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OGWT live from Snoresville

by 99 Comments

Dull live music, dry respectful old heads and the atmosphere of a morgue

Try this for a better time – contains added Ellen

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  2. Maybe I should join them in the morgue, then.
    I’m enjoying it a lot.
    Peter Frampton looks nothing like he used to, but he looks fantastic. He looks remarkably like what I would expect Chris Martin to look like in another 25 years.

        • The first song was accompanied by an acoustic guitar and the second was with an electric.
          When you say “a sherry” is that a whole bottle of Cockburn?
          Anne Nightingale sounds even more ridiculous now we can hear her original voice and her adopted Cockerneee Geeezer Gal accent contrasted.

              • When did the change from Grammar School/trying to impress a debutante from the Guinness family accent (i.e. the real voice … see John Peel, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Brian Jones … a.k.a. the bit I like) to sounding like a dustman on the Isle of Dogs accent (a.k.a. the start of the bit I think is shite) actually take hold?

                Serious question.

                Did it happen at different times to different people?

                Would Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix have succumbed to it if they’d lived longer?

                I think the cockernee Jagger was pretty much in place by 1970.

  4. Faces and indeed voices best suited to radio and print. I particularly enjoy Hepworth’s off camera grunts and harumphs of affirmation, a man in constant anticipation of his next cue to addressing the audience at home.

    The ordinariness feels forced but then again I see my own constant slight and awkward moments in life when trying to convey something approaching love and reverence of the music that moves me to distraction in the reflected lens of their studio spotlight.

    Men talking anecdotally and animatedly about music while sober is a dying art.

  5. Oh do behave, I’m having a ball with this. Of course it’s reverential and self congratulatory but there’s a whole lot of memories here. You’d have to be a right curmudgeon to not smile at the old Trampled Underfoot video (and like Danny Baker I had no idea that Philip Jenkinson used to find and chose those old films).

    https://vimeo.com/65539679

  8. I see Annie Nightingale has tweeted her displeasure at not being invited to copresent with Bob Harris. Fair enough I suppose, although I still can’t quite forgive her for asking Paul Simon if he found it difficult writing songs on his own now he had split up from Art Garfunkel…

  11. Must admit, much as I am enjoying this, I can imagine my daughters watching it with the same baffled air I might have at my parents watching, say, the Black and White Minstrel Show.

  13. I’m watching it on catch up and it is indeed a bizarre Harrisocentric view. But I did enjoy Wildfire Kin. If that was what they were called. Too many talking heads of inconsequence otherwise.
    Hah! As I watch, Albert Lee, guitarist of merit, plays the piano……
    (Quite nicely actch.)

      • Of course. No point in Albert being there if he’s not going to play guitar. He’s a good pianist and a good singer too.
        In fine fettle for a 74-year-old.
        Talented bastard…

    • Wildwood Kin @retropath2 – from Exeter. I first saw them a few years ago at a tiny outdoor gig supporting Steve Knightley and they were ok, but have really come on. Played on Seth Lakeman’s last record, and their own album is terrific – not what I expected at all to be honest.

  14. It’s great to see Liverpools finest, Rob Vincent, on national tv- about bloody time. He’s terrific. But having a 40 year old British Americana artist as the final act on the show, representing bright young new talent, perhaps tells rather a lot how The Whistle Test was in Bob’s era….

    • Yep. Though there was a wide cross-section of yer beat music covered by the OGWT, back then, the bars of the bar chart labelled “Americana” and “singer-songwriters” would have been disproportionately large, surely influenced thus by Whispering Bob. In that sense, I guess tonight’s soecial was authentic. Sadly.

      • Strewth, I thought you meant ROBBIE Vincent.
        I have a sizable collection of soul music and ALL of it is due to Robbie Vincent.
        If he said he liked it, I ran a mile.

        • There’s something very Alan Partridge about this (possibly self penned) final sentence on his Wikipedia entry

          ‘On 29 November 2013 Robbie Vincent announced his decision to leave Jazz FM and was denied a final farewell show on the station following his announcement.’

          This is Rob Vincent. His next live dates are as support act on Beth Nielsen Chapman’s tour

  16. I was rather expecting this to be The Bob Harris Show featuring Bob’s favoured artists and some other talking heads.
    The Industry Of Bob is quite a big concern these days.
    Dunno if I care to watch it, really.

        • Yes.
          Not a Bob fan by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s not that terrible. I find him easy enough to avoid without losing my rag.
          And anyone who manages to carve themselves such a safe and rewarding niche in the world of radio and the music biz in general cannot be described as stupid.

  19. As someone who was born after Old Grey Whistle Test began, my version of the show is Whistle Test. Ellen, Hepworth et al were my crew. I would be much older before I found out who Bob Harris was. I remember Whistle Test showing the Strawberry Fieds Forever (maybe on the 20th anniversary in Feb 87? Not sure) and it blew my tiny mind.

