A blog about television performances from shows like Top Of The Pops that were officially wiped, but survive thanks to off-air recordings made in the days before ownership of video recording devices was commonplace. Quality of the surviving footage may not be great, but the clips are brimming with historical importance.
BREAKING NEWS - it appears that the wiped appearance of Marc Bolan and T.Rex performing New York City on Top Of The Pops in 1975 has surfaced on Youtube in the last few days, originally posted by user videorestore2 under the title 'BBC 2 continuity from 70s'.
The 1960s was the period in which the world of pop music began to split into two separate entities, Pop and Rock. As the decade had progressed, pop had gotten increasingly sophisticated - experimentalism, politics and intellect were all appearing on vinyl. Emerging musicians dispensed with conventional and polite showbiz conventions, and by the dawn of the 70s, the gulf between 'disposable' pop and 'serious' rock was a wide one indeed.
Sometimes, however, the counterculture met showbiz to remarkable effect. In the 1960s, television was fairly conservative, sunday evening programming especially so. In this time slot was a show hosted by Dusty Springfield, who, despite her slightly old-fashioned image, was a deservedly respected and soulful singer. Her show, It Must Be Dusty, featured a variety of acts, one of whom was The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Three songs were performed with the group, including a Jimi/Dusty duet of 'Mockingbird', a hit in 1963 for Charles and Inex Foxx, but typically, the tape of the show was deemed to be unimportant by production comany ATV, and it ended up wiped.
Two recordings made by the public survive. The first was captured from the television screen by means of an 8mm camera. The film is damaged and the whole recording is in poor quality, with only fragments of the duet visuals surviving, but you can just about tell that they've having a great time together.
The second is an audio copy of the performances, in slightly better quality than the 8mm version, although still muddy. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to hear Dusty's blueswailing punctuated by Hendrix's guitar, before the group launches into 'Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), sadly with no Dusty on there. Their duet starts around the 4:15 mark in this video.
Although today's clip is neither off the telly nor technically lost, it's from a film that's very hard to come by in the UK - although available on import, we've never had a videocassette or DVD release, and RBFTP only got to see the whole of 'Smashing Time' after it popped up on a file sharing site.
Its abscence from the release schedules is baffling; although not without flaws, it's a charming time capsule, with a raft of British character actors, some great shots of Carnaby Street and sixties London, and lashings of satire from its writer, switched-on renaissance man George Melly, who knew a few things about youth culture, writing the seminal Revolt Into Style in 1970. It's certainly a whole lot more fun than 'Blow Up'.
The plot concerns two friends from the north played by Lynne Redgrave and Rita Tushingham, who move down to London to experience the capital as it swung. Redgrave's character Yvonne comes into money, and decides to launch a pop career, despite her lack of talent.
After a dialogue with her Austin Powers-esque manager we join her in the studio, recording her first song. Surrounded by musicians with wind instruments, harp, sitar, real-life psych-pop flops Tomorrow and three old woman going 'Ba-ba-ba-ba!', the utter cacaphony, with a few tweaks to the recording studio dials turns into a brassy, driving number, as the screen montages into enthusiastic DJs, pop charts and articles, cash and cases of whisky delivered as bribes as the record spreads all the way to the Queen's radiogram.
Yvonne gets advice from her manager:
"Broaden up your northern accent a bit, remember, you worked in a mill"
Todays clip on RBFTP is another 1960s Top of the Pops apearance. Sandie Shaw was never the strongest of singers compared to contemporaries like Lulu, Dusty or Cilla, but she was probably the most quintessentially sixties pop dolly of the period, plucked for stardom from the assembly line at the Ford factory in Dagenham, after being spotted at a charity concert by Adam Faith. 'Long Live Love' was her second No. 1.
This clip hasn't been 'lost' for decades- it featured in the early 1990s BBC TV series 'Sounds of the Sixties', which rounded up a number of archive performances. It is however, a curious survivor. It isn't the originally televised performance, which like most 60s TOTP clips, was wiped many years ago. Rather, it's the filmed rehearsal which has inexplicably survived.
Being a rehearsal performance, Shaw performs the various stage moves and mimes along, but there's understandably little effort put in, and she looks bored witless. If you didn't bear in mind it was just a run through, you'd think Shaw was a rather more sultry and sullen performer than she normally was, and although the performance wasn't intended for broadcast it's quite interesting how it can distort one's perception of the artist.
