Early David Bowie music video for “Ching-A-Ling” taken from the Love You till Tuesday promotional film. Made in 1969, but unreleased until 1984, this film also features Hermione Farthingale (Space Oddity’s painfully intimate love-song “Letter to Hermione” was for her, obviously) and his friend Jono “Hutch” Hutchinson. The trio performed under the name “The Feathers.” The filming for Love You till Tuesday would be the last time Bowie and Farthingdale would see ever each other.
Note that Bowie is wearing a wig: He’d had to cut his hair for a role in a film called The Virgin Soldiers. “Ching-A-Ling” was recorded on the sly at Trident Studios by famed producer Tony Visconti in 1968. The harmonies would be revisited on The Man Who Sold the World’s “Savior Machine.”
After the jump, another early Bowie video for “Sell Me a Coat.”
I’m going through one of my periodic Captain Beefheart
Buy the Trout Mask Replica house
Obama endorses Beefheart
Beefheart: Through the eyes of magic
Banned Captain Beefheart TV commercial
Run Paint Run Run: The Painting of Don van Vliet AKA Captain Beefheart
Here’s a really cool image captured by a small pinhole camera on the top of a turntable. This beautiful photo was shot by photographer Tim Franco. I really dig it.
(via Mister Honk )
What a brilliant antidote to the current highly lame trend of attempted personalised music selection software (Pandora,etc). This Brian Whitman fellow has got it right (even though he’s admittedly part of the problem, ha!). These services are only going to point you in the direction of some major label hackery you’d never notice on your own, anyways. Nothing will ever beat word of mouth and the recommendations of friends and relatives with excellent taste. Let the deletions begin !
I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.
“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. I want it to also delete scrobbles and spotify playlists that feature the artists. Maybe it should read your email too and tell you who you shouldn’t talk to anymore, i could use that
Absolutely gorgeous high definition video of The Honeycombs doing their Joe Meek produced hit “Have I The Right.” Honey Lantree on drums. Nuff said.
Previously on Dangerous Minds: The Incredibly Strange Life Of Rock and Roll Alchemist Joe Meek.
Anthony Newley’s misbegotten take on The Beatles’ “Within You Without You” is so stunningly bad it has a certain hideous allure. It’s from the 1977 TV special The Beatles Forever, which featured Newley, Tony Randall, Ray Charles, Bernadette Peters, Paul Williams, among others, eviscerating Beatles classics. It doesn’t get much worse than this…and that’s why I dig it.
The Youtube description of the video is almost as amusing as the clip itself:
Movietone News footage of Sunbury 1974 (the end of the 60s) with Mr Newley’s epoch defining reading of George Harrison’s exotic toe-tapper from the Beatles Pop Art album Sgt Peppers. Newley is magnificent as always.
Tony Randall introduces the song.
In 1969 Apple Records released Maybe Tomorrow by The Iveys, a band that was poised to be the next big thing.
Although the album was scheduled to be released worldwide, the release in the U.S. and the U.K. at that time was halted without explanation. Many reasons for halting the album have been suggested by the band and Apple employees, but the most common theory in that Apple’s newly-hired president, Allen Klein, stopped all non-Beatle releases on Apple until he could examine the company’s finances, which were in disarray at the time.
Dismayed by the failure of their first album to get a proper release and the general consensus among band members that the name The Iveys was a bit too twee, the group changed their name to Badfinger and later re-released most of the songs from Maybe Tomorrow on Badfinger’s Magic Christian Music.
The song “Maybe Tomorrow” is a decent little pop tune. “Tube Train” is a standout raver with a distinct Who vibe. A lost gem.
Maybe Tomorrow was released on CD in 2004 but has gone out of print. It’s available at a price here.
“Tube Train” after the jump…
Welsh born Paul Bradley Couling (Mal Ryder) never made it as a rocker in Britain, but with his band The Primitives he became a superstar in Italy during the sixties.
I took part in four international Sanremo festivals, and all the top Italian TV shows, photo’s on the covers of all top magazines, scandals in the papers of my supposedly flirts, there were paparazzi everywhere, my private life was non-existent, my shows, full houses, and I was getting mobbed everywhere I went. I drove fast sports cars, well, you name it I did it !!!!! I was doing so well in Italy by this time, that it was pointless going back to England, as I had nothing going for me there, and I was making one hit after another in Italy, at first with The Primitives cover versions of a Young Rascals song called ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore’ in Italian ‘Yeeeah’. Success was growing every day, so much so that every song got in the charts, most to N° 1. and selling a million copies, like my version of the Bee Gees song ‘I’ve Got A Message To You’, in Italian ‘Pensiero d’amore’, after which I made a musical film, one of four I made in my career as an actor.”
Mal’s stardom would remain an Italian phenomenon. Try as he might, success in Britain eluded him.
At one stage I tried to make it back in England, with a record, using part of my real name Paul Bradley for the Baby Records. We recorded it in London’s PYE Studio. All songs where in English. This LP came out in 1980 called Silhouette from which was taken some singles which got into the charts in Italy and in many other countries, (but not England.)!!!”
“Yeeah” is so good I’ve included two versions in the following montage, which also includes a raunchy cover of The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin”, with Ryder sounding like his Welsh brethren Tom Jones, and “Pensiero d’amore”. The first 100 seconds of this video is among my favorite rock moments of all time - Mal emoting like a motherfucker while a stoic Italian audience responds with bemused indifference.
Super stella!
