Help! starts out so good...the scene of them arriving at that house, walking in the separate doors, Paul rises from below playing the organ, George directs mechanical teeth in the grass, etc.......and then it goes downhill after that.
I heard that, too! Always a delight to hear Ken, especially when he had something new and juicy like that to play!
He also played just the very last bit of Maxwell's Silver Hammer - the "Silver Hammer Man" mass chorus - on his programme a few weeks before, as I recall, from his own recording of it. He'd been there when they were dubbing that bit on ("over and over again!" I remember him saying). He interviewed the band in the studio, and I remember Lennon telling him that the medley was called "Paul McCartney versus Pete Townshend" - Tommy was just out at that time, with its segued tracks.
1964, see Museum of vintage reel to reel video recorders. Open reel black and white antique video recorders. Paul McCartney was said to have become "one of the first British owners of a video recorder, a gift from Capitol Records" in early 1966 (Q magazine article on Sgt Pepper, June 1987 page 51). This must have been a British model but it would have only recorded VHF 405 line signals. The 1969 Abbey Road special would have been broadcast before any domestic UHF 625 line machines were on the market, BBC2 was still the only channel broadcasting in that format until BBC1 and ITV made the switch in November 1969.
Yes their recordings are most of what survives of the first two colour seasons of 1970, as even as late 1970 these were amazingly wiped probably because colour vt was so expensive that had to re-use as much as poss for the horse of the year show and whatnot and yet you would have thought that a programme as high profile as Steptoe would have been kept - not for posterity ( that wasn't even in the lexicon back then ) - but for later showings as repeats. Amazingly all of the Dads army colour vt ( aside from one episode which has since been amazingly restored ) from 1969 onwards survived as does Monty Python ( aside from a couple of scenes since borrowed from NTSC sources ) the latter i think because the Pythons stole the tapes from the bbc before they went into the skip. As odd as it sounds back then stuff was only repeated once before then becoming a candidate for wiping, survival after that was a crapshoot. Late Night Line up would have been aired in colour from mid 1967 although hardly any survives in its colour VT format aside from those 5 or so Colour me pop add ons. Galton & Simpson's recordings were of course crude B/W the best you could get from domestic recorders at the time, the first colour domestic VT in the UK i think may have been the Philips c.1974 but the UK break out was arrival to the domestic rental market of VHS recorders in 1978 although the real explosion would not occur until the early 80's , price of tapes being a factor, a 3hr VHS black tape cost me 15 quid in 1978, by the early 80's you could get them in packs that worked out a pound a cassette. I believe that adoption of VHS as opposed to beta and philips 2000 by the UK domestic rental market ( most people rented back then ) for whatever reason ( clever marketing by JVC Sanyo ? ) was a factor in VHS becoming the dominant format in the UK, although i have no idea what the reason for this also happening in the states was.
REBUILDING ABBEY ROAD LATE-NIGHT LINE-UP: Part 4: More film sources documented as used in programme: "Gyromorphosis" (93ft 16mm) approx 2 minutes 40 secs – John Huntley, British Film Institute "Autumn Spectrum" (100ft 16mm) approx 2 minutes 45 secs – John Huntley, British Film Institute There is no indication of which tracks these pieces of film were used for and they may of course have been edited together either with each other or with other pieces of film to produce the visual accompaniment for one or more of the songs in the programme. I have not been able to locate any moving footage from either of the films but there are some still frames and descriptions that give some idea of the nature of the visuals. Both films were created by Hy Hirsh in the latter part of the 1950s Hy Hirsh: Hy Hirsh was a photographer and filmmaker who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA on 11 October 1911 and died in Paris France in November 1961. His family moved to Souther California in 1916 where he became interested in photography and filmmaking and aged 19 worked in Hollywood for Columbia Studios as a cameraman and stills photographer. He also produced art photography as a sideline with his first solo exhibition taking place in 1935. He subsequently became attracted to experimental and avant-garde and moved to San Francisco where he worked as both a photographer and cinematographer working with others on a number of films before creating his own animated shorts in 1951. Being an avid jazz fan he used the music of Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet to accompany his films. He produced four films while in San Francisco including Gyromorphosis (although some reports suggest this was actually the first film he produced after moving to Amsterdam) which won a medal at the 1958 Brussels Exposition as did Autumn Spectrum which he did produce after moving to Europe. He went on to pursue a number of film techniques that would have been forerunners of the light shows that became part of the underground music scene of the late sixties. It is perhaps no surprise that his work was investigated for use it the visualisation of Abbey Road by the BBC. He used ‘oil wipe’ processes, filmed black and white patterns with coloured filters and also shot images created on oscilloscopes. He united these images using his own hand-built optical printer enabling him to overlay mutiple images onto a single strip of film. Gyromorphosis: The actual date that this film was made is variously reported as 1953, 1954 and even as late as 