The Drifters on British TV 1985

This  is to let readers know that youtube currently has what appears to be the complete version of a Drifters appearance on TV in the UK in 1985 in which Ben E King is guesting with Johnny Moore's group.

Some clips from the show have surfaced before but this is the first time I've seen the whole thing so catch it while you can, especially as the technical quality seems better than I've seen elsewhere and King's six minute showcase is sheer joy: he's in pretty good voice and should he feel in some secret area of his heart that he is slumming it by doing such a gig no sign can be found in a performance which radiates warmth and vigour.

Marv Goldberg has said that King regularly joined the group on British tours between 1982 and 1985, and I happened to catch this particular combination, or reuniting, of the group around the same time as this broadcast. It was at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow - and the programme, recorded in Manchester for Granada TV, confirms my memory of that gig: that King, at least, was magical, though the rest of the group seemed somewhat battle-hardened, or at least cabaret-optimised.

The TV show, called The International Entertainers, was broadcast on Monday 15th April 1985 at 11.45pm (in the South East though there may have been regional variations). Two directors are credited, which makes it seem likely that costar Beatrice Reading's segment was self-contained; she doesn't appear with the group in what has been uploaded to youtube. Which is a pity: I saw Beatrice Reading at the same Glasgow theatre during that period, providing a much-needed livener in a hitherto rather staid tribute to Louis Armstrong: when she was onstage it felt like the spirit of the great man had descended on us at long last.

It isn't clear who directed which half of The International Entertainers although it's interesting to see that one of them is David Liddiment, a major figure in British television. The producer was Johnny Hamp, known for early TV appearances by the Beatles and for being the man behind the shows The Comedians - in which the acts of UK comics were edited together, giving the impression of a single continuous jokefest - and The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a studio mock-up of a working man's club which featured a wide variety of guests including Bill Haley and Roy Orbison, reflecting the fact that by the late sixties the best of such clubs could afford to book international acts - Louis Armstrong famously appeared at the Batley Variety Club in Yorkshire.

Which makes it likely that what we are seeing on youtube is a studio recreation of a cabaret gig - though thankfully Colin Crompton, who played the officious Club Chairman in Wheeltappers, is nowhere to be seen or heard, and the setting does look quite authentic, the audience seated at tables with little red shaded lamps.

The Drifter are backed by a reasonably sized band, presumably their regular touring musicians at the time; I think I recognise the MD from the Glasgow gig, a man whose bouncy enthusiasm the night I saw them live found no discernable answering emotion on the face of at least one saxophonist. But the musicians are in the background on the TV show so what they thought on the night they were immortalised must remain a mystery.


Moore takes the first lead on TV - Hello Happiness, also the opening number in Glasgow. At this point Ben E King is effectively just another Drifter, doing all the movements and harmonies. Given what I've read about him, in Gerri Hershey's Nowhere to Run and the like, he may have been happy and grateful simply to be making a living at that point but it's still mildly distressing to watch; you want to reassure him: "on the horizon..." but he'd probably assume that was just a request from a lone Leiber and Stoller nut.

So this programme is historically important, after a fashion, capturing King the moment before he was to be propelled back to solo stardom with the film which bore the title of his most famous song. In Hershey's highly recommended book, for which he and other soul singers were interviewed around this time, King talks of playing hotel ballrooms and dinner theatres, stressing he is making a nice living and can't complain, talking only of "adjustments" - although his frustration seems pretty clear:

I find them [the audience] very, very hard to reach. Even as many times as I've played it, I still stand in the wings sometimes, and I look out at the audience for a while. They're like forty and fifty and sixty, and the drummer can't get but so loud. And the bass can't get funky. If I say 'funky' to them, I have to explain why I'm doing this.

But none of that is apparent in the programme. After a newer Drifter, Clyde Brown, takes the lead on When My Little Girl Is Smiling, Ben E King gets his own spot: with the others backing him, he sings Amor (good choice for a cabaret gig; the others have maracas etc), Spanish Harlem (with some nice brass) and Stand By Me.

What's interesting to see is that the Drifters are properly incorporated into what is really King's solo feature: instead of backing vocals being a fairly small part of the studio recording of Stand By Me, Johnny Moore and the others repeat the title in classic Drifters fashion, suggesting how the song might have sounded had George Treadwell not rejected it for the group at the time.

King then hands the mike back to Johnny Moore, who launches into There Goes My First Love, one of the Drifters' seventies hits (written by Barry Mason and Roger Greenaway), seguing smoothly into Saturday Night at the Movies from their Atlantic period, though the latter seems to be taken at a faster lick than the recording.

The tempo is slowed down for Like Sister and Brother, the one song in the set which really owes nothing to their classic fifties and sixties recordings, given an impassioned rendering here by Clyde Brown: for a moment we could be listening to any one of a number of mid seventies soul groups. There is, I suppose, a momentary nod to the typical doo wop signing-off style at the end of the song, with each voice chiming in, but in this nostalgiac context Brown seems to be delivering a message from from the future.

Throughout the show Johnny Moore has been performing his songs at a rate of knots, which is why I used the term battle-hardened earlier, and to be fair it's what the audience seem to like. But perhaps they were momentarily stunned by the quality of what they had just witnessed, because when Moore reclaims the mike to go into one of their biggest seventies UK hits, Kissing in the Back Row of the Movies (a reconjuring of Saturday Night at the Movies), when he pauses during the intro he is forced, somewhat embarrassingly, to solicit the applause which didn't automatically come, as can be seen in the videocap below. (Couldn't they have gone in for a tighter shot?)

But the audience do go bananas at the end, and Moore's high notes at the song's climax more than justifies the reaction.

And that's it: they bow, applaud the audience, wave and go off, another crowd thoroughly entertained, and Ben E King soon moves into a different realm. Here's the show:



Oh, one final detail before we close this meeting. In Nowhere to Run Ben E King rhapsodises about his time singing in groups on New York street corners, rhapsodising about the sense of closeness, the  understanding, going so far as to say he values those years more than the fame.

But there is perhaps a hint of connection even in this televised gig, which may help to explain why Ben E King made those regular treks to England. If you listen closely enough to the beginning of Stand By Me you will hear an appreciative "Yeah!" from another group member. If that was Johnny Moore, then maybe that's all that needs to be said. As Ben E King summed up the streetcorner experience: "You never felt alone, is all."