Just listening to the radio and I was instantly transported to the TOTP of my childhood (that's Top of the Pops, a TV show playing some of the top forty songs of the time for those of you who weren't born then/aren't UK based). Anyway when I just heard 'Martha's Harbour' by All About Eve it reminded me of the first time I saw it live in the TOTP studio - a very memorable experience, for all the wrong reasons.
Picture the scene. You are sitting watching your TV at, I believe, 7pm on a Thursday evening, and the camera pans to the next band. The music starts. The camera goes close up to the singer, whose voice you can hear singing. Her mouth isn't moving. You can hear the guitar playing. The guitarist isn't playing. The song progresses. The singer still isn't singing, she isn't attempting to mime, she is just perched on a stool in the middle of a sea of faces and looks slightly confused, occasionally turning her head from side to side scanning the studio.
In a later interview Julianne Regan apparently said that they couldn't actually hear the music and didn't know that the song had started.
It was the death knell for TOTP playing 'live' music. After that everyone assumed everything was mimed, even when it patently wasn't (i.e. was horribly flat).
All this reminiscence after a few minutes of a song heard on Radio Two just after 6 this morning
Oh and All About Eve went back and sang it again the next week, with people glued to the screen in case it happened again... I was one of them. It didn't.
Randomeanderings: Useful and useless things, random assorted ideas and general waffle
Randomeanderings: Useful and useless things, random assorted ideas and general waffle
- clinestar
- Part time poet, full time librarian, student of the delights of milk chocolate. Likes books, milk, paddling, poetry, scribbling, chocolate, notebooks, sea, piers. Not necessarily in that order. All work copyright cih.