With the group in temporary abeyance Hank and Bruce worked the famous Soho ‘2i’s coffee bar, incidents much later mocked-up fairly accurately when the Shadows play “Bongo Blues” in a sequence in the ‘Expresso Bongo’ (1959) movie. For this ‘couple of turtle-doves’ there was to be no happy ending. Say it enough times and it’ll connect with the target audience – that ‘pretty girl in skintight jeans’. Teenage love is a wonderful thing they insist to jaunty acoustic strum, ‘when will I find mine?’ ‘Teenage’ is the vital catchall word, the new consumer demographic. Flip the record over and it’s scarcely much better, a solo voice for the verse, with harmonies joining for the chorus. There are tap-tap-tapping bongo’s and squeaky harmonica, a repetitive lyric that goes ‘Jean Dorothy, you know I love you’ – little more, in close harmony with built-in Buddy Holly hiccup, and a ‘la-la-la’ break. Yet despite such mitigation, the record is not very good. As Bruce would relate decades later, they’d not come into the Rock industry, for that did not yet exist. It’s 1958, British Rock ‘n’ Roll was in its infancy. The group got to appear on Jack Good’s BBC-TV show ‘6.5 Special’, and even got to make a record, as the Five Chesternuts – “Jean Dorothy” c/w “Teenage Love”, produced independently at the Phillips studio and then leased to Columbia. With an astute eye for opportunity they hooked up with Pete Chester, drummer son of popular comedian Charlie whose celebrity-connections opened up career-doors that years of gigging would never have done. They didn’t win, they came third, but when the rest of their Railroaders quintet split for home, the duo stayed. But long before them, Brian ‘Hank B Marvin’ Rankin and Bruce Welch (aka Bruce Cripps) descended from their native Newcastle to play a National Skiffle Group competition in London. You think The Animals… or maybe Sting or Bryan Ferry.
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