Rock History

Unique stories from the British Music scene

Category: Blog

  • Have you got any footage of 50s / 60s groups playing?

    Have you got any footage of 50s / 60s groups playing?

    One of those daft questions we have asked before, and the answer sometimes is amazing in what turns up. We are looking for any old footage you might have shot on Super 8 or the like of your group or maybe a friend’s group either playing live or goofing about with equipment or vans. There tends…

  • Haydn Bendall and the day it is all over

    Haydn Bendall and the day it is all over

    You spend a week, months or even years in the studio working on and recording an album with the  artist – then one day it is all finished, mixed and delivered, the following day someone else moves into what has been your home. Then what?

  • Starting a documentary project with Peggy Seeger

    Starting a documentary project with Peggy Seeger

    A lovely day today when we starting talking and filming with Peggy Seeger about her upbringing in America pre and post war, the folk archiving father and the classical composing mother, her brothers Pete & Mike, Woodie Guthrie, Lead Belly, Libba Cotten composing ‘Freight Train’ and through to Peggy’s college days. We will resume in January for…

  • Phill Brown and recording the never more aptly named Burnin’ album

    Phill Brown and recording the never more aptly named Burnin’ album

    Now is your chance to learn a few studio tips from when Phill Brown was recording at Island’s Basing Street or his early Olympic Studios sessions

  • Lester Smith is the specialist microphone expert

    Lester Smith is the specialist microphone expert

    Lester is a long termer at the famous Abbey Road Studios and they need this sort of love of the recording process and attention to detail in order for the whole thing to keep rolling, rolling rolling  

  • Richard Brown played the bass for the Stones, Cyril Davies, Screaming Lord Sutch and more

    Richard Brown played the bass for the Stones, Cyril Davies, Screaming Lord Sutch and more

    Richard Brown aka Rick Fenson tells us what it was to have an electric bass guitar in those early days, you would get press ganged into every band that was playing and so long as you could play da Blues / R&B – it was all real fun unless you needed to go to the loo  

  • Caldwell Smythe and Colonel Barefoot’s Rock Garden

    Caldwell Smythe and Colonel Barefoot’s Rock Garden

    We had been doing some filming of the events at the old Station Hotel in Richmond where those young Rollin’ Stones cut their teeth in the Sixties and we met the extra-ordinary Caldwell Smythe who had put on the gigs at nearby Eel Pie Island in the late Sixties. Too many good stories to miss out…

  • Jonh Ingham and the journalist jaunts to worship those still standing Stones

    Jonh Ingham and the journalist jaunts to worship those still standing Stones

    Jonh – as he liked to spell his name in the heady Sounds days as a journalist – experienced Punk in all its evolving music altering stages, but he also used to get out and about with other kinds of music too. One of those trips was when he went off on a jaunt to see those…

  • Jack Bruce and the meaning of life

    Jack Bruce and the meaning of life

    Obviously filmed a while ago for the in-progress documentary about his song writing partner Pete Brown, the late Jack Bruce casts a light upon British humour and the role it played in our country’s psyche. The ability to laugh at ourselves and a surreal view of what is life is just so British. Life with the Graham…

  • Robert Wyatt takes us on a UFO Club trip

    Robert Wyatt takes us on a UFO Club trip

    Here is a man who was there and can remember the Sixties, thus debunking that famous theory once and for all. For him London’s UFO Club was a place for like minded outsiders and he can recall it with great clarity as you will see.

  • Steve Jenkins tops the pops

    Steve Jenkins tops the pops

    Here are some insights from a man who knew a huge amount of detail about how the British pop charts were compiled each week and what could be done to ‘improve’ them. At one stage he worked for a company called Record Sales who merchandised the shops that reported their sales figures for the charts to be compiled from and…

  • An early and rare Move interview

    An early and rare Move interview

    There is not too much of this interview and it is clear that at times the film stock ran out. Such were the problems in those pioneering days when the film and sound were actually recorded on separate machines; so when it came to editing you just worked with what you had actually managed to capture. This is…