These days almost nothing goes unrecorded, unfilmed, and preserved for prosperity.
Unless there’s a boot I’m unaware of, Joy Division doing Louie Louie will always be the stuff of legend, and something I’ll always wish I could listen to.
Any other examples?
Recorded, filmed – yes. We’ll see if things are actually preserved for posterity, recent events would suggest that isn’t a given.
“Madhouse on Castle Street” – the BBC play Dylan was in. Love to see that.
That would be the sort of thing that was wiped so that the video tape could be reused. Standard practice in the sixties.
According to Wikipedia it was made with electronic video cameras but was recorded onto film rather than on tape.
The film was junked in 1968. BBC standard practise at the time.
In the early ’70s I got to know a couple of guys called Cliff and Dermot, pals of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, who acquired an early “portable” video camera and started up a company called Shamus O’Famous to make video films. The portable in the previous sentence is in inverted commas because their rig consisted of a hefty-looking shoulder-mounted camera with a thick flexi cable to an LP-sized reel-to-reel tape deck and battery pack, hanging on a shoulder strap. The results from that rig were not very impressive and their company went bust fairly soon. Last I heard of them was that Cliff went into cable TV in the early experimental days in Milton Keynes and Dermot eventually became a tube train driver.
An awful comparison, but I was watching that Piers Morgan “Psychopath” programme last week, and the very high quality home-video footage of the killer made me realise what a different world it is now, with every moment apparently documented, in a way it never was for my/our generation (I’m 55.)
By contrast, this post reminded me that no footage whatsoever exists of Nick Drake, and that, maybe surprisingly, the total footage of Joy Division in the vaults totals less than an hour in length, probably the norm for short-lived bands until the 80s…
As for what I’d like to hear, the David Sylvian/Scott Walker session would be way up there for me… and my “white whale” is a track called “Everlasting Day” by a Japanese band called Sober from the early 90s, which I jotted down after seeing the video on TV, but have never been able to find, even with the coming of t’internet…
You know what makes me itch? George Orwell. There is no film footage of him, which for someone who died in 1951 and wasn’t interested in being a celebrity is fair enough. But….
He spent years broadcasting on BBC India – literally hours of talks. None of it survives. So we’ve got Tennyson’s voice (yes!) but not George’s.
Nnnnnggg!
Also, similarly non-musical… Viv Stanshall and Don Van Vliet had long nocturnal phone conversations. As Peel said, what they were talking about is literally unimaginable to us mere mortals.
Nick Drake did make an appearance on the Granada TV arts show ‘Octopus’, which was originally only shown in the Granada region. However it seems that this performance, or at least some of it, turned up later on other ITV regions as a schedule filler. It may be that a tape of this still exists somewhere in the vaults of one of the other ITV regions.
… or Australia. For some reason all of these things tend to turn up in Australia. It’s like that cave in Wales where they put the National Gallery’s paintings in WW2 against the German invasion.
Before reliable satellite transmission, any UK sound or video recordings that were to be broadcast elsewhere in the Commonwealth were always shipped over as tape or film copies. Stuff that was known to have been wiped or destroyed here in the UK has often been found in the back of dusty cupboards in the Antipodes, Africa or India.
Yep. Two lost episodes of Morecambe and Wise found in an abandoned cinema in Sierra Leone.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/morceombe-and-wise-lost-episodes-comedy-cinema-sierra-leone-a8651746.html
I read that the sixties psychedelic legends The Misunderstood used to perform a long spacerock piece, “The Trip to Inner Space,” at their gigs in 1966- 67 but no one ever recorded it.
On a related issue, there is the famous case of Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was never documented for posterity except for a Japanese TV recording that has since been lost in the archives ( although I did once see a bootleg VHS tape)
If we’re talking theatre, seeing the original Look Back in Anger would have been good. Only production Osborne was pleased with – most other Porters, starting with Burton, were just too shouty.
Chris Stamp on the Hendrix South Bank Show spoke very warmly of the gig that the JHE did the night after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He said it was never bootlegged.
Peter Cook used to call LBC’s late night phone in show as “Sven” – a character from Norway that used to turn any topic around so that the discussion became about fish. I used to listen to the show because in the days of Jeremy Beadle (sic) it was very very funny . Sven appeared some years later as a regular caller in Clive Bull’s time. Sven called many times – I had no idea he was Peter Cook. There were several off-kilter regular callers and Sven fitted in just fine. I know a few of his calls survive but I am sure there are many more that are gone forever.
There are seven of them on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/alan_Sven
There are loads of Cook tapes which, frankly, we’re never going to hear before his widow either lets us or isn’t in a position to do anything about it. Recordings like that will be among them.
Wasn’t there some excitement a few years ago about Peter Cook’s widow giving access to a load of hitherto unreleased material?
Nothing seemed to come of it after the original hoo-hah and she has since died, so either the material wasn’t actually much good or else their surviving relatives don’t want it released.
Or of course there’s so much of it that it’s taking a long time to sift through it.
My understanding is that after he died his widow just shut up his house and didn’t allow any access. She lived in her own house a few doors away from his. Although happily married, I don’t think they ever lived together.
Lin Cook became notoriously protective of Peter Cook’s legacy after his death. Victor Lewis-Smith befriended her just before she herself died in 2016 and she allowed him access to Peter’s old house in Perrins Walk in Hampstead for his “Undiscovered Peter Cook” BBC documentary.
There were only eight “Sven” calls in total to Clive Bull’s LBC show, according to this:
http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/sven.htm , which also contains various other rare-ish Cook recordings.
Henk Hofstede of Dutch combo (and Best Band In The World) The Nits once told me about their WOMAD gig in 1996. The highlight in his opinion was the afternoon in the backstage area. At one point they witnessed a rather high-spirited Robert Wyatt, entertaining the hangers-on with half an hour of accapella jazz classics (Coltrane, Mingus, and yes, “Round Midnight”). Of course no-one in those days had a mobile to film it…