Shadows Music in the Far East – Manila

[abstamaria]

I thought I might show in this new thread what The Shadows were and continue to be here in my hometown, so far removed from England. I hope that this will encourage some of the local fans here to contribute and that this will be interesting to those of you in Europe, the US, and elsewhere, particularly if you have never been to the Far East – an unlikely place perhaps for Shadows music.

I will start with this vintage photograph, taken in the 1960s, of a local teenage band called the “Whiffenpoofs.” We used to refer to bands as "combos" in the eraly 1960s, but am not sure quite why. My cousin Bob, shown with the Stratocaster, played lead and eventually went on to play jazz guitar professionally in the US. The bass guitarist is my good friend Harry, who just wrote me to say:

“Three AC30VOX amps for instruments. Vox had a bass amp 2 x 12 also. We also had 2 Fender strats and a Fender jazz bass - all candy apple red; too bad kodakcolor was not available yet then. The electric organ was a red Farfisa made in Italy. The Fender twin reverb was used for vocals plugged in with 2 Becker mikes.”

Whiffenpoofs.jpg

(212.09 KiB) Downloaded 946 times

Note that in those days guitarists stood behind the amps and that the bass guitar is indeed plugged into a Vox. Harry said it was so marked (as a bass amp) by Vox. It wasn’t very powerful, he recalls. They got candy-apple red guitars, because they thought that was what the Shadows used! Information and color photographs were hard to come by in the early 1960s.

The drummer in the photo, Red, plays with us still and is shown in the video below of one of our shows the other year. (I posted the link before, so many of you would have seen it). Note that Red has lost all his hair since!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU4DfWQBiUo

I have posted this in all the Shadows sites I am a member of, as I didn’t want to miss anyone, and so apologize for the duplication.

Regards from sunny Manila,

Andy