BBC Concerts

[Chris]

I just finished watching the 3 BBC concerts on Trio. They all were great in their own right. Sadly they did not show Cat singing Bitterblue or Changes IV, but they did include the bits where Alun took the time to tune up his guitar, while Cat waited for him. It was just nice to finally see the CS BBC concert broadcast on American TV!!

I enjoyed the James Taylor concert with James singing Suzanne and Steamroller. But, I have to say the Neil Youngs' BBC Concert is classic, he was way TOO funny. He went on a tangant talking about DUAL BBC CUPS and to many harmonicas in his coat pocket.

I have a question for someone who may know the answer. How many years were these BBC concerts broadcast? They were such great little concerts, they really should start broadcasting all of them again.

[sue]

Christine,
I am quite jealous of you watching those great shows.
I do hope they'll show it on national American tv.
Lovely to know there's still shows out there we could potentially look forward to in the future!

[Daddy-o]

Hi,

I'm really not sure on this but from memory, the BBC In Concert series seemed to last only a couple of years. It was great, at the time, to see intimate studio performances with small audiences. I recall Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Harry Nilsson, The Kinks and of course Cat. I watched it at my Gran's house in colour 'cause we didn't have BBC 2 and only a black & white TV! Luckily, we had one of the earliest video recorders at out school, the tapes where the size of house bricks. My R.E. teacher, Dave Lawrence (who put on a charity open air concert in '69 which included David Bowie as one of the main attractions!) was a Cat fan and recorded it for us to see. It's great that the In Concert series still survives. The BBC weren't meticulous in archiving their priceless rock performances. A lot of incredible material was wiped to make space for essential viewing like "Gardener's Question Time"! A very impressive series was shown a few years back here in the UK, called Sounds Of The Sixties, they followed it up with Sounds Of The Seventies. Much of the material came from BBC engineers who had the good sense to run off their own copies - there had been a ruthless economy drive on, which meant that tapes had to be re-recorded over! As far as Cat is concerned, I've only seen the In Concert series and the Old Grey Whistle Test featuring If I Laugh and Changes IV aired in recent years. As a youth, I remember seeing him on Top Of The Pops and Ready Steady Go. They even showed the Teaser Cartoon on children's TV. There was a Granada TV concert too (they show clips from this very occasionally where he's wearing a red "Warehouse" T-shirt, a photo of which is on this very site), it was originally only shown up north I believe. So I've never seen this one to this day. It would be great to see these things again. So Chris, it's much the same here, as you guys have been campaigning for the ABC concert to be dusted off over there, us UK chaps should do likewise. Oi BBC, sort out your Cat archives!! Oi Universal-Island, get those Cat DVD's in the shelves of HMV, MVC and Virgin!! We can die happy then! Historically, Cat is much neglected globally! This is the 21st. century, we have DVD technology! Everything and anything is available, except...the Cat!

[Satire]

well......we have the VH1 "storytellers" and the mtv "unppluged"S .....even though they suck lately..

[70sCat]

When were these shown here on tv??

peace and love,
Sak