    So last night’s show was pleasant to have on for three hours while I tried to figure out Tom Petty songs on a 12-sting guitar, but it was the Bob Harris show, and he only hosted half of OGWT’s run, and even then he disliked a chunk of the bands passing through.

    Some more thoughts:
    – Gary Numan’s a nice man.
    – Dave Stewart is a preposterous man, but he knows where the party’s at. Ridiculous and full of money, **louis walsh voice** I like him!
    – Richard Thompson was very nervous in his interview, I thought, was that because he was pre-performance?
    – I like seeing Ian Anderson’s point about being afraid with no plan b. The rock history books always get written by the victors where success is assured, but no one talks about the fear.
    – Kiki Dee is 70
    – There shouldn’t have been an audience
    – If Queen hadn’t been successful, Bob wouldn’t have liked them
    – Only one archive performance. Is there a different rights issue when you only show 5 seconds of a song? I know there are many clip shows which rely on OGWT. Can we repeat some shows in their entirety? Give them some context? Like TOTP on BBC4? Or would that ruin the brand: “hey, chunks of this show are quite boring, and it appears The Wailers were not on every week.”

    • Famously, Bob was dismissive of Roxy Music.

      I have a box set of clips. They are complete performances but the presenters still intrude and spoil it for me.

      I am old enough for the Old Grey bit. It was largely tiresome with the occasional bit of excitement, such as Little Feat, The Wailers, Roxy Music. I, personally, think peak was the punk/new wave era with Nightingale. Awful, awful presentation, but those kids blew the lens off the camera. The show could barely cope with it all, trying to maintain its mature, sensible, slightly condescending shtick as the likes of John McKay ripped his fingers on his guitar strings. Marvellous.

        • Indeed. A fresh look at the archive would be interesting. The same old fogeys choose the same old same old. Get somebody new in, a youngster with some enthusiasm for old stuff (I met one the other day, mad keen on Jimi who died well before he was born). I bet there’s loads like this Can clip that would encourage me to spend a few quid.

      • I used to love the Old Grey Whistle Test, always the full name for me. And ror once I found myself agreeing with Danny Baker, when he described the success being based on all the teenage boys watching it alone, late at night, all convinced that they alone were watching it and that it was entirely made for them. A sight of some of those split second clips took me right back to memories of when and where I watched them first the around. I think I will rewatch some of my OGWT box sets again.

    • RT always comes across as nervous, and has a slight stammer. TBH I think he now deliberately milks it a little, to help maintain his self-effacing image. (Having said he is usually more than happy to chat at signing tables and the like, and comes across in exactly the same way.)

      • I wonder – truly – how that self-effacing thing will come across in his memoir. I’m surprised there was an auction/bidding war for it. His literary agent (or his co-writer’s agent) must have seriously bigged-up the project in a way that convinced publishers there was something there capable of appealing beyond the pure Thompo audience.

        Limiting the book to exploring the now mythical end of the swinging 60s – as the PR stuff suggests – will have helped. No one on Earth wants to read about Thompo playing an arts centre in Neadsen in 1985 and releasing another critically acclaimed album that the same 20,000 people bought.

        • I admit I like RT and have seen him more times than anyone else. But that is only because Roddy Frame and the Undertones stopped touring and he has carried on.
          So maybe I am more interested than most, but I think he has quite an interesting story. Fairport, 60s, Folk rock, the doomed (Sandy and Nick), converting to Islam, scandal divorce, expat life in LA, and critical acclaim but low sales. Bit more than the usual (we were 4 lads from Billingham and we took all the drugs). Bet he remembers more than Keef.

          That said I don’t read many autobiographies. (I still haven’t read Grant and I and I bloody loved the Go-between)

          • The Undertones haven’t stopped touring. I saw them in December in Dublin and they were brilliant. I could watch the O’Neill brothers forever – so underrated! To be honest I prefer the Paul Mcloone fronted Undertones to the Fearghal Sharkey incarnation.

          • For anyone who loved/loves the Go-Betweens, “Grant and I” is absolutely essential. By the end of the book, you feel as if you know Forster, and knew McLennan. Terrific.

  20. Oh YouTube, so full of excellent content. The last OGWT was a special episode that brought in the new year of 1988. What better way to celebrate the upcoming year of Acid House than with a live OB at a Gary Glitter gig:

  22. I thought it was excruciatingly dull – tedious reminiscing, mostly z-list guests and no pace or life in it whatsoever. Massively disappointing. One of the few people on the studio couch who said something meaningful was Danny Baker, about the whole precious feel of discovering OGWT back in 1971 as a 14 year old. Unfortunately the live programme then completely failed to either capture or convey any of that magic. They’d have been better scouring their archives to come up with three hours of footage that they haven’t shown already ad infinitum. It made me feel embarrased to have ever sung it praises to people younger than me who never saw it in its prime.

