Also in the studio that week were Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas and The Honeycombs. Jimmy Saville was the host.ĥ August 1964. Also in the studio that week were Dusty Springfield, The Barron Knights, The Merseybeats and The Searchers. Also in the studio that week were Dusty Springfield, The Barron Knights, The Nashville Teens and The Rolling Stones.
Manfred Mann performed Do Wah Diddy Diddy on Top of the Pops on five occasions ġ5 July 1964.
« THE BEATLES – “A Hard Day’s Night” THE HONEYCOMBS – “Have I The Right?” » Comments This and the next two number ones serve as experiments – how basic can this new music get and still work? What can it get away with? Not this, I’m saying. Glam rock harnessed it best but it’s there stirring under “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” – maybe it’s just that awful studied rocker’s voice that limits it. There’s a quality of audacious dumbness some songs have, something brazen and divisive which makes you feel like you’re in on a joke (that turns out not to be a joke at all). It’s hard to work out exactly what it’s aiming at – throaty rock’n’roll? crossover bubblegum? It lands somewhere uncomfortable and irritating in the middle, as things turn out.īut it almost works – it’s nearly stupid enough. It’s a strange combination of baby-talk lyrics and horribly exaggerated R’n’B singing, with a guitar part that sounds like it’s being played on elastic bands and a call-and-response part straight out of a primary school assembly. “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” is an enduring ‘golden oldie’ and I assume a lot of people are deeply fond of it, which seems odd to me because it’s awful. There’s so much happening in pop at this point that some records end up nudging into the canon almost by accident – they were just in the right place at the right time and got caught up in the general magic of things.