You may well be right. However, Abbey Road was the last real set of album recordings that the band undertook. To a certain degree we do know that the gestation of a number of songs came during the Let It Be/Get Back sessions and were highlighted in both the Peter Jackson film and Let It Be SDE. There were less band related items connected to the Abbey Road album. This represents perhaps the only visual interpretation of the album and ad such is historically interesting. Grated, it is not a band directed attempt, but that was similar to the situation with Yellow Submarine. The relatively poor surviving record of this programme does mean that is never going to be embraced in the same way as the cartoon film or Get Back rehearsals, but it would be interesting to view what did emerge to accompany the Abbey Road album. I somehow can't imagine Apple giving this a high profile release so am not sure what platform could be utilised for it. The low profile release of the Christmas recordings does illustrate that there is a hierarchy of projects and scales of release that do get officially sanctioned.
Only a few million people around the world experienced the premier of Abbey Road on Late Night Line Up. Today their are hundreds of millions of followers new and old who would love to go back in time and feel and see what they saw and experienced, instead now all we have is really horrible 50 seconds of a film clip and one piece of art a Barbershop Quartet fans deserve more than this we want to see the full premier of those 10 songs and all the parafanalia and hype excitement that went with it!
We can fob this stuff off as "rubbish...who cares...", because it doesn't have the entertainment value of a new song or performance. The thing I love about watching old specials from the 1960's and 1970's is you get a sense of the era. We forget that The Beatles were around in a world that no longer exists. We think of the music as timeless, but in fact, they existed in a time. The other noteworthy inclusion of the special is it was the first example of a long-form music video. Something that wouldn't happen until the VHS-era, but here, a major broadcaster is promoting one of the group's most popular albums as a TV special.
I didn't originally see it and I'd like to watch it. Probably another person like me out there somewhere. Maybe even two.
All I want to say is that if they can restore and clean up 100 year old films to look like yesterday as seen on youtube am sure they can make this tv film that Jack Henry did look spick and spam, all that's required is a fresh digital audio to be replaced over the top
Different. The 100-year-old film was still shot on 35mm film. 35mm has a lot more information on it than videotape did. 35mm Film Resolution (filmfix.com) For comparison - a frame of 35mm film is equivalent to about 5.6k in digital video terms, so if the print is in reasonable shape, you can make it look as if it was shot yesterday. Videotape, on the other hand, is much lower and we're talking about a very low-resolution tape format that the show was captured from. Sony CV Series Video (smecc.org) If we use the Sony TCV-2010 format as an example (most likely what John got from Capitol), you're talking about a resolution of just over 200 lines (VHS has about 240 lines). Quadruplex 2-inch tape (which was the tape format the BBC used at the time) was 625-lines of PAL video, if the original master tape from Late Night Line Up is still out there (and it would have been produced to tape given the nature of the show's format), then you'd get something looking half decent. If Jack Henry-Moore's tape is the only footage we have, then the best it could look (given the issues with the tape are sorted, which by the sounds of it, there are quite a bit), would be quite low-res (see the video I posted above from OVS).
OK, I've just come across this thread so here's my two cents. I saw this Late Night Line-Up on TV in 69. I saw it at my parents' home on their black and white television. Colour TVs were still not very common at the time in the UK. To put things in context we need to remember that fans had been waiting for a new Beatles album more or less since the beginning of the year and certainly for at least six months. The Get Back concert and album project had been abandoned and we'd just had a couple of singles released. Strangely enough when Abbey Road finally arrived it still came as something of a surprise. I remember walking past the record shop (actually it was a WHSmiths) in the centre of town and seeing the album in the window with absolutely no accompanying advertising. And as you know the name of the album and the group are not on the album cover so there was a certain shock factor involved. I don't remember seeing anything concerning the album cover on the BBC show. In fact I don't remember anything of the stuff mentioned in this thread as being there. This doesn't mean some of the ideas were not there. Knowing the BBC, the groovy dancing girl and the moon landing film would be very probable. But I don't remember the barber shop singers for Maxwell or the Day In The Life extracts (which we'd heard about but would never officially see until Anthology). The one thing I definitely remember has not been mentioned here at all. For Here Comes The Sun there was some kind of psychedelic imaging and I specifically remember a silhouette figure with outstretched arms. This has stuck in my mind ever since because it was well done and very appropriate for the mood of the song. I saw the show on the Friday evening. I don't recall it being repeated but if it was repeated on Saturday 10th October, as has been stated, then I would vey probably have been at a party or at a gig at the university.
Wow. Thanks again for the firsthand report. Any information on this program, no matter how small, helps. It's good to put it in perspective of a pre-24 media cycle world where information wasn't at your fingertips. I'd imagine the program would have been quite an event for those that hadn't yet heard the album. The information about "Here Comes The Sun" sounds very much like something that would have been in the program, given the surviving footage we have. (the footage with sound is here) If the video uploaded by DigMedia is the Late Night Line-Up footage (see below), then we can confirm that the program did contain: The rear of the Abbey Road cover in the opening The "A Day In The Life"/Come Together clip. Jane London dancing to "Something" "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" with drawings still (or animation). One second of this was recovered.
@zipp - a question about the "Here Comes The Sun" segment - is it possible that any of this footage was used in the background of the silhouette figure? Also, was the figure male or female?
