The thinking behind 'Receiving broadcasts from the past'/Pink Floyd perform 'See Emily Play' on Top of the Pops, July 1967

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).

Via Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation.

Via www.rewindmuseum.com

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.