Another gem from the BBC vaults via Adam Curtis’s blog: The Rock and Roll Singer, a documentary from 1969 that follows down-on-his-luck American rock and roller Gene Vincent for the first four days of a low budget English tour:

Gene Vincent had been a massive star only ten years before, but now much of that had gone and he takes you into a very British world of small dance halls on the Isle of Wight, cheap hotels where he has to tell the woman on the desk that he will be sharing with his roadie, and a rehearsal room in the basement of a pub in Croydon - where the walls are lined with old mattresses, plus a fantastic touring van.

It is just a wonderful film, full of long hand-held takes - and at the end you watch a man completely exhausted by his performance backstage in a tiny dance hall, and he really doesn’t want to do it any more. But then the promoter comes up from the darkness and leads Vincent like a child, by the hand, back onstage to do an encore.

Less than eighteen months later Vincent died - because an ulcer burst in his stomach.

I can’t embed the film, so scroll about halfway down the page.

Below, Vincent sings “Be Bop A Lula” from the documentary:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Sweet Gene Vincent

Thank you Chris Campion!