News, Views and Music Issue 116 (Intro)

October 14^th:

Dear friends, good news! (at long last, some good news!) I now have broadband – just in time to see our stats counter move perilously near the magical 10,000 hits mark. Be sure to receive a ‘thankyou’ not when it does if you’re one of our regular members and have written into us or sent me your email address/twitter feed/facebook link etc– I can’t promise anything more than a clipart cake but, well, thankyou for your support all the same. Having the internet at home means no more trips to the library only to find the computer’s not working, furiously writing in order to make a deadline before they close and hopefully more time to sort out our ongoing technical problems. The site t35.com is back by the way – I’m in the process of transferring all my files across which hopefully means I won’t have to post all the links again (which took me flipping hours the last time they went wrong at Easter). I may have to revert back to making these newsletters fortnightly when my hideously long form comes but still, I’m a newsletter ahead of myself at the moment so that shouldn’t be so bad. They can’t keep us down, eh, no matter what they throw at us! Good music will always endure (heard any Spice Girls on the radio recently? Me neither!) And we’ll do our best to make sure that we endure, even if we have to go through as many variations and line-up changes as our featured band The Jefferson Airplane. First, though, the news...

                                                        

♫ Grateful Dead News: The Grateful Dead Movie is coming to DVD! Well, eventually, apparently the DVD set has been delayed until 2012 already, but the blu-ray version of this concert film is hitting shops this week apparently. The film, which is largely made up of the Dead’s ‘farewell’ shows from 1974 (before their 18 month hiatus) has been out of print for years, ever since a video copy in the early 1990s, and also features footage of favourite band haunts and other fan friendly footage (such as the ‘Mars Hotel’ as featured on the ‘Mars Hotel’ cover getting knocked down!) The set also features five hours of extras! More news if and when...

♫ Pink Floyd News: Poor BBC6, they always arrive late to the party, even if they do often arrive with the greatest presents. Following on from a fortnight ago’s BBC4 Floyd Night (and to tie-in with the latest re-issues – and please have a look at some older issues if you want to know more because I’m sick of writing about them!) there’s a full 10 hours or so devoted to the band. The programmes start in the early hours of Friday, October 7^th, skip a few hours till the evening and continue to the early hours of the following Saturday. They’re a mixture of the usual BBC repeats we see often on BBC6 (the Syd Barrett doc was only on again this Summer), some very old repeats we haven’t heard in ages (the ‘Record Producers’ doc) and some exciting looking news ones (A whole hour of Pink Floyd at the BBC, all of which is unavailable on CD (even though bits and pieces have been repeated)? Fantastic!) For the record here’s the full list of programmes:

12am and 3am ‘Wish You’d Been Here – The Story Of Pink Floyd’ (in two parts, first broadcast 2005 or there abouts)

7pm ‘Now Playing – A Pink Floyd Special’ (various Floyd records)

9pm ‘Record Producers – Pink Floyd’ (I never quite understood how the Floyd were ‘producers’, perhaps they’d been better off looking at Hurricane Smith, producer of the first album? Still an excellent series – I hope they repeat the 10cc one sometime soon too because that was fabulous!, circa 2007)

10.30pm ‘The Producer’s Playlist’ – yet more Floyd records, though with a more unusual slant: the producer’s favourite Floyd record is apparently ‘Fearless’ from 1972’s ‘Meddle’ LP, not a track you ever hear too often!

11pm ‘Floyd At The BBC’ – I can’t wait: Peel Sessions, In Concert recordings, all unreleased on CD and all unrepeated since first broadcast, barring two 15 min sessions that have been on BBC6 before

1am ‘Desert Island Discs – Roger Waters’ – the bassist’s surprisingly humble and chatty interview-with-music-choices programme from last year. Well worth hearing iof you haven’t already

3.30-5.30am ‘The Thing About Syd’ (in 2 parts, 2006): Another repeat for this bitty but entertaining doc broadcast soon after the madcap’s death. A fitting tribute, but not a patch on the TV version broadcast a couple of years before his death

Radio 2 are always late to every party and have a mixed record with documentaries: their new documentary ‘Days In The Life Of Pink Floyd’ is a diary-based version of the usual story and is broadcast on Monday, October 10^th at 10pm.

ANNIVERSARIES: Happy birthday greetings to AAA members born between October 11^th and 17^th: Paul Simon who turns 70 on October 13^th, Justin Hayward (guitarist with The Moody Blues 1967-present) who turns 65 on October 14^th and Bob Weir (guitarist with The Grateful Dead 1965-95) who turns 64 on October 16^th. Anniversaries of events include: The Beatles receive their first ever gold disc, for ‘She Loves You’ a year and a week after their first ‘proper’ release (October 11^th 1963); The Beatles’ prestigious TV gig on ‘Saturday Night At The London Palladium’ (October 13^th 1963); The Who release their milestone single ‘I Can See For Miles’ (October 13^th 1967); Janis Joplin’s ashes are scattered off the coast of California after nearly a year of legal hold-ups (October 13^th 1971); Grace Slick, then still with her first band The Great Society, makes her first on-stage appearance with the Jefferson Airplane after their singer Signe Anderson leaves to have a baby (October 14^th 1966); Pink Floyd play their first major gig at the launch party for underground newspaper International Times (October 15^th 1966); The Kinks release their all important follow-up to ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ (October 16^th 1964) and finally, The Beatles make their first TV appearance, singing ‘Some Other Guy’ at the Cavern Club for TV show ‘People And Places’ (October 17^th 1962) .