One of the fan clubs of 60s electric guitar music - Toronto Shadows Club. The sound equipment that can be seen in photographs from the 60s, the kind on which The Shadows played back then, making a multitude of wonderful hit recordings, covers of which rang out for many years in Polish clubs and on the radio too. Today, to hear them you have to find your way to a fan club or to collectors' record collections.

     The band's music is clean-sounding, rhythmic, melodic, catchy and recognisable by its characteristic sound, supported by echo and reverb effects and by the distinctive, virtuoso lead playing of Hank Marvin. It was mostly played on a Fender Stratocaster, brought over from America specially for him by Cliff Richard. Today that instrument belongs to Bruce Welch.

     The band's music and style have many splendid imitators, yet its lyrical voice, though decisive in sound, does not reach the heights of the model set by current trends. And although Hank Marvin has tucked himself away in Perth, working in the quiet of his own studio and now shunning the big stages, the founder of the band The Shadows, Bruce Welch, still visits fan clubs around the world with his musicians, keeping up the tradition of the sound in the instrumental line-up consistently championed by the band from the very start. And its model of an instrumental line-up - in other styles too: three guitars and drums - still functions today. Only once could they be heard live in Poland - in 1965, in Warsaw.

     Being a committed fan of this music and of the band, I am glad that through fans and friends I have the chance to bring back this musical phenomenon of worldwide scale. In a way I have an insight into the activity of Toronto Shadows Club through my friend - Ryszard Wilk -  Pięciu znad Wisły  - who remains at all times very close to it. I hope that for fans of this music the material from Shadowmania 2006 will be something of a gem, for which

Ryszard !   I thank you very much !!..
     You are lucky enough to be able to talk to the musicians of this cult band, the ones with whom the most beautiful years of youth of the fans of The Shadows were most lastingly inscribed in our memory ...