Dave Clark Five - Everybody Knows

(Columbia, 1967)

You might think it’s silly and confusing to issue two different singles called “Everybody Knows” over the course of your career, but Dr. David Clark and his merry foursome happens to disagree. And so we have the release of “Everybody Knows (We’re Through)” a mere three years after “Everybody Knows (I Still Love You)”. While the songs actually have little in common beyond their titles, I do appreciate the false sense of sequel that the parentheticals lend the proceedings… of course, if one really wants to, it can be imagined that the slow, sappy defeatism of the later song is the sound of the lovelorn narrator of the upbeat original, now older and wiser, simply giving up. It’s a treacly bit of heavily-orchestrated melodrama that prefigures fat Elvis, minus the cheap button-pushing dynamism that makes Presley’s bloated hits guilty pleasures. A failure. Things do go better on the B-side, as the thumping garage soul of “Concentration Baby” – with an urgent keyboard part that’s awfully reminiscent of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” – plays well to the Dave Clark Five’s strengths as an energetic rock ’n’ roll band and shows that the group was making at least tentative steps towards changing with the times. [This is the Danish version of the single; in America, “Inside and Out” appeared as the B.]