Kicking off the week with instrumental legends The Shadows, who were the mainstays and pillars of Rock in the UK from the early 1960's on. Strangely, they were huge in Europe and Japan, but not very well known here in the U.S. Not really a lot of good reasons as to why, but the suspicion is, The Shadows came along at a time when Surf was just getting going in the U.S. and bands like The Ventures, The Challengers, The Tornadoes, The Marketts, Dick Dale and The Deltones and a flood of others dominated the airwaves and left little room for imports, no matter how good they were.

So a lot of good and memorable material went mostly unnoticed over here, and only lately has it been re-examined and re-discovered by collectors.

Tonight it's their 1964 single, which was a hit in the UK and issued here in the U.S. on Atlantic without much success, The Rise And Fall Of Flingel Bunt.

Here's what you might have missed the first time around, unless you weren't around, and then it's something you might not be familiar with.

Les Fantomes were France's answer to Britain's Shadows or America's Ventures, with a liberal sprinkling of Sweden's Jorgen "Apache" Ingmann for good measure. They were, between the years 1961 and 1964, the biggest thing to hit the French charts in a long time and were the epitome of Twang Francaise.

Although they made no dent here or in the UK, they released a string of ep's and albums before their eventual breakup. Tonight it's a track off an ep culled from their "Big Sound Guitars" album for Disques Vogue in Paris. Cafard isn't high voltage and doesn't move along at a quasi-frantic surf pace. It's a slow, broody number recorded in 1962 right around their peak in popularity.

For all intents and purposes, the popular success of Les Fantomes spawned a whole genre of French Twang instrumental bands, before jamming on the brakes and facing the British Invasion and re-invention.

Twangy guitars were big stuff in Europe, and everywhere else it seemed in the early 60's.