Comrade Redgrave, campaigning as a MP candidate for the Workers Revolutionary Party, February 1974.

 
More of these at Bostworld.

 
From BBC News:

Letters written by the late playwright Oscar Wilde are to be auctioned off later this month.

The letters appear to reveal Wilde “propositioning” a magazine editor at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

Alan Judd from Bamfords auction house said they are important as they “help to fill in pieces of Oscar Wilde’s tempestuous jigsaw”.

The collection of five letters is expected to sell for £10,000 on 24 September.

The letters were written to magazine editor Alsager Vian and are being sold off by his descendants.

 
Rare Japanese documentary footage of The Dictators, Suicide, Bad Brains, Mink DeVille, James Chance, The Ramones and The Dead Boys at CBGB, 1978. The Plasmatics at Cbs 1980 from NYC cable show ‘Innertube’.  Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, also from Innertube, 1979, at Max’s.
 

 
Found randomly on YouTube: An actual television advertisement for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album circa 1974. I wonder if this ever aired anywhere?
 

 
One hit wonders in Germany, Adam and Eve do their best Sonny and Cher in this video from 1967, “They Can Look At Us And Laugh”. The duo were Eva Bartova from Prague and American expatriate John Christian Dee.

There’s not much information on John Christian Dee that I can find. He was born in Buffalo, NY. He moved to London in his twenties. He wrote some songs for The Pretty Things and The Pink Fairies. He later married the infamous Janie Jones and together they ran a prostitution ring in London. He and Jones were busted and sentenced to prison but he fled the country. In 1975 he was jailed in Germany for stabbing his girlfriend. He escaped and disappeared somewhere in France.  John Christian Dee died in London in 2004.

After Dee split for England, Eva continued to record with a new Adam, Hartmut Schairer, but the results weren’t nearly as interesting as her brief career with Dee. She died in 1989.

The video is a real oddity. The Sonny and Cher replication is pretty amazing. The song sounds like something Sonny would write, with its depiction of hippies as proud loners being ostracized and ridiculed by straight society. The first Sonny and Cher album was titled Look At Us - not much different from the title of this song. Dee has Sonny’s vocal mannerisms down pat: stretching vowels with a wiseass snarl.

Anyway, here’s Adam and Eve. If you don’t dig the song, you’ll love the wigs and bell bottoms. If you want more, buy the CD here.
 

 
More Adam and Eve after the jump…

 
The sound isn’t great, but the video looks terrific and it’s new to me. Jimi kicks in around the 2 minute mark.
 

Footage from heart of Swinging London in legendary ‘I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet’ boutique, Carnaby Street. Jimi plays Like A Rolling Stone, Stone Free. footage was taken in 1967, Chelmsford, England.

 
Jack Kerouac reads from Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show in 1959. This clip is taken from the documentary film, Whatever Happened to Keroauc? It’s often mislabeled as being a reading from On The Road, but it’s not (to add further to the confusion, there is a close up of On The Road’s cover as Steve Allen is speaking).
 

 
Sister Janet Mead

“The Lord’s Prayer’ was recorded in 1974 as a B-side to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” by Sister Janet Mead and became a huge hit, first in Australia and then internationally. It sold over 3 million copies.

The whole song is pretty cool, but the first 15 seconds is sublime. The bass and drum riff, distorted phased guitar and tambourines meld into a classic slice of vintage sounding sixties psychedelia. This nun rocks! 

Describing her success as “a horrible time” in her life that shook the foundations of her faith, Sister Mead managed to overcome her dark night of the soul and continues to record and perform to this day.

This video is from Australian TV show Rage and it features some documentary footage of Sister Mead between gigs.
 

 
The Singing Nun

Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933(1933-10-17) – 29 March 1985), known in English as The Singing Nun, was a Belgian nun, and a member (as Sister Luc Gabriel) of the Dominican Fichermont Convent in Belgium. She became internationally famous in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the song “Dominique”. Although she was deeply religious, she was also increasingly critical of some of the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine and eventually became an advocate of birth control. She also agreed with John Lennon’s statements about Jesus in 1966. In 1967, she recorded a song entitled “Glory Be to God for the Golden Pill” — a paean to contraception — under the name Luc Dominique. It was a commercial failure

In a last ditch bid to regain some commercial success, Deckers, once again billing herself as The Singing Nun, released a disco version of ‘Dominique”. It bombed. Her poorly managed financial world was in shambles. She was broke and deeply in debt. In 1985 she and her longtime companion, Anna Pecher, checked out with a combination of booze and alcohol. Where was God when she needed it most?

In her suicide note, Jeanine wrote:

“Am I a failure? I try to stay honest with myself. To look for the truth, and try to question everything in my life…
Ten years ago I would have said I was a loser.
Now I don’t think in terms of losing or winning…
Life is a continuum. You’re constantly on your way. One day I feel good, the next I feel bad. Altogether it’s bearable.
Would I do it all over again? That’s not a good question. You can’t.
You can’t do it all over again. Voila”

 
Watch a trailer for a new film that purports to tell the true tale of The Singing Nun after the jump…