Video of "Kinda Cool" - Hank on Piano

[donna plasky]

Hi, everybody. I came across this video of "Kinda Cool" from 1965 which features Hank playing the piano. I've seen occasional video clips of Hank playing an upright piano, but this shows him playing a baby grand piano. I couldn't help but find it interesting. It begins at about the 2:00 mark on the video. You might want to fast-forward past the first two minutes.

The third song is Bachelor Boy. Cliff sings what I think are the original lyrics "...have a wife and new child, singing they'll be my turtle dove..." I think somewhere along the line he changed that to "...have a wife and kids..." But I digress, the piano playing is cool.

Kind regards,
Donna

[Didier]

Thanks for letting us discover this interesting video !

Didier

[JimN]

The video is another part of the summer 1965 series of ATV spectaculars featuring Cliff and The Shadows, which appears to be about their oldest complete period of video-recordings in the archives. It seems that the series is slowly being "released" via Youtube - though it would be wonderful to have the complete thing in a DVD box set.

The shows were mainly mimed to commercial recordings (see below), but each hour-long edition did produce at least one or two live performances (and, in one case at least, a mimed performance of an unreleased recording).

Of the three songs in this clip, the first (Beat Out Dat Rhythm On A Drum) is Oscar Hammerstein's lyrical setting of a piece from Bizet's "Carmen", written for use in the updated and uprooted film version: "Carmen Jones". Cliff recorded it for his 1961 LP "Listen To Cliff", and although that song did not feature The Shadows, I'm sure I've read somewhere that Tony Meehan played percussion on it. The movie sequence from "Carmen Jones" featured legendary jazz drummer Max Roach, and it must have been gratifying for Tony to get a chance to record a version.

The sequence with Hank "playing" Kinda Cool was interesting - but wasn't the first time he mimed to it on TV. In the summer of 1962 (nearly fifty years ago now... ), ATV made a half-hour show with The Shadows, and Hank mimed to the same tune going into the commercial break. The video for that 1962 show has been lost, but audio-recordings exist.

Bachelor Boy... that sounds like Bruce's standard lyric-as-written to me: "Then I'll get married have A wife an A child..."!

JN

PS: Must trawl Youtube for more of this.

[donna plasky]

Hello. I am glad you enjoyed the video. And, Jim thank you for the background information. I found two more segments of what appears to be the same TV program. In the first one, the three songs are The Time In Between, My Grandfather's Clock, and Do You Wanna Dance. As before, The Time In Between is a Cliff-only, dance number. At the 3:14 mark, My Grandfather's Clock is interesting. The video is a little blurry, but it appears the Shadows are dressed like toy soldiers and Hank and Bruce are playing acoustic guitars...Hank's might be a 12-string. The third song is an alternate version of Do You Wanna Dance.

The second video has a couple of minor audio glitches. The first song is Little Princess...later on there's Wonderful Land on their Burns guitars. with some trumpet music coming from somewhere, on tape I suppose. I am guessing that miming is boring to do, so John R. seems to have gotten the worst deal out of this. He's got that great powerful bass in his hands and it doesn't appear to be plugged in.

Kind regards,
Donna

[negninegaw]

Thanks for posting, very informative!
For a while I have been trying to play 'Stand up and say that';
right hand part is clear to me, however, I don't know what Hank played with his left.
When I look at this video, during the verses his left hand is not really playing difficult
'boogie-woogie, probably just octaves, in the knowledge that there is also the bass guitar part.
Anyone knows if the same applies to SUandST ?
(I have seen the vid of Cliff Hall, he might do more 'boogie' with his left hand, maybe even Jet's bass part of the original?)