Rob Bradford, the Greatest Hits/More Hits/Singles Collection.

The new book is illustrated once more: have you used the same photographers as with the previous book?

Yes, John Humphrey and David Hawley, together with Angélique von Söhsten from Holland, kindly supplied some colour tour pics. They look fantastic too. But of course the main point of the book is to let everybody see what (legal) CD product has come out worldwide over the years. It’s all there, some of now extremely rare, and there is a lot of striking and unusual artwork to drool over!

Do you just include recorded output or is there mention of DVD/video which are available commercially?

No, just CD. We toyed with the idea, but the problem was that the book was already running to 576 pages. I hope at some point to put a DVD/video supplement on the Website, together with regular updates of CDs from 2005 on as they occur. By way of consolation here, the most important Shadows DVD by far is the Final Tour one, and you can hear that on CD anyway.

But won’t keen collectors have all these alternative versions of Shadows and Cliff tracks anyway?

Conceivably, but only if they have a very substantial collection of CDs. As I have said, there are a fair number of variants that nobody appears to have noticed, some deliberate, some eccentric, some the result of pure carelessness or incompetence. We really did put a lot of effort into combing every release for anything out of the ordinary, and we found quite a lot! There is even an Apache variation which is in none of the books or magazines. And we actually had to devise a new term for one species of manipulation, which did not fit into conventional classifications!

Anything else?

The Discographies will allow you to see, year by year and month by month, precisely how and when each release was made available, including every variant version and every ‘first stereo’ issue. And there are pics too of flexidiscs, rare EPs and other goodies!

Would Cliff Richard fans want to obtain a copy of this book?

Well, there are things here that they won’t find elsewhere. The book has lots of information on the classic recordings Cliff made with The Drifters/Shadows in the 1960s. Every number they did together is included, and there is information on session dates, on personnel, on the many alternative versions (again, some properly described for the first time), and last but not least there are recommendations about the best CDs to find these tracks on. Some CDs are definitely better than others, and some are best avoided altogether!

So what will your next book be… (perhaps one concentrating solely on Hank Marvin or another interesting one would be one about Brian Bennett - both who have of course released a fair few albums)

Well, Caroline, the next book, which Rob Bradford will be coming in on, I am delighted to say, will be a Pocket Guide to ShadowMusic, a bit more compact than A5, with about 200-250 pages, designed to fit snugly into an anorak pocket! It will be like a complete set of liner notes on absolutely everything The Shadows have recorded, track by track through the years, with a few other goodies thrown in for good measure. Many of the tracks have never ever attracted comment before. There is a lot of info scattered all over the place which can be brought together, and also quite a fair bit of background detail that does not seem to have been looked into at all. You can count on plenty of interest and not a little in the way of controversy as well! Watch this space!