1956. It is in its full form 6 minutes and 44 seconds and is based on a sculpture from the New Babylon project by a dutch artist. Hirsh described the film as striving to: “bring into actuality the inherent qualities seen in the construction-sculpture of Constant Nieuwenhuys of Amsterdam. To realise this aim I have put into motion, one by one, pieces of this sculpture and, with coloured lighting, filmed them in various detail, overlaying the images on film as they appear and disappear. In this way, I have hoped to produce sensations of acceleration and suspension which are suggested by the sculpture itself.” One review describes it as: “Multiple overlaid image combinations of dynamic structural sculptures that twist, roll and turn generating interconnected abstract images of propulsive movement. Beautiful and intoxicating with gorgeous use of colour… like a merry-go-round for adults.” If you ‘google’ Gyromorphosis images you will find a lot of example stills from the film that will give you a flavour of what the visuals would have looked like. Autumn Spectrum: This is a serene view of Amsterdam reflected in the waters of its own canals accompanied by a mellow jazz score filmed by Hy Hirsh in 1957 after his move to Europe. Hy Hirsh in Cinema 16 Film Notes from the March 1960 supporting a programme of films from the 1958 International Experimental Film Festival in Brussels describes the film as “a film collage abstraction of images reflected on the water of Amsterdam canals… the entire conception, the composition, the ‘montage’, the blending and superimposing of images are all accomplished in the camera. In this wa I believe I found means for furthering the evolution of the camera as a creative instrument.” He goes on to propose that: Much emphasis is placed on continuity and fluidity of motion. The whole film is in one ‘scene’ without a single moment of darkness. In Autumn Spectrum movement is a dominant element, though nostalgia is the real theme of the film. The coloured patterns and their peculiar movements as reflected in the canals of Amsterdam are the stimulants for this project.” Excerpts from both of these films were used somewhere within the Abbey Road ‘Late Night Line-Up programme. It is possible in the mind’s eye to visualise that these surreal images could easily have been used to accompany the music of Abbey Road particularly at that point in time where projected imagery at music events was still relatively fresh. Programmes such as BBC’s ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ would frequently accompany music (perhaps where they could not get the band into the studio to play) with seemingly random films clips often with no direct link to the music. Often animated patterns or cartoons would be used and these became part of the viewing experience for those of us who experienced the music on TV during the late 1960 and 1970s. Quite where they were used is open to speculation but it is interesting to drop-in on the mind-set of those programme makers who were given a wide brief with little visual source material in order to present the latest album by the biggest band in the world!
Rowan Ayers recollections, as published in LENNONOLOGY | Volume One - Strange Days Indeed Friday, September 19, 1969 A day after the press preview of Abbey Road, the rest of Great Britain had the opportunity to hear most of the new album when it was aired on the BBC2 arts program Late Night Line-Up this evening, between 10:55 and 11:30. "The Beatles approached us," the BBC told the Daily Mirror. "It seems they often watch the programme and they like the way pop music has been covered visually." Rowan Ayers, the editor for Line-Up, said that he planned to "illustrate the music with captions, film sequences and electronic devices." Ayers later recalled: "I received a telephone call from Peter Brown, from Apple, asking if I'd like to come and have lunch with the Beatles at their Savile Row offices… they wanted to know whether I'd like to have the opportunity to launch their new album, just completed, exclusively on Late Night Line-Up, using any visuals we chose to illustrate the music. Over a boozy lunch, I listened to the tracks and knew this was going to be a great album. Paul McCartney was enthusiastic about what we might do, coming up with plenty of suggestions and ideas, John Lennon was his laconic self, George seemed lost in thought most of the time, but Ringo was enthusiastic and wanted to know about everyone on the program." The finished production was described by one viewer as a "kinda psychedelic movie thing." Chip Madinger www.lennonology.com
Back in 1980, there was a privately-run Beatles shop in Mathew Street in Liverpool, owned by a couple called Jim and Liz (as far as I remember). It was in a shop on the very end corner of Mathew Street, as you came in from Whitechapel, and up some steps through a strange Art-Deco style door (it was a clothes shop last time I was there, I think). Anyway, it was all very run-down and a bit grungy, long before the street became the Beatles-centric place it is now. Anyone remember the store, or the people? (One thing I saw there was the original Brian Epstein Nems store visitors book, signed by lots of famous stars of the day. They later sold that - God knows where it is now. They also had a big pile of Apple Records catalogues from around 1972 - I bought one for £2.50, as I recall. It was all very amateurish and uncommercial, compared to how things are now). Anyway, when I went in there in early 1981, we were all still pretty down about John's death, and there was a TV running non-stop videos of The Beatles, all taken from TV shows, all very grainy and in poor quality, but things I hadn't seen before or since. I just wondered if anyone on here was still in contact with those people, and whether they might have video footage that might be relevant to this thread. Bit of a long-shot after 38 years!
