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Am I the only one who still converts prices in my head and find myself regularly outraged to be charged 15/- for a Mars Bar?
[quote=”Besbvesdy” post=3632] faced with the non-compliance of some guests[/quote]
In the interests of fairness, it wasn’t non-compliance. One guest is deceased and we couldn’t find any representation for their interest; Richard and Linda Thompson’s spot has already been released on DVD by RT himself (you’ll find a rough version here –
The other spot was (a) embarrassingly poor and (b) the perpetrator didn’t respond to initial requests and we didn’t try too hard to chase them.
and as a follow up to the last, my correspondent in 2005 wrote:
Hi Ian,
I will search for -(no promises after 3 house moves)- for a couple of
cassette tapes that Jake gave me at Easter 1997 which were titled –
‘Masters – Jake In The Studio’ or something similar. He stayed with me for
the week-end during a gig I promoted at the Theatr Gwaun, Fishguard and
generously presented me with the tapes on the way to the station. I gathered
they were drafts for ‘a new album or two’. I made a copy and enjoyed a very
eclectic mix of songs. If I find them I would be glad to make a copy and
send you the originals.Alas, he didn’t find the tapes and passed away last year. That Easter ’97 date looks a bit late but it’s all I have
Hi Mark. Over the years we managed to identify a number of video and audio recordings of Jake in the BBC archive using a variety of sources. It meant that when the quest to release the “And Songs” material first began we knew more than the BBC–specifically we had the library references for the shows which, at the time, the Beeb thought were lost. We also tracked down a lot of other material lurking on old cassettes, off-air Betamax recordings and others. The Jake in Germany cd was a professional remaster of an off-air recording that a fan had made from a British Forces radio show, part 2 of which has never been found. And there are recordings of shows done for hospital radio and assorted audience recordings of gigs.
The BBC themselves were very helpful to me, originally, then Paul Thompson when he took on the work of getting “And Songs” released, but there are difficulties, the main one being that unless you have an inside track to the archives then it will be expensive to sift through the masses of material that is either unindexed or badly indexed.
We are still in the early days following the release of “And Songs” but there is an open question about what to do about the other material we know exists – eg do we try and do a further release on a smaller scale since these are likely to be of interest to only a few people? There is merit in that, but there is also expense in licensing, remastering, etc. and the time needed to put agreements in place and ensure royalties are properly paid etc. This includes radio material. One of Jake’s songs that is a personal favourite – The Cenotaph – crops up only on a Radio Show and on the “The Camera and the Song” with slight variations in the lyric. But there would be a lot of work involved in getting even just that one song out and at present it is only public in the sense that there is a video of the song being performed at the Scarborough Jakefest on YouTube.
And then there was a fellow who emailed me once to say Jake had given him a cassette of some unrecorded material to see what he thought. Unfortunately the tape had disappeared and the fellow couldn’t remember what was on it and he has since, I think, passed away.
Finally, back in 2002 we had a provisional list of songs that we thought were lost. Over the years those marked with an asterisk have cropped up, so nil desperandum. This was the list with those now known marked with an asterisk:
I’m just a dog*
The Cake
Tonton Georges
The Shabby Little Shepherdesses*
The Policeman’s Jig*
The Appalling Mr Kinnell
Lady Penelope
Fiffi Golightly
When I Get Filthy Rich
The Lonely American
The Immortals
The Prisoner*
Freda*
Kirkstall Road Girl*
A ripe old age
Uncle Arthur*Ian
I would be very surprised were there not other things lurking. There is a very brief clip in “Jake on the Box” of him performing a song about a council workers’ strike on Nationwide. The makers of JOTB didn’t have funds to dig any deeper for it as per the following message I got from the director:
[i] … the piece of archive you mention was a lengthy and frustrating problem for me. As you’ve seen, there is a VHS of this, made from a 16mm telerecording of that edition of ‘Nationwide’. However, any enquiries searching for this piece result in an “inserts tape” for the programme which contains filmed reports, but nothing of the studio presentation which, of course, included Jake’s song.
Twice we asked for transfers of this; and twice, on the DigiBeta tape, came back the filmed inserts to the programme, full of exciting stuff like scrapyards, earthmovers and Hugh Scully testing Harold Wilson’s bed (very ‘Nationwide’) but nothing of Jake who performed only in the studio.
Its details are:
Song “Where have all the municipal workers gone”
from tape PL58877 from Nationwide tx 7/10/70
Please copy from 1:29:00 which is the large “NATIONWIDE” captionTwice, Ian, this brought back only the inserts. I didn’t have any more money to pay for transfers after this, and the BBC were howling for the programme which, as you know, then took several more months to make it to air.
[/i]Ian
That was probably when we did the evening in Great Torrington. We knew beforehand that Sheila Thackray and a couple of the children would be in the audience, we didn’t expect Ralph McTell or Bob and Sue Haverley. It was me who sang Little Thomas Haverley only to see someone dash out of the hall in tears – Sue Haverley.
It was written as a song on the birth of a child to family friends. Thomas was certainly still around when we did that show – his mum said she’d let him know the song was sung.
The cherry tree was real, but, while still a sapling, was eaten by the family goat.
On the film version of the Camera and the Song, one of the memorials filmed is the one at Grassington. The names he uses at the beginning are not to be trusted – “Susan Haverley” for instance was the mother of Thomas Haverley. When I performed the song I used to have a look at the local war memorial where we were playing and use some names from it plus the only one of my family I know to have died in the Great War, Frank Weston of the Sherwood Foresters
I got an email once from someone who claimed Jake gave him a tape of some home recordings of “new” material but my correspondent thought he’d lost it in a house move and didn’t reply to my follow up promptings. These may just have been material we already knew about. There are some old songs which were mentioned in concert programmes but which never made tape either as far as we know. One I would have liked to hear was “The Appalling Mr Kinell” with a chorus that apparently went ‘Kinnel, ‘Kinell… The late Ian Watson claimed Jake had sung it for him once on a car journey but that it was never properly finished.
I see no-one responded. The answers in order are:
1. See the news on the front page of the website
2. see answer 1 above
3. Yes🙂
Ian
Hmmm, I might even take my guitar out of its case and try and remember how to play it for something like that…
Amities
Ian
That version of the Cenotaph in the last post is by me and Hugh Bradley a couple of years ago. I have two recordings of Cenotaph, one from Camera and the Song and the other from a radio programme and there is a very slight difference in the lyric as I recall.
The Camera and the Song still exists in the BBC archive and I have a rough recording of it somewhere (although I can’t remember if it is on VHS or DVD). The show also has a great version of Brigadier with silver band.
In a similar vein, I would really quite like to get hold of a copy of the Alex Glasgow show in the same series. I don’t suppose anyone can help?
Hi Ian and welcome to the site.
A considerable amount of material is in the BBC archives and we have the catalogue numbers for all that of which we are aware. I previously discussed how to get hold of this with the BBC and got a long way until we found out how much the licence fee was going to be to get the rights to remaster and release it.
That was a couple of years ago and I went away to think again. Rest assured that we’ll keep trying though.
Ian
