Golden Earring on Colour Me Pop footage 09/09/1969 !!!

[ajsmith]

I recently discovered, thanks to an October 1969 Melody Maker article sourced by Tony Rees of TV Pop Diaries, that several additional unaired Colour Me Pop shows were made after the programme abruptly disappeared from the airwaves in August 1969, further to those listed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_Me_Pop: previously I only knew of the existing Chambers Brothers edition as far as unbroadcast shows went, but this article mentioned shows featuring Gullivers People, Sands (presumably the Irish showband of this name and not the 'Listen To The Sky' folk), Jefferson with Sight And Sound and Golden Earring, later of 'Radar Love' stardom. Well all these added names have opened up new avenues for my research, and today looking into the Golden Earring lead I made the discovery that the first song of their CMP performance 'It's Alright But I Admit It Could Be Better' was filmed for a Dutch documentary on the band on 9/9/69! (see entry here: members.ziggo.nl/casper.roos/1960stour.html).. and it's on Youtube! The performance runs from around 44.14 to 48.20 here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLb5WjQrHUY

.. and it notable for capturing more footage of the behind the scenes production of CMP, including how surprisingly close the vision mixing equipment was to the band in the studio! Anyway, hope people enjoy . I had no idea about any of this extra CMP content until a few weeks ago! There's always more to discover!

[robertreinstein]

Awesome discovery sir!

[richardwoods]

Wow!!

[RWels]

The main video seems to be an unreleased 1969 Golden Earring documentary.

[ajsmith]

I just did an edit of only the Colour Me Pop related scenes from this doc for easy reference:

[richardwoods]

Brilliant stuff. Makes you weep though for what’s been lost!

[Kev Hunter]

Excellent! Great to see that performance, so thank you. All the band's albums have interesting material on them, and in particular the six albums released between 1969 (Eight Miles High) and 1975 (Switch) are outstanding. It's just a pity that GE are chiefly remembered in the UK for "Radar Love" when they have such an impressive and prolific back catalogue. Luckily they are served well by surviving footage, especially from European shows.

[SydV]

Oct 1, 2020 12:12:59 GMT ajsmith said:

Chambers Brothers, Gullivers People, Sands, Jefferson with Sight And Sound and Golden Earring

There was the odd show that featured two acts rather than the usual one, so it could be just three or four shows un-transmitted rather than the five the above list would suggest.

9th September 1969 would mean Golden Earring recorded on a Tuesday. For this type of show I wouldn't imagine they'd tape more than a few weeks before the transmission date. Do we have any recording dates for shows that did go out? That would give us an idea of when the Golden Earring show was supposed to be shown. Could be that they were the last act to be recorded. If not then it would seem strange and a terrible waste to carry on recording so many programmes that would never make it to air.

[petercheck]

Mar 7, 2021 19:57:10 GMT SydV said:

Oct 1, 2020 12:12:59 GMT ajsmith said:

Chambers Brothers, Gullivers People, Sands, Jefferson with Sight And Sound and Golden Earring

 Do we have any recording dates for shows that did go out? 

The only one I'm aware of is The Kinks' performance, broadcast on 26th July 1968 and taped 4 days earlier on 22nd July 1968.

[ajsmith]

Re: the unbroadcast shows, while the Golden Earring one appears to have been recorded right at the end of CMP's run and thus was probably unscreened due to the show's permanent removal from the schedules in the same timeframe, it appears from some more recent material I've been sent/discovered that at least some of the other unshown editions were taped significantly earlier. A contemporary music paper article that Tony Rees sent me reveals that the Jefferson with Sight and Sound edition was recorded back in April 1969: also the extant but unshown Chambers Brothers edition, often assumed to be the last made, was in fact according to the Kal programme from it's 2013 showing, recorded on 29th March 1969* (see Chris Perry's post here): missingepisodes.proboards.com/thread/8588/june-2013-kaleidoscope-music-event .. so the question is.. were these shows being held back and 'banked' for later broadcast? This would at first seem odd as often acts would be promoting new singles or LPs, so it would seem counter productive to hold their shows back for months on end.

However, looking at the tx dates for CMP on the wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_Me_Pop, we can see that it didn't run every week, and in fact some weeks were missed: such as indeed the last week in March 69 and the first week in April. My thinking is that CMP, as the end of evening closedown show of variable length, the removal of which wouldn't affect any other scheduling, was likely the first programme to get bumped off the schedules when something else overran or had to be switched around. Thus while Steve Turner and his team prepared a show for every week, when some were unexpectedly bumped from the schedule they had to be banked as the following weeks programme took priority to run as originally scheduled. Thus a small backlog of unshown shows was likely accrued due to being at the mercy of the BBC2 schedule. Just a theory but I think it's the most likely.

Regarding recording dates vs Broadcast dates, I have a (VERY!!!) incomplete list of recording dates from selected editions from info given to me by Steve, see below:

05.10.68 O'Haras Playboys# Rec 10pm on day

02.11.68 Eclection, Spooky Tooth, Jethro Tull# OB 29/9

09.11.68 Foggy Dew-O, Lew Prinz And The Bedrocks# Rec 14/9 & 6/10

16.11.68 The Nice OB 29/9

23.11.68 The Alan Price Set, Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger & The Trinity OB 29/9

30.11.68 Giles, Giles and Fripp# Rec 16/11

07.12.68 Timebox# Rec 23/11

1.1.69 Sons and Lovers Rec 21/12/68

We can see that most shows seem to have indeed been taped shortly before broadcast, 2 months at most.



*I discovered this freely available info slightly too late for inclusion in my Shindig! article on CMP, so unfortunately it ends repeating the myth that the Chambers Brothers show was the last made. I'd like to apologise here for propagating this misinfo, even if it did allow for a cutesy conclusion about how the 'Time Has Come Today' to recognise Colour Me Pop!

[John Green]

Good post aj.
It seemed to be fairly common back in the day, for the host of some topical/debate programme to say, "Well, this is so interesting, that I've been told we've been allowed to over-run". Great days. Generally, there'd be an announcement afterwards that "the following programmes will be shown at a times later than those announced in the Radio/TV Times". If it was getting into the wee small hours-and how naughty watching TV at 1:00 a.m. seemed-then programmes would "be seen at a later date". Not great for a group hoping to promote a release, especially if it didn't eventually get broadcast!

[tonyrees]

As Lennon said "and here's another clue for you all..."

This is the UK back cover of Golden Earring's Eight Miles High LP. Kinda looks like Colour Me Pop? (Image from Discogs.com)

[Kev Hunter]

That does look like the CMP set indeed; there's a clearer but slightly different shot on the rear of the French release of the album.
See here

[ajsmith]

That Golden Earring CMP photo got me Google image searching for other CMP images I might have missed: had never seen this one from The Elastic Band (Andy Scott's pre-Sweet group)'s edition before! Looks like it might be a well angled off-screen photo taken from the TV screen: think I can see the curve of the telly screen at the top corners of the photo there.

from this site: sweet.thesweetweb.com/andy-scott-elastic-band/

[Thomas Walsh]

The Honeybus appearance as announced in the Radio Times, October 10th 1968.