Sadly it appears that Liz died in 2008 and Jim passed away in January this year Cavern Mecca - Wikipedia
Well worth a try if any one out there is still in contact. You never know where that long lost item is going to appear and if they had the Epstein store visitor's book they clearly had some unique items. Good to see that there are still things turning up after all these years. I'm still researching the information regarding the Abbey Road programme and only yesterday something that had been a dead end suddenly burst into life. Not the actual programme you understand but some information that is of interest. Keep tuned in, there is more information to come. It is just taking a little while to go through and research.
Leaving even the intrigue of this lost TV special to the side, isn’t this meeting also noteworthy for being a documented summit of all 4 Beatles after the final photo/video shoot in August 1969?
Very sorry to hear about Liz and Jim from the old Mathews Street Beatles shop. I used to have a mail-order list from them, with videos and other stuff for sale. I'll try to search it out, though it's so long ago, I'd be surprised if I can find it.
In a letter to a journalist, the owner, the late Jim Hughes said, "I donated all of the Cavern Mecca material to the Liverpool Records Office where they can be viewed by anyone." That was in 2010 or thereabouts. He also mentions how, in the late '70's and early '80's, he thought that Liverpool was ashamed of The Beatles, and refused to help him establish any official memorials or museums. The day I visited his store, The Cavern Mecca, in 1981, Noel Edmunds, at that time a major UK TV personality, was the only other person in the place, walking around looking grimly at the stuff on display, while the owners stood nervously behind the counter watching him. I assumed he must've been scouting the place for some kind of TV feature, but it never happened. (He was a lot smaller in person than he looked on TV!)
That's kind of sad isn't it. Of all the bands in the world, The Beatles are the one that should and has enough condensed history to have a permanent memorial in their home town. Perhaps Liverpool did feel that the band deserted them for London. But Liverpool has a much higher profile in the world than it otherwise may have because of the band. I'm guessing that if you asked a lot of Americans to name two British cities Liverpool would probably be in a lot of people's lists, perhaps sometimes ahead of London!
I don't really remember details, but as I recall there was a news story in the late '70s about somebody wanting to establish some sort of Beatles tribute/memorial, and major Liverpool politicians opposing it. (I may be mixed up on this, but I have a definite memory of watching John Chancellor of NBC News tell some story about an unnamed group, then at the end saying smirkingly, "Sic Transit Gloria Beatles.")
At the time only the BBC's own publications could carry BBC TV listings for the whole week. Essentially this would be the Radio Times, although there would have also been partial listings in the BBC's weekly cultural magazine The Listener. I presume that daily newspapers could carry listings for that day's TV output - they certainly could do so a few years later - and there may be some extra detail in one such listing.
Indeed national daily newspapers did carry TV listings at the time - I've just come across some on-line images of one such newspaper from that era. Not for the day in question, and at too low a resolution to be able to read them in full, but there were detailed descriptions of at least some of the evening shows on BBC2.
i think that in general Late Night Line up was usually listed generically and without specifics so it may not have even been featured as a special in RT ... old copies if rt are available if anybody wants to try and find one.
