Subject: Bass Guitarist of The Shadows Jet Harris dies at 71

Jet Harris, who died on March 18 aged 71, was the original bass guitarist with The Shadows, the backing group that propelled Cliff Richard to fame, but left the band in 1962 and found success as a soloist and as a duettist with the drummer Tony Meehan.


With his blond quiff, chiselled features and heavy-lidded eyes, Harris was considered the best-looking member of The Shadows’ line-up. But he left the group in 1962, having discovered that his first wife, Carol, had had a brief affair with Cliff Richard as the singer’s career was taking off. When the story got into the Sunday papers, Harris started drinking heavily.

Harris had met Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch when they were jamming in the 2 i’s coffee bar in Soho in the mid-1950s. They were all amateur musicians who formed impromptu groups playing country and western music as well as the prevailing fashion — skiffle. Harris joined them in a band called The Vipers, led by Wally Whyton and then the best skiffle group in London. Meehan was brought in as drummer.

In 1958, calling themselves The Drifters, Marvin, Welch and Meehan backed Cliff Richard on a tour of the Midlands. The singer had just released his first single, Move It, and was being promoted as Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley. In October, when the record producer Norrie Paramor booked them to make Cliff’s follow-up single, they added Harris to The Drifters’ line-up.

They cut their first record with Cliff in January 1959 — Livin’ Lovin’ Doll — and a month later released their first single as a group, a vocal number, Feelin’ Fine. In May they recorded their first instrumental, Chinchilla, for the soundtrack of Cliff Richard’s first film, Serious Charge. In July a second instrumental, Jet Black, written by Harris, failed to make the charts.

Later that month, while drinking with Marvin in the Six Bells pub at Ruislip, Harris suggested that the group changed its name to The Shadows to avoid confusion with the American group called The Drifters. They backed Cliff on his first No 1 hit Livin’ Doll, and in July 1960 had their first hit as a group with Apache, an instrumental that also topped the British charts.

Several more hits followed, including FBI, Frightened City and Kon-Tiki (all 1961), and the group continued to back Cliff Richard as his recording career flourished. They also appeared with him in his second feature film, The Young Ones.

In the autumn of 1961, shortly after releasing the group’s debut album, The Shadows, Meehan left the band to be replaced as drummer by Brian Bennett. Harris followed in April 1962, tormented by his wife’s alleged infidelity; and, following the release of another Shadows’ chart-topping hit, Wonderful Land, he signed a contract as a solo artist with the Decca record label, with Jack Good as his new manager.

Harris had a minor hit the following June with Besame Mucho, recorded on his six-string bass guitar, but did better with the title theme to the 1950s Frank Sinatra film The Man With The Golden Arm, which climbed to No 12 that September. The following month The Shadows released a second album, Out Of The Shadows, featuring tracks with Harris on bass guitar, which went to the top of the album charts.

In January 1963 Harris formed a duo with Meehan, knocking The Shadows’ Dance On off the No 1 spot with their single Diamonds. The pair followed this up in May with Scarlett O’Hara, which made No 2, and in September their third single, Applejack, climbed to No 4. The records were distinctive for Harris’s use of the bass as a lead instrument.

But his career faltered when he and his girlfriend, the singer Billie Davis, were involved in a crash in their chauffeur-driven limousine, leaving Harris with serious head injuries.

Not long afterwards Harris stormed out of a television studio where he and Meehan were appearing on Ready, Steady, Go, went home and smashed all his guitars. He turned to drink, his career foundered, and after Applejack he made only three further singles, including Theme For A Fallen Idol (1975). A solo comeback in 1966 failed, and for 30 years he was prey to alcoholism. When his money ran out he took a series of temporary jobs — bus conductor, hospital porter, cockle-picker, bricklayer — to make ends meet.

He gave up drinking in the late 1990s and returned to the music business, touring in Britain, France and Finland with the Marty Wilde Show.

Terence Harris was born on July 6 1939 at Kingsbury, north London, and played bass in the band at his local school. It was there that he earned the nickname “Jet”, for his prowess as a sprinter (his parents treasured hopes of their only child becoming a full-time athlete).

Trained on the clarinet, he abandoned the instrument when his imagination was captured by boogie-woogie pianist Winifred Atwell, and the realisation that her pounding left hand gave a piece its outward shape. “The bass line,” he would say in one of his last interviews, “is what makes a number growl.”

He made his own four-stringed double bass to play in a London jazz group, and was then invited to join Terry Dene’s Dean Aces. Aged 16, he quit his apprenticeship as a welder.

His first gig with The Drifters was at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester. “We couldn’t believe what was happening to us,” Harris recalled. “The women screaming. The adulation was incredible.” After the group had metamorphosed into The Shadows, Harris was dismayed when the neck of his Framus Star was damaged in an accident in his dressing room. But the instrument was quickly replaced by a Fender precision bass, one of the first to be imported into Britain from the United States.

In the early days of their success, while the other members of The Shadows shared digs on Old Compton Street, Soho, Harris rented a basement flat in Belgravia “with a fox in the cellar, a monkey, and a skunk called Sam under my bed. He’d had his stink taken out,” Harris explained.

In a book about The Shadows published in 1983, Harris claimed that his first wife, Carol DaCosta, whom he married in 1959, had had an affair with Cliff Richard in the early days of his success; this had led to Harris’s chronic depression and alcohol addiction.

In his sixties Harris turned to music again, joining a Shadows tribute band called The Rapiers, and performing as a solo act. In 2008 he recorded a CD, The Journey, and the following year, to mark his 70th birthday, his fan club arranged a party. He was upset not to be included in a reunion of Cliff Richard and The Shadows to mark their 50 years in showbusiness.

He was appointed MBE in 2010.

Jet Harris, who had been receiving treatment for cancer, is survived by his third wife, Janet Hemingway, who had been a fan since queuing for his autograph outside Sheffield City Hall in 1962.