Excerpts from the annual summer music jamboree broadcast as part of UK TV station Channel 4 youth programme The Tube have been posted this week on Youtube.
One clip from the so-called Midsummer Night’s Tube of 1983 features an interview with Malcolm McLaren about his recently released album Duck Rock and single Double Dutch.
The priceless footage of Teddy Boys & Girls dancing and talking about their cult lifestyle in the early 70s at the bottom of this post comes from the East Anglian Film Archive, which provides access to 200 hours of moving images relating to the part of the UK 100-or-so miles east of London.
I saw Chuck Berry play live twice, and have written previously about the first time when, supported by David Bowie-endorsed revivalist rockers Fumble, he performed a truncated set at the Rainbow theatre in north London’s Finsbury Park in September 1973.
The second time was frankly bizarre. He and Little Richard sat in with Paul Shaffer and his band during a live broadcast of The David Letterman Show from the UK capital in 1995.
As part of the BBC Four Goes Pop season, the British TV channel is running a 45-sec ident commissioned from Derek Boshier.
Continue reading Derek Boshier: Specially-commissioned BBC Four ident running all week
Derek Boshier is the next subject of the BBC strand What Do Artists Do All Day? – Zara Hayes’ film, which was shot in Los Angeles and shadows Boshier on his daily routine, will be screened at 10.30pm UK time on BBC Four next Monday (August 24).
//Boshier features in these panels from BBC Four’s Pop Art-style run-down of the season elements//
British artist Derek Boshier – subject of Rethink/Re-entry, the monograph I have edited which is published this autumn – is to be featured in next month’s BBC season of programmes about Pop Art.
Boshier has been commissioned by the broadcaster to create a new BBC Four ident which will run throughout August alongside new logos produced by his fellow Royal College graduates Peter Blake and Peter Phillips (who starred with Boshier and the late Pauline Boty in Ken Russell’s groundbreaking 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes The Easel).
This album is titled Fans. It’s about wearing your emotion on your sleeve, just as fans scream out from the audience or want to get on stage so they can kiss him or are terrified they’re going to have a nervous breakdown if he don’t come round the corner and sit beside them. They all bear the frustration… we’re all fans waiting to jump out.
Currently doing the rounds of the punk groups on various social networking sites is this clip from the cheesy 70s revival of classic 60s British television series The Saint.
Entitled The Arrangement, episode nine of The Return Of The Saint was broadcast on November 5, 1978 and starred such UK TV drama stalwarts as Carolyn Seymour, seen here looking glam in a car in Soho’s Wardour Street outside The Marquee where the great Aussie band The Saints are crashing through Swing For The Crime from their Eternally Yours album.
Continue reading The Return Of The Saint: Cameo by The Saints at The Marquee and Shinny in Seditionaries
Continental Europe appears to have gone bananas for British popular culture this Jubilympics* summer, hence Franco-German arts channel ARTE’s new four-part series London Calling.
The programme was made by seasoned documentarist Simon Witter and looks to be a treat (particularly the intelligent use of archive material; great to see rare footage of John Stephen striding along Carnaby Street).
I’m among the interviewees featured in Subculture, Don Letts’ Channel 4 documentary about post-War British street style, the first part of which aired for the first time last night.