close but no cigar ! Radio Times/1969/Spike Milligan/Harold Robbins/Blue Peter expedition to Ceylon/ | eBay
REBUILDING ABBEY ROAD LATE-NIGHT LINE-UP: Part 5: More film sources documented as used in programme: "OffOn" (123ft 16mm) approx 3 minutes 20 secs –Vaughan-Rogosin Films Ltd Again there is no indication as to where the film was used within the Late Night Line-Up Programme or which track(s) is was used to accompany. Only part of the film was used within the programme with the full production being something over 8 minutes in length. It was made by the American experimental filmmaker Scott Bartlett in 1967 using then ground-breaking film/video hybrid techniques. Scott Bartlett (Filmmaker): Scott Bartlett was born on 29 September 1943. He was a director and writer, known for Altered States (1980), Metanomen (1966) and Medina (1972). He died in 1990 in San Francisco, California, USA. He was one of the premiere experimental abstract art filmmakers of the late 1960s and the 1970s. His acclaimed work is greatly admired by many of his better known colleagues. He was part of Francis Ford Coppola's original Zoetrope filmmakers group along with George Lucas. During the sixties and early seventies, he was married to Fruede Bartlett, founder of groundbreaking independent film distributor Serious Business Company, one of the only distributors of cutting edge shorts and animation at the time. The two of them had previously owned the former Grand Hotel in San Francisco, whose tenants during that period included Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. A fire destroyed the historic building in the 1970s, leaving no trace of its psychedelic legacy. His films won numerous international awards. A graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology, he also taught film-making at various universities, including the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Maine. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Film Institute. His 1967 experiment OffOn, shot on 16mm, was groundbreaking for its use of new video imagery technologies. OffOn (1967): OffOn is an experimental film created by Scott Bartlett made and released in 1967. It is most notable for being one of the first examples in which film and video technologies were combined. The nine-minute film combines a number of video loops which have been altered through re-photography or video colorization, and utilizes an electronic sound track to create its unique effect. One review describes is as: “An experimental film that consists in its entirety of an audio and visual collage. It starts out with an extreme close-up of a human eye. Spirals swirl and flash across a screen that is artificially tinted in vivid colours. There is a repeated image of a woman making poses similar to a ballet dancer en-point, with the image split down the middle and reversed. Later there are repeated shots of a woman's mirrored, distorted face, as well as abstract shapes resembling inkblots. The whole is accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of dissonant, atonal buzzing and humming noises.” Bartlett described the of combining video and film technologies as: “a kind of aesthetic common denominator. Marrying techniques so the techniques don't show up separately from the whole. It's crossbreeding information. That's what a computer does, too. Having several aesthetics force each other into their separate moulds and then sort of seeing what happens.” Film Links: Link to the film: Link to a short ‘making of’ documentary: Making of OffOn by Scott Bartlett Both of these are well worth a look to give a flavour of the abstract and experimental filmmaking current in 1967. To me the film has elements that were later utilised in final psychedelic scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Again it brings back memories of the kind of visuals that were utilised in the late 1960s/70s to accompany rock music on TV when there was no promo film available or live performance possible for TV broadcast. It is of little surprise that the BBC chose to source OffOn as part of the Abbey Road ‘Late Night Line-Up’. It is presumably exactly the kind of experimental visuals that The Beatles had been impressed by and encouraged them to ask the BBC to use in order to promote the release of Abbey Road on TV.
A friend of mine has supplied the relevant page of the Radio Times for the original broadcast of the Abbey Road 'Late Night Line-Up': Radio Times, 11 September 1969 (page 53 - 19th September, Friday). The entry for the programme is a generic one giving no details of the specific content and there are no articles, photographs or additional information regarding the inclusion of Abbey Road in this edition. However for those interested here is the entry: 10.55 [pm] Colour Line-Up: Friday Talk, argument, diversion, with MICHAEL DEAN, JOAN BAKEWELL TONY BILLBOW, SHERIDAN MORLEY Editor ROWAN AYERS Interestingly, on the page in question there is an advertisement for: Colour TV only 25' a week Radio Rentals For a down payment of £65 you would get "a Radio Rentals 19' tube luxury colour console. Sharp, true colour on BBC2. Vivid black and white on all three programme. And when BBC1 and ITV come out in colour later his year, it gets all there programmes too - as soon as they can be received at your address." For the youngsters out there 25 shillings (25') equates to £1.25! And yes, there were only three TV channels in the UK in 1969! Cue debate on whether TV was better in those days!
And he looks very small on TV! I remember the store in Liverpool, it was pretty good, but I recall the records they sold (most of them solo stuff) being quite overpriced, a tradition that has continued with the vinyl on sale at The Beatles Story and the shop at the Pier Head.
