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This is very, very good news. Potentially this could be a treasure trove of lost TV appearances by all manner of people...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... Ln-duyCrNk

Did you see the bass guitar at 3:45 during the fragment of Elton John's performance?

In 1971, with the closing down stock sale, those basses were going fpr £59 each - new - in Denmark Street (probably bitsas).

...yes and for a few minutes (before looking more closely) I thought it was Hank playing his white Marvin! I'll assume that it was a Shadows/Rostill bass? If so, I wonder who was playing it? Not John, of course.

This haul means that, potentially, we might all (eventually) get to see some late Sixties appearances of the Shads on TOTP, Marvin, Welch and Farrar on TOTP and the now legendary Bowie performance of Starman on Lift Off With Ayshea! And gawd knows what else...

The part that interests me is how Kaleidoscope hope to get a return from this material. Will it really be good enough to sell to TV companies for 'golden oldie' programmes? Then there's all the rights to be sorted out, including BBC/ITV as the originators of the material. Also, of course, it's all black and white, which is a hard sell these days.

Around the country there may be other 'treasure troves' of material, with people (or their decendants) wondering what to do with it. I'm in that position. Back in the day I recorded many sound tracks from the BBC-TV music concerts in the early '70s. No Shadows, before I get anyone's hopes up, but many other artists, from the well-known (Marc Bolan, The Rolling Stones, Mike Oldfield, etc) to the obscure (Bonnie Kelloc, David Buskin?). All on quarter-inch audio tape. What to do with it? I made enquiries a few years ago but I couldn't raise any interest, so it continues to sit in my cellar. The thing is, it was from a time when 2" Quad videotape reels were being reused after transmission because they were so expensive, so my audio tapes are the only recording left of those shows. If only the broadcasters had known then what we know now about the interest in that era!

drakula63 wrote:...yes and for a few minutes (before looking more closely) I thought it was Hank playing his white Marvin! I'll assume that it was a Shadows/Rostill bass? If so, I wonder who was playing it? Not John, of course

Although you can't see his face in the film it's almost certainly Dee Murray, judging from the correct playing of the fretboard and also the hugely flared trousers. An interesting story here, that despite being a hugely talented bass player, he and Nigel Ollsen (drummer) were only allowed to play on one track of each of the previous albums (except the live one where the touring band played), the rest being done by studio staff like Herbie Flowers and Brian Odgers, apparently at the insistence of management or producer (the latter seems odd as Gus Dudgeon produced albums by famous bands which they clearly played on). Maybe it was linked to the fact that Elton John was himself a studio musician - it seems likely their appearance on one track of each of the previous albums was a requirement of Elton John.

Dee Murray and Nigel Olssen were part of Elton John's 'touring band'. Under pressure from Elton John (so the story goes), from this album onwards Elton John's band played on the studio recordings. If you listen to the standard of the bass arrangements and playing, you can see why Elton John insisted.

Dee Murray usually played a Precision bass.