A solitary version survives, one with a spoken introduction from Cliff Richard, the other without. It is not known whether the latter, as it is circulated today, is a fan-edited version of the former, or represents a re-broadcast shorn of its preamble — an uncertainty that applies to a number of the tracks involving group or group plus singer.
Cliff, in his usual chirpy manner, talks of Bruce’s aching feet/wrists and goes on to state that, since Bruce has aching wrists then he, Cliff (as ‘yours truly’) is playing rhythm guitar on this recording: close listening suggests that he was not backward either, and his contribution seems steady and controlled — not that he is called upon to put on a complete performance. For whatever reason, this is an abridged version, omitting the passage extending from 1:29 to 1:58 in the standard recording; there is also a closed ending. So far as can be discerned in the absence of total clarity, it is pretty faithful to the original (as indeed one might expect given Cliff's involvement), and certainly does not exhibit the slight differences of phrasing and emphasis in evidence in a well-preserved example of the number performed on BBC’s ‘Saturday Club’ in the course of 1960.
The first series of ‘Me And My Shadows’ ran from 3 July to 25 September 1960, material being recorded it appears over the months of May, June and July. We know for sure that APACHE figured in the penultimate show (see QUATERMASSTER'S STORES), but as the tune was recorded on 17 June, entered the charts on 21 July, and was in the Top 20 for a fifteen week period beginning from 28 July, topping the charts for five consecutive weeks, it must surely have been featured in the series before then, probably well before then: BBC radio had one airing on 9 July and three in August. At the same time, it is hard, indeed impossible to believe that, with such a prestigious number, a Bruceless, truncated version served for all, but it is a mark of the haziness of the surviving material that we cannot place it in any kind of firm context.
The final show of the very last series, broadcast on 31 March 1963, featured APACHE. It is impossible to say whether this was the shortened ‘Cliff’ version, an prior or a later version that did include Bruce, or even the standard A-Single, given that in the later stages of the Luxembourg run studio recordings appeared to be called upon increasingly.