New BBC Series: 'Seven Ages of Rock' starts May 19th

They couldn't even bring themselves to say who Kathleen Hanna was. She was just a friend of the band. Would it really have been so hard to say, "Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill"?

haha, yes. Already tired of how narrow its focus was, I was pleased to hear that namecheck, then baffled by her being no more than "Kurt's friend". And there I was thinking it was already kind of stupid that past Nirvana documentaries had mentioned "Kurt's friend Dylan Carlson".

I missed the first five or ten minutes of the indie one, so for me British indie was The Smiths splitting up, The Stones Roses existing for a while, then Oasis battling it out with Blur. Huzzah!

Any chance this will be released on DVD? (I imagine the licensing for all the video footage, live recordings and so on would be pretty impressive, but this is the BBC...)

J&MC Whistle test: Stopping the song like what?

Jim shouted "stop! stop!!!" at one point, whereupon the horrible racket they were making ground to a thankful halt. Koogs is right; this wasn't in the original broadcast. I'm assuming this was a tape of the "rehearsal".

Unless it was another of the programme's ill-advised "reconstructions".

this ep was 'how indie killed itself'. i only caught the last 40 mins or so. i'll watch the rest later.

ooh! want! want!

(pssh, what are the chances? They probably used that by mistake!)

Although, how do they do those shows? They ask for the video, they get it onto a copy tape, then drop the segment in, right? (I used to work in these places)...

>the whole thing was very much intended for american audiences. shows >highlighting the brilliance of The Sweetest Ache wouldn't play well in >minnesota.

How is this show meant for an American audience? What American will ever see it? It's BBC produced anyway... I doubt the American funding stipulated 4 mentions of the Pixies, but no mentions of Pavement, etc.

Metal: no ACDC, no Whitesnake
Glam: no Marc Bolan
Indie: no Dog-Faced Hermans, no Death By Milkfloat

The series is a US/UK co-production and most of the finance came from the US side.

"The true banner of indie is carried nowadays by Rascall Flatts and Dave Matthews Band"

where was steve albini? how come we had to sit and suffer scott litt banging on every 10 minutes and no mention of him?

the whole 'kurt had the UNPLUGGED venue dressed like a funeral...' spiel and then the scott litt waffling that 'it had to end there with that scream...' on the last song etc felt like a stupid and dangerous thing to do. suggesting to a new audience that may not know the whole story that he maybe planned to kill himself afterwards and so on.

they made it sound like that was the last ever nirvana gig and it wasn't.

Never mind Albini - just the one, very brief, passing referral to C**rtn*y L*v*? Were the producers feart of her lawyers?

>>ooh! want! want!

>>(pssh, what are the chances? They probably used that by mistake!)

Unlikely in the extreme. For a clip such as this one, they would normally just call up the completed programme as broadcast. It would be a very vigilant film researcher that would call up rehearsal/insert tapes too (which, by rights, shouldn't even exist). But, judging from some of the hyper-obscure Smiths footage also included, the film researcher *was* very vigilant.

The series is a US/UK co-production and most of the finance came from the US side.

-- Marcello Carlin, Monday, 2 July 2007 11:31 (1 hour ago) Link

Yeah, but that's still irrelevent when it's made exclusively for the UK audience and written/produced by the BBC (it's British, I hear), thus making the "made for the American audience" argument invalid since no US audience is ever going to see this.

There's probably some cultural diplomacy involved (rock = something from America that's not war, etc.), but I doubt some American government agent was rubbing his hands like "yeah, more Pixies, less Pavement... yes... excellent..."

Well, the Jesus & Mary Chain "In a hole" footage was originally shown twice. (yeah, I know, contradition in terms there)..

So, my guess is that the whole thing is filed under "J&MC Session" and the OGWT progs dropped in the completed song as per performance, and the 7Ags show just picked a satisfactory part of the whole session as illustration.

ooh what was the hyper-obscure smiths footage?? didnt see the last ep.

The point is that the BBC made the programme with a view to selling it overseas, so they have to concentrate on acts who are "internationally known" on a major-selling level.

did no one else think it was a bit of a dour ending that they basically admitted at the end that nothing new can be done, the best you can hope for now is just reassembling elements of the past (and thats it, more or less)?

the kind words from john harris and noel gallagher about the libertines seemed a bit forced.

