Nick Drake - Peel Session 1969 video free download
The only known surviving material from the Nick Drake (19 June 1948 -- 25 November 1974) Peel session, recorded 5 August 1969 and broadcasted the day after.
The songs included are two snatches of "Time of No Reply" and "Three Hours". Other songs recorded on that session were "Cello Song" and "River Man".
When asked about the surviving status of the session in 1999 Peel replied: 'It's a difficult question. It was supposed to be an expiry date of I think about three or four months on sessions. Of course, it was very much the BBC's way at the time that there was no provision made for keeping popular music sessions because they were held to be pretty much valueless, and for a long time they just existed in boxes alongside of the corridor, and (John) Walters and myself gradually found places where we could hide them and keep them away from the people who wanted to destroy them, but it didn't go very well to begin with. It's one of those things where the BBC at the time, very much something like, Gardener's Question Time, episodes of that would be kept in a lead-lined case at the bottom of a mineshaft somewhere in the Home Counties for all of recorded time if possible, but something like a Pink Floyd session would be erased within weeks. You know, very strange business altogether. So I'm not sure whether that Nick Drake session still exists. cos a lot of sessions from that time, maybe one or two tracks are still around, the others have just disappeared over the years"
Comments
10 years ago
Peter Freeman
At the BBC the decision whether to wipe tapes - of both radio and TV broadcasts - would have been influenced by economic and cultural factors. First, the "BBC culture" was formed by the stereotypical BBC intake of white, male, upper-crust ex-public-schoolboys. In that corporate culture popular music was sneered at, and the preferred music of the dominant elite would have been either strictly classical or else one of the competing forms of jazz. The idea of preserving the music made by any of the arriviste lower-class 'musical combos' would not have received much support. There may have been a reluctant acknowledgement that The Beatles were a special case, but few if any others were regarded as anything more than irrelevant upstarts. The "Not One Of Us" attitude persisted long in the BBC as well as outside it. I encountered it, still snooty and going strong, as late as the 1970s. Thank God Peel and Walters managed to do some guerilla salvaging - but those two hardly fitted the corporate stereotype in any case. They were definitely Not One Of Us.Second, the economics of tape purchase and storage in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially for the BBC. The BBC was then - and before, and afterwards - always short of money for day-to-day operations. The Corporation may have been overstuffed with Oxbridge graduates in executive positions, but spending on programmes at all levels was kept to an absolute minimum, and that meant that purchases of the tapes used to record these sessions was only possible once a case had been made, and approved by multiple levels of BBC bureaucracy. They were expensive, and given the limited supply of tapes they were constantly being erased and re-used. The same limitations led to tapes of television programmes such as Dr Who being wiped. Really, the miracle is that permission could be obtained to archive any broadcast material at all, although the dreary Establishment culture at the BBC would inevitably lead to the preservation of programmes The Chaps thought worth preserving. Gardeners Question Time might perhaps make the grade, or something "important" like Any Questions.Let's be thankful for the scraps that Peel and Walters rescued, and for the devoted home recordists who can provide us with a little more of the lost output (in the face of a determined and irrational campaign to kill home taping). And then lament the huge volume of recorded broadcasts which are lost for ever.10 years ago
Brookfield
Full session being released later this year, on vinyl, as part of a limited edition book.10 years ago
Maurizio Greco
Buongiorno..10 years ago
Jonathan Espeche
What idiots the BBC were for not saving ALL of the BBC sessions people did back then. SMH 11 years ago
pawnsacrifice1
Can you imagine finding the tapes with this on?...shame it's lost as Nick Drake's stuff is rare as it is12 years ago