    • I’m yet to see Friday’s effort, but thought it worth reminding ourselves just how little “pop” music there was on TV in the 3-channel, pre-videotape 1970s – basically TOTP, OGWT, and er, that’s it… however staid & stilted it may seem in retrospect & re-watches, it was pretty much the only game in town for any UK music fan at the time, and seized upon accordingly… the everything-instantly-on-demand/YouTube/iTunes/Spotify generation will never quite understand what it was like back then…

      … and bugger, I feel old…

  23. Which is kind of what Danny Baker was saying. It’s just that the whole of Friday’s effort singularly failed to live up to this sense of wonderment. It was embarrassingly poor, with a kind of under-rehearsed chat formula last seen on The Word. I think part of the problem with it having a live element is that Later now does the whole band-in-the-studio thing, and does it well. Which didn’t leave them with much, except Bob and a series of talking, nodding heads. Like old blokes at the bowling green recalling past times.

    • They should have featured a group of hairy hippies passing a bong around and talking stoned bollox, for the authentic OGWT-watching atmosphere. A bit like that kitchen sequence in “Human Traffic” but much, much mellower.

  26. As an old-time OGWT fan, I enjoyed it. Back in the day, you never knew what you were going to get on the OGWT and Friday’s show was no exception. I thought Gary Newman was excellent, Kiki Dee and her talented guitarist phenomenally good and Rob Vincent brilliant (this was the first time I had heard him!). Richard Thompson was also excellent. I’ve never liked John Otway (a talentless sensation-seeker) and don’t really know why he was given airtime over more influential artists.

    The old clips were pretty decent but I think listeners here have probably seen them too often previously so that many now appear to lack ‘sustained dramatic interest’. A new OGWT viewer would probably love most on offer.

    The sofa surfers were, in the main, good value, particularly Danny Baker. The filmed contributors were mostly excellent. I have loads of time for Andy Kershaw, but I’m afraid Anne Nightingale leaves me cold. I actually stopped watching the OGWT when she started to present it, mostly because I didn’t like punk and was out of the country a lot. To me, Whispering Bob’s the best presenter by far.

    I loved the piece about marrying film archive to ‘new’ music. That’s the subject for a whole new episode right there.

    All in all, it was nice to see the OGWT back. Danny Baker got the context of the programme bang on. There was nothing else like it on telly at the time (3 channels only!) and we stayed up to watch it. It was educational and you rarely liked everything that appeared – the real highlight was live music by acts you rarely got to see. When Bob was in the chair, I certainly looked forward to it and it was the topic of much discussion at school or college the next day.

    I’d watch the OGWT now if they brought it back!

      • Hey, totes off-topic, but talking of Otway – “talentless attention seeker” he may be, but he wrote Geneva (or Geneve as the record sleeve calls it) which is stupendously brilliant. Anyway, I’ve just been learning meself to play it this week. “Researching” how to learn it, I came across this jolly nifty site, which I didn’t know about before, that lets crap guitarists like moi play along at the right moment:

        https://play.riffstation.com/chords-tabs/john-otway-geneva-with-an-orchestra/2u1uiSzUG4A

        Well useful.

        • Spoke to Otway after a showing of his film. Noticing he was left handed I asked about his guitar. “That’s why I have the twin neck, you can play it left or right handed”
          Does that help I asked
          “No I’m crap both ways”
          Anyone who at the premiere of the film in Leicester Square has the entrance filmed and grafted on to the end of the film as it is showing is fine by me.
          Also the interview showed the OGWT effect from 20 people in a pub, to queues round the block.
          I have the OGWT clip flip book too to relive that moment.

  27. Thought the Otway sequence was about the best thing on there, and he looked suitably deranged when interviewed in the present. Nothing can convince me that Garry Numan is anything other than a fifth-rate Bowie copyist and his whole Middle Eastern sackloth look was pitiful. What’s the deal with Kiki Dee? Am I missing something?

    • I thought it was funny the way she regarded moving from guest spots on The Two Ronnies (20 million viewers) and Benny Hill (50 million viewers) to the midnight BBC 2 ghetto as promotion, just like it was fine touring with The Queen Mum at the point in his career when about 20% of all records sold had his name on, but it’s so much better now gigging in sheds to an audience of moany “Streets Of London” types who loudly grumble anytime you start up something from after 1976..

  28. Wasn’t sure where to post this, so here will do.

    I used to quite enjoy “Johnnie Walker’s Long Players” on Radio 2 with David Hepworth but the latest, and hopefully last, series has been appalling.
    The last episode deals with “City to City” by Gerry Rafferty and “Spirits Having Flown” (eh?) by The Bee Gees … the whole of recorded music and you alight on those two LPs.
    And this is not necessarily the weakest episode!

    It’s a jumping the shark job.

    Why do series like this feel the need to get clever the longer they go on?

    The 33 1/3 book series is the same. Starts off with a neat idea, worthwhile albums to analyse, ends up with stuff that absolutely no one has ever heard by acts no one has ever heard of …

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