Some shots are almost Pythonesque in their bizarreness - the ones of bare patches of studio floor (the non-existant audience 'dancing'), and DJ and presenter Pete Murray looking around the near deserted studio, seemingly baffled, but the set is exactly as you'd want a 60s TOTP set to be, with huge blown up photos of Sandie on the walls, and some light-up prop that looks like it was half-inched from the Blackpool Illuminations.
It's a great clip, but best approached with caution, as it gives a false impression of Ms Shaws real stage persona...
Although Bowie was undoubtedly the master of changes in the 1970s, RCA Records labelmates The Sweet also shifted shapes several times in the same period. With the songwriting and production skills of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, they emerged as a pure bubblegum group in 1971 with their first hit Funny Funny, a lightweight pop confection with a pat-a-cake rythym and insidiuous chorus. More hits followed, but the band were dissatisfied with their recordings - in fact, they were barely recordings of the band as the Chinnichap team used session musicians on the records with the band contributing only vocals, although they were permitted to write and record their own B sides.
The band were finally allowed to play their instruments in 1972 with the release of 'Wig-Wam-Bam', a much heavier single than they had released before. By now they had adopted increasingly glam styling, apparently started by the impossibly laddish bass player Steve Priest, who discovered that using make-up was an effective means to chatting up birds at the BBC make up department.
Despite these , the group finally split from Chinnichap in late 1974, and moved away from pop to a more metal sound, which ended their run of hit singles, although the group maintained a loyal German fanbase.
The two videos here are taken from an episode of the Granada Television pop show 'Lift Off with Ayshea', which was broadcast along with children's programmes at tea time. Presented by Ayshea Borough, who had most notably starred in UFO previously, and was dating Pop Archaeologist favourite Roy Wood around this period.
First up is 'The Six Teens', their penultimate Chinnichap 7", and an uncharacteristic ballad for the band. It's an enjoyable mimed performance.
The second video is more interesting, starting with Ayshea telling the band 'That was super', before a brief interview which mentions singer Brian Connolly's voice (He'd been attacked and punched in the throat earlier in the year), and then the band launch into a track from their Sweet Fanny Adams LP, 'Set Me Free'. It's a thunderous track, way heavier than the single, but what is completely incongruous is when the studio cameras focus on the audience, who are several years younger than the average TOTP crowd. Nevertheless, they clap along gamely, as the credits (in a wonderfully period font) roll.
None of the episode these clips were taken from survives officially; it's believed they were recorded from the television by the group's guitarist, Andy Scott.
In August 2012, a video of a pop performance was leaked to Youtube. Its existence had been known about since 2009, and was eagerly anticipated by fans of the band. However, it was not a new, previously unseen piece of footage of a contemporary star; in fact it had previously been aired on prime time BBC1.
The reason for the excitement was that the footage was of huge importance to pop culture historians. Forming part of an episode of Top of the Pops broadcast in July 1967, it was shown once, and subsequently lost when the tape was wiped by the BBC, a policy distressingly common to many broadcasters until the 1970s, which will probably merit further discussion later in this blog.
The performance is by Pink Floyd, performing their hit single 'See Emily Play'. The importance of this footage is for several reasons - it represents an era of TOTP where any surviving footage is precious; no other performances of the song from this period seem to survive; and any footage of early Pink Floyd featuring the tragic and legendary band founder Syd Barrett is rare due to his short tenure in the group.
There is a very interesting article on the discovery of this performance here from Record Collector magazine. Like much rediscovered footage, it was a surviving home recording - and a very early one at that. In 1967, home video recording in the UK - in fact, anywhere in the world - was virtually unknown. The machine used was made by Sony, who were one of the few companies to market a video recording machine in the mid 1960s, using a half inch reel-to-reel system. It was probably from the Sony CV-2000 series, machines launched in 1965 as the first domestic market video recorders (although most made their way into industrial or institutional use rather than domestic).
The footage is in very poor quality, due to deterioration of the tape - sadly very common with ageing iron oxide magnetic tape recordings. Obscured by a timecode at the top, the tracking of the picture veers wildly and completely disintegrates at one point, and the pitch of the recording is subjects to bursts where it speeds up and almost grinds to a halt, but amidst the deterioration of the tape are short bursts of incredible footage lost to the public and fans for 45 years.
It is undoubtedly a real shame that the footage is in such a state, but the quality that it imbibes it with is summed up very well in the Record Collector article:
"The quality is pretty poor, in places, there are picture drop-outs and the sound wobbles and weaves in and out, but actually, If you look at it, it's like you're picking up pictures from the past."
Like some faded, ghostly broadcast signal that has somehow echoed back across the ether, we can once more tune in to an enormously important performance lost to the public for nearly half a century.