As regards the Smiths footage, it seemed to consist of a snatch of their TOTP appearance with "This Charming Man" followed by an extract from the Hacienda gig which they allegedly played later the same night.

> Yeah, but that's still irrelevent when it's made exclusively for the UK audience and written/produced by the BBC (it's British, I hear), thus making the "made for the American audience" argument invalid since no US audience is ever going to see this.

a quick google says that the north american rights for the series have been sold to VH-1

wasn't there also dressing room footage of the smiths?

It was all fashionably smudged up.

"Fashionably smudged up"!!! It was probably shot on domestic equipment (which in 1983 meant a VHS camcorder), then passed through over-compensatory video noise reduction to make it watchable. This process -while removing noise- makes the picture rather smeary. Priceless stuff, nevertheless.

In terms of removing noise, it's a pity they couldn't remove Julian Rhind-Tutt's hugely irritating narration.

were the housemartins in it?

No.

But a generous amount of time was devoted to the Libertines, so that's near enough.

that's very unkind marcello. paul heaton is surely the melodic elephant in this almost empty room.

Unfortunately he didn't sell in America.

And also, unlike Tommy Doherty, he is not a "character."

Isn't he the only convicted football hooligan to have a #1 single, though?

surely the housemartins were the first "indie" act to get properly big, first to get a no 1 single anyway?

Unfortunately they didn't sell in America.

marr has always said that HAPPY HOUR was a rip of I WANT THE ONE I CAN'T HAVE. he sort of has a point.

ha. i read marr as andrew marr and thought you were making a zing about some of his *alleged* revisionism in his history of britain program. happy hour is about thatcher thou innit...

Uhhhh10 is a moron. They said American funding, not funding by the American government (we don't have anything really equivalent to the BBC). And we get a lot of BBC shows over here. The rest of the post was too stupid too even bother with.

Intended to market overseas doesn't/shouldn't mean 'can only focus on bands known/successful outside the US and UK'. do they really base it on the logic that less people will watch if they haven't heard of everyone being talked about? it'd ridiculous.

Sorry Bill Magill, but you can choke on my hairy, foul-smelling balls. Are you one of those Brit-appeasing paste-o-philes? the only British shows we get here are those dusty Britcoms 60 year olds watch on the PBS affiliates. Otherwise, only a handful of digital cable owners get BBC4 if they select it as part of their package.

But, if the intention is for the BBC to sell it overseas, then that makes sense.

Not sure what a Brit appeasing past-o-phile is, douchebag. I've actually seen some recent music-related BBC stuff on my tv, which does't happen to get BBC4. I don't know where "here" is for you but it sounds like the tv options are about as good as the education you received.

And no thanks on the offer re: your balls-I'd like to instead take the opportunity to kick the living shit out of you.

take it outside, you two!

not in MY gym!

Henry S Cooper?

lol noobs

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=seven%20ages%20of%20rock&search_sort=video_date_uploaded&search_category=0&search=Search&v=

there's your last episode right there in full. well 9 parts, but 'full' if you get me.

Is there a DVD version of this yet?

That kind of stuff rarely makes it here, but as I will be in UK next week I thought there might be a chance to pick it up, if available. I really want to see this series.

Looks like these people finally realise there's more to DVD entertainment than rock history programs. Now good and about time.

fap? (x-post)

Finally managed to find these as a Torrent, and have subsequently burned them to a DVD to watch in calm. Have already seen the indie episode, and it was ace. I never get tired of this kind of series, and in this case, he covers a lot of genres who have been sort of skipped in earlier series. (I guess the first and third programs are the only ones covering genres that have largely been covered very comprehensively by similar documentaries earlier)

this is basically the same as that other britpop doc. lameness.

I would say no. For starters, the other doc completely ignored Suede. This one, on the other hand, has none of Liam Gallagher, whose statements are entertaining and fun, but completely uniformative as the guy cannot possibly have an IQ of more than 50 at most.

Plus you have the entire indie history here, not just those few years from 93-94 until 1997-98. And there's also less of that other contemporary stuff such as Brit Art etc. This one concentrates on the music.