Buddy Holly - Remembered 60 years on

Buddy Holly's legacy - 60 years on

Colourised picture of Buddy Holly, England 1958

February 3rd 1959, the day the music died but didn't.

The legacy of Buddy Holly's musical life remains strong and rightly so. If you dig into the past, here was a performer whose music shaped much that followed.

Buddy Holly was in the right place at the right time, in post WW2 America. America emerged from WW2 in a better position than countries in the European region devastated by 6 years of war.

Bill Haley's Comets - Hot Rods and rock n' roll - 

ingredients that lit the fuse for a generation

In the Texas state, in 50's America, Western Swing, Hillbilly mountain music and country music were ingredients waiting when Bill Hailey lit the fuse commercially in 1954 with Rock around the clock.

Buddy Holly's journey through musical styles led to country and as soon as Elvis played Lubbock, Buddy's style changed overnight. In 1955, Texas Rockabilly became an important local style of music - like jazz, it moved forward gaining and developing as new players emerged on the scene.

Being able to pick up music from Mexican radio stations had an influence on Buddy and the Crickets too, Heartbeat being just one of Buddy's songs, with the Latin beat combined with a country music double-stop intro and solo. 'Tex-Mex' they called it.

Norman Petty the genius musical producer

Whilst Buddy Holly was emerging as a songwriter and evolving his musical group into the Crickets, another catalysing force was about to enter the story. 

Norman Petty had learned about electronics during his WW2 military service and became the Texas answer to Sam Phillips who ran the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis producing Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and countless other stars.

Like Sam Phillips and Les Paul, Norman Petty was pushing the technological and music recording boundaries. All three were using echo, microphone effects and multi tracking and producing ground-breaking sound.

Fender Sunburst Stratocaster

In 1954, Leo Fender put his legendary Fender Stratocaster guitar into production and Buddy Holly purchased one in 1956 with the help of his brother. This guitar looked futuristic then and has not dated really since, seeing off many imitators and copies.

In the studio, Buddy Holly's style and songs combined with the studio production and use of the then basic studio effects produced legendary music. The Stratocaster and his 4x10 Fender Bassman amplifier were integral to this process too.

Use of tripping echo by Petty, where Buddy's vocal line was decaying as he was starting to sing a new one sound very effective. Flipping the drums through a natural sound and echo chamber sound during the solo, was simple but effective. 

Buddy Holly used his guitar as more than just accompaniment. His guitar was used more dynamically, like a piano and right out at the forefront. 

Although Buddy did play lead runs on the guitar, various Crickets line-ups did include lead guitarists such as Sonny Curtis or Tommy Allsup for example.

Hank Marvin in 1960 - the influence extended to the glasses!

However the end result was arrived at, the legacy of this great music continues. You only have to play one of the tracks and the sound is just electric. There is something that just sets it apart from a lot of other music. It never dates.

Play along to Buddy Holly's songs and something mystical happens, you start playing things that you wouldn't normally play, phrases, notes, chord variations - it is mystical and plain spooky. It is almost like the legacy is pushing you on, evolving.

The Buddy Holly legacy even in its early days influenced guitarists who would influence others. In Britain, guitarist Hank Marvin who would find fame with the Shadows wanted a Stratocaster after seeing one on the Chirping Crickets LP cover, going on to play the first new one imported into the UK in 1959.

The Buddy Holly statue in Lubbock Texas

The Shadows (then the Drifters) backing Cliff Richard, recorded a live LP at Abbey Road studios including a Buddy Holly track the day before Buddy died. Hank Marvin developed an instrumental style of playing and covered a number of Buddy Holly tracks on his Hank plays Holly CD.

Although Buddy Holly never was able to use the tremolo arm in his playing, Hank Marvin did, incorporating it into his style, to help the guitar emulate a singing human voice.

Players including Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Mark Knopfler, Andy Summers and George Harrison amongst many, cited Hank Marvin as a major influence.Keith Richards was also influenced by Buddy Holly's music too, 'he had everything' Richards said on a television program about Buddy Holly. Indeed he did. 

Bobby Vee - who stepped in to play on Feb 3rd 1959

The immediate vacuum left by Buddy Holly's death was filled by artists such as Bobby Vee, who would later play with a version of the Crickets and put out some catchy hits such as 'Rubber Ball'. 

The music that followed was in retrospect syrupy and often bland, succumbing to a 'Bobby syndrome'  - a singer often named 'Bobby' whether their original name or not, usually wearing a sport jacket, driving a Ford Thunderbird and with an immaculately coiffured hair.

This fitted the direction America was going in the 1950's towards a consumer society of white picket fence, white middle class citizens living in a land of plenty and opportunity. And safe. Like something out of a 1950's soap series.

Long gone was the now out of fashion wild and leather clad style of Gene Vincent or MArlon Brando's 'Wild one'. Eddie Cochran's 'Something else' predated Punk Rock by twenty years, but was way ahead of its time. It didn't fit with the preppy and acceptable saccharine mush of the new decade of the 1960s.

Buddy Holly was in his last months refining his songwriting style and moving and developing his career into something bigger. His move to Manhattan in New York, a cosmopolitan 24-hour town, away from the staid and conservative Lubbock, was opening up new possibilities for him including acting. 

Interestingly, John Lennon, another performer greatly influenced by Buddy Holly also lived in New York in his final months. If you compare one of Lennon's last tracks 'Nobody told me,' you can hear a 'Holly-esque' echo laden sound, it is almost like the whole thing came full circle.

The simple memorial stone to Buddy Holly at Lubbock

With Buddy Holly's death, we are fortunate that Maria Elena Holly and Buddy's family have allowed the legacy of work and his life to be accessible.

With a Buddy Holly Centre and a museum devoted to artefacts Buddy owned in his life, we are thankfully able to see the legacy large as life and not hidden away for the privileged few or family to see.

Rave On - a great compilation album

In 1983 I bought a double cassette tape that was called 'Then came rock n' roll.' I still have it, on that was 'That'll be the day' by Buddy Holly and it was just such a great sound. 

Around that time I was in a band with some friends I had been at school with and I was in a second hand shop that also sold guitars and I found 'Rave on' a compilation of Buddy Holly's songs. It opened with 'Rave on'.

When I heard that song I was blown away, I played it again to appreciate the sound and what was going on. It sounded immense. Having tracked down many of Buddy's songs over the years, what is apparent is there was so much potential in that music, intensely written and recorded. Who knows where it would have gone onto?

In 1992 I saw the Buddy Holly stage show in London and bought the cassette tape, on that was a track I hadn't heard called  'Its so easy' and what a great track that is. In the round, there are just so many great tracks to choose from them in this legacy that is Buddy Holly. 

Can you choose a definitive Buddy Holly track? Difficult. There are so many. Everyone has a favourite. That's the great thing, the songs sound fresh as though they were recorded yesterday and people still love them.

Is the British High Street finished as a buisness model?

Going, going gone... 

High Street shops are going, is the end of bricks and mortar retail?

We have recently seen BHS, House of Fraser and Toys R Us essentially go bust, Debenhams limps on ( I predicted it would be affected some time ago), the question is, is there any future in High Street retail outlets other than existing in the form of Coffee shops and Charity shops?

20 years ago I worked for a small but highly important supplier of food products to the major suppliers like Heinz and the leading supermarkets such as Marks and Spencer. This supplier had been bought and amalgamated with another supplