From Sounds, January 3, 1976.
Decided not to dial back the saturation on this image, as the dingy yellow-brown seems to convey the already-curdled-even-then aroma of this three-day event.
Old Wavest of the Old Wavest here must surely be Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance. Only two rungs below last night headliner Bad Company
A whole day - as buffer zone? - between that and the opening night's appearance of the Steve Marriotts All Stars
Climax Blues Band, Steve Gibbons Band, Barclay James Harvest, John Miles, Baker Gurvitz Army, Nazareth, Status Quo
But who the hell are Jack the Lad and Snafu?
For total hang-overs of the Sixties, you got Pretty Things and Procol bleedin' Harum
The issue contains a Special Souvenir Supplement of pieces based around the Great British Music Festival line-up - including cover stars Bad Company.
Hark at that zip, made of leather laces. With the leather stitchwork, it fairs screams LOOK AT MY LOINS. In this photo, there's also a weird sort of pube-tinged camel toe effect. Talk about "cock rock".
Plus Sounds writers predictions for '76
Roogalator! Kokomo! Boxer! John Bennett Band! Graham Bell! Mr Big!
A few New Wave-ish names poking in there, though - Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman, Dictators, The Tubes (attitudinally if not sonically), Motorhead (attitudinally but also a tiny bit sonically), Chris Spedding (well, as a gun for hire - he'd been a Womble - but "Motorbiking").
Last Exit is Noo Waver Sting's first, extremely Old Wave entity, a fusion-ish outfit
Snide coverage of the Great British Music Festival from
New Musical Express - "but where was the great?"
Ah looking at the ticket the first night is on the last day of 1975 - New Year's Eve - a Wednesday, so that issue of Sounds would have come out, in London if not the provinces, on that very day (the Sounds issue date is the Saturday - Jan 3 - as was the norm with the weekly music papers, but you could get hold of them a few days before the official publication date)
Imagine spending New Year's Eve in the Olympia suffering through that lineup.
Well, there's Thin Lizzy - and bottom of the bill Doctors of Madness. But still...
Now wait a minute - I don't know if there was a GBMF in '77, but there was one in '78, with a New Wave made-over line-up
Not completely made-over - Quintessence of Old Wave Hall of Famers Lindisfarne headline the middle night, there's also Frankie Miller, Bernie Torme, Bandit, Slade, and old trooper John Miles plugging away. And David Essex.
But the first night prominently showcases the next generation.
I had literally never heard of the Great British Music Festival in any of its iterations - clearly t's not entered the annals of fondly remembered Old Wave fests, even to the extent of Bickershaw Pop Festival of 1972 or Deeply Vale Free Festivals 1976 onwards
But otherwise there is a surprising dearth of documentation or reminiscence about TGBMF
Except Doug in Comments points to a usage of a photograph taken at the first festival of a well known "idiot dancer" infamous for dancing in the nude although not here
As used on the cover of The Chemical Brothers's 1999 album Surrender
I remember Ed from Chemicals telling me (when
I interviewed the groop around Surrender) that what he liked about raves - as opposed to nightclubs - was the "s
exless uniformity" of the mass experience, nobody posing or trying to look chic. So an event like GBMF or Knebworth or Reading probably be in that continuum... the opposite of the in-crowd, the mod / Northern Soul / New Romantic / rare groove continuum
Oasis at Knebworth would be a merger of the rock festival and the rave unity vibe.... as had been Stone Roses at Spike Island earlier
The crowd slumped on the concrete floor of the Olympia reminds me a bit of what people said of the ambience at the
Futurama festivals in Leeds.... indeed the
NME reviews of those festivals described as drear returns to the festivals of the pre-punk Underground era.... a nouveau hippiedom.... the New Wave reverting to Old Wave.
I would have thought that Motorhead were quite a big break from Old Wave. More modern sounding than most Punk.
ReplyDeleteWho was Bernie Torme? Any relation to Mel?
Bernie Torme was no relation of Mel, l don’t think. He was an Irish guitar player who at that time - and long after - occupied a Glam / New Wave / hard rock territory similar to Generation X, Hanoi Rocks, and early Japan. He had a severe case of Hendrix poisoning, and IIRC used to wear Hussars’ jackets on stage.
DeleteIan Gillan hired him in 1979 for his New Wave move, with some moderate commercial and (IMO) artistic success.
Bernie Taupin, Bernie Torme, Mel Torme - they cluster together in my mind. Add Mel Bush, promoter of The Great British Music Festival to the claggy pile-up
DeleteMel Torme, the Velvet Fog they called him. He sang on a Was (Not Was) song, "Zaz Turns Blue", on their second album. Always meant to check out his own albums. A singer's singer.
Should also point out that Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance were quite charming really. Far from superlative, but agreeably pastoral:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsP-gyWZibo
TBH, Thin Lizzy and [70s era] Status Quo sounds like a better NYE ticket than anything experienced in this century - but maybe that’s just me.
ReplyDeleteThe other two days however do look grim in the extreme - though I’d have given Slim Chance a go and checked out The Pretty Things.
The whole thing though seems like a grim precursor of the more recent trend of trying to lend things sense of - I dunno, comfort? legitimacy? grandeur? - by stcking “Great British..” in front of them, evoking a brand of flag-waving nationalism which seems about 10% self-consciously nostalgic / tongue-in-cheek and 90% just plain loathsome.
In fact, would the idea of a festival which deliberately limited the line-up to acts from a single country fly AT ALL these days? Seems a fairly horrendous prospect, really, though sadly quite likely to happen merely by accident given how impractical international touring has become.
Speaking of which - strikes me as highly unlikely Thin Lizzy would have wished to be considered as “British”, but.. a gig’s a gig I suppose.
Re: the ’78 line-up meanwhile, SO WEIRD to see Slade, kings of the world a few years earlier, relegated to bottom of the bill. Pretty much impossible to imagine a band of equivalent popularity slipping so hard / so quickly these days…
Well Nazareth and Bad Company would be a dream ticket for me. Excellent bands.
DeleteThe line up on the second night is an odd one, with the twin headliners. Kind of "...and if you don't like Procul Harem, then we've got Barclay James Harvest!".
I once checked out Procul Harem on the basis that they had Robin Trower so there might be some tasty riffs in there. But its all just fillched bits of Bach played on the mellotron. And some cryptic, non-specific lyrics. Really a very, very strange band, ploughing their own (and to me unlistenable) furrow.
I tried to give Procol another go only the other week, A Salty Dog and "Homburg" and that. It's got this stately, somewhat leaden feel to it. Gary Brooker has one of those gravely soulful, somehow oaken sounding Britsoul voices - very grown-up and dignified. Similar to Steve Winwood. Not as hammy and oversouled as Cocker. Quite restrained.
DeleteI suppose one can't discount how surprising "A Whiter Shade of Pale" must have seemed in its moment. Wasn't it number one for five weeks or something? The psychedelia in it is entirely in the lyrics, not in the music. The production avoids all the modish things.
They're odd because they are the only band I can think of where the keyboards are the main thing, and not merely an integral thing, like with say Yes or Deep Purple or The Doors. It would require a re-wiring of my brain to enjoy them because I have unconsciously trained myself that keyboards are rightly, naturally, subordinate.
DeleteI think you are correct to describe them as stately. They have a church-y feeling to them, like you are about to hear the vicar giving a sermon.
Perhaps the "British" is meant to be a geographic term - British Isles.
ReplyDelete(Do the Irish even use that expression?)
I feel like one of Slade's late '70s albums was marketed - maybe even titled? - something like "Whatever Happened To Slade?". Playing on that perception of slippage. It was a pretty huge plummet but not totally unpredecented or unparalleled - look at the fortunes of Steve Harley a year or two after Number 1 with "Make Me Smile". Or I dunno the Dave Clarke 5, who are probably close to Slade's 1960s equivalent as excitingly empty teenager-fodder.
That said, Slade had something of a comeback in the early '80s, playing higher up on the bill at metal festivals, having a modest hit or two - and they even made the front cover of Sounds. Indeed Soundsclips or maybe it was the other chap who scans and tweets old issues, Zounds Abounds, he recently did that particular issue with Slade on the front.
Slade's finest moment was in their second phase:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FaMOuyD_Yc
When I was a little kid in the 70's I couldn't stand Slade, they came across as very thuggish and intimidating, which is odd given the cuddly reputation they have nowadays.
(Do the Irish even use that expression?)
DeleteNo, we don't. Absolutely not. A categorical no on that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_Happened_to_Slade
ReplyDeleteThey were dinged by the death of glam, but what apparently torpedoed them was that they made a huge mid-70s effort to break America that went nowhere. From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/dec/10/slade-when-slade-rocked-the-world-1971-1975-box-set-review
'Lester Bangs was a fan, but everything about them seemed to baffle other US critics. “Noddy Holder, the resident ugly of the group, asked the audience if it was crazy [and] it answered affirmatively en masse … Truer words have never been spoken,” wrote one, going on to complain both about their “unsophisticated rock performed at the pain level of amplification” and Dave Hill who “wore glitter on his forehead and in his hair, along with a continual silly grin”. On the evidence of the soundtrack album Slade in Flame, you wonder if their hearts were really in it. Even the rockers are shot through with a wistful melancholy. The beautiful Summer Song (Wishing You Were Here) pines for old-fashioned British seaside holidays, kiss-me-quick hats and all: it evinces the kind of enthusiasm for Blackpool or Llandudno that can only be mustered by men going slowly mad as their tour bus makes its way through the Midwest.'
It looks like Slade were third on the bill at the 1978 Great British Music festival, going on before Generation X and headliners The Jam. Just six years before they were the first band to play Earls Court…found a link to a blog that contains a review of this gig in Sounds by Dave McCollough
ReplyDeletehttp://auralsculptors.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-jam-great-british-music-festival.html?m=1
Also, and this might be going off point, there’s a photo by Richard Young taken at the 1976 Great British Music festival called “Jesus Amongst The Fans”. The “Jesus” in question was famed idiot dancer, William Jellet, who thankfully in this picture has kept his clothes on.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.richardyounggallery.co.uk/products/jesus-amongst-fans-olympia-music-festival-london-1976
The image was used for the front cover of The Chemical Brothers 1999 album “Surrender”