The usual source for hearing new Beatles records before release was the radio. I remember hearing most of Sgt. Pepper on the radio, probably via Kenny Everett. I specifically remember hearing Back In The USSR on the transistor radio just before having a bath (that's the kind of ridiculous detail that somehow sticks in your mind). Seeing and hearing new Beatles music for the first time on TV was unusual. All You Need Is Love on Our World was an exception. The music fror MMT was already out on record so it wasn't through the Xmas TV transmissions that we first heard those particular songs. So watching this Late Night Line-Up was first and foremost to hear songs for the first time from the new Beatles album. The images were secondary. I can well imagine the programme starting with the back cover title from the album but I have absolutely no recollection of seeing any shots used from the front cover pedestrian crossing shot. I'm sure I would have remembered seeing something like that. Seeing alternative shots from album cover sessions (be it Abbey Road or Sgt Pepper for example) was something you just never saw anywhere at the time. They came to light via magazines, bootlegs or box-sets much much later. I've now watched the whole of the Scott Bartlett video. The presentation of Here Comes The Sun was light and dreamlike whereas this video is more of a nightmare. However at one point (from around about 4.46 to around 5.00) we can see very much the outstretched-arms figure I remember. Imagine that sequence without all the fuzziness, indeed with a clear definition, and you have very much what I saw. As you can see the silhouette is not particularly male or female but if I had to choose I'd say male because he appears to be wearing jeans.
Actually Dig Media have stated in their twitter that they have seen the Barber Shop Quartet from Maxwell's Silver Hammer near the end of the video but have only released a one second still from the beginning of the song video "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" with drawings still (or animation). One second of this was recovered. [/QUOTE]
Thank you, again @zipp , for your recollections. Until the tape is (or can be) restored, this is pretty much what we have left of the special. If you turn the electronic sounds down and replaced it with "Here Comes The Sun" (a big thank you to @dormouse for their original research) you can imagine that section, you mentioned being more dreamlike (maybe even slow the footage down). If I may ask a few more general questions: Was the whole special pretty much 40-50 second excerpts of each track? From my understanding, Late Night Line-Up was only usually 10-minute segment in-between programs. Most people who have commented on here have said they didn't recall seeing a cut-away shot of the album on a turntable - do you remember seeing or not seeing this? Can you recall any other songs from the album used in the special? Even if you don't remember the visuals. The general consensus is not every song was used, but if the was only using short excerpts, I'd imagine they would have struggled to reach even the short running time of a typical Late Night Line-Up segment.
The entire 33 minute show was devoted to the album. I don't recall tracks being just excerpts and they would obviously have had time to feature quite a few tracks. If there had been just excerpts I would have been frustrated and would certainly have remembered feeling short-changed. Late Night Line-Up would usually feature two or three subjects so it was unusual to have just one subject for a whole programme. Here's a link to an article about the show which seems pretty exact to me : Late Night Line-Up (partially found Beatles "Abbey Road" special; 1969) - The Lost Media Wiki
Thanks. I wonder if the Dig Media video has been edited down then? Only the first 40 seconds of "Come Together" appears in that before heading to "Something". It doesn't look edited, though.
As its title suggests the programme usually had a line-up of guests. I've found an archived programme from 1966. It has a song from Tsai Chin, an interview and cookery lesson from Fanny Craddock, and an interview with actor James Robinson Justice. The tone of the programme was relaxed, adult and slow-paced. So in my opinion they had time to feature full-length tracks after a brief introduction. And to answer an earlier question, no I don't remember seeing the album turning on a turntable. Perhaps some songs were excerpted and some were complete. If in fact only 40 seconds of Come Together were shown this could indicate that at the time the show was made (before the album's release and public reaction to different tracks) Come Together was not considered an overly significant track on the album. Here's the archived programme :
Is that from when the programme was just called 'Line Up'? 'Late Night Line Up' came a little later I think, 1968 perhaps, I'm not sure.
It says late Night Line-Up at the start of the video. Late Night Line-Up existed from 1964 to 1972. Line-Up only existed for a few months in 1964 (from April to September).
I watched this live in 1969 and distinctly remember the record going round on the turntable which was a Bang & Olufsen, which a relative of mine had at the time. A lovely looking turntable!
I don’t think you mentioned the source or type of the official BBC documents you’ve been referring to in this thread. Are these by any chance PasB (Programme as Broadcast) docs? Television Programmes-as-Broadcast - Television - British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) - Archives Hub If not, has anyone tried to retrieve PasB records for this programme yet?
There are thankfully fan-made off-air audio recordings of all the missing episodes of Doctor Who, plus a tiny amount of film from an 8mm camera pointed at the TV, but I believe that, to date, only one off-air consumer video recording of the show has been found from the 1960s, and it happened to be an episode the BBC already had a proper telerecording of (Episode 2 of “The Space Pirates”). All of the missing episodes from that era that have been returned by fans have been in the form of film telerecordings originally made by the BBC themselves, not off-air recordings. The most important fan-made, off-air Doctor Who video recordings currently known to exist came a bit later: they’re NTSC color videotapes of several early 1970s episodes for which the BBC held only black-and-white telerecordings.
Dig Media about to release a clip from Maxwell's Silver Hammer stay tuned with the Barbershop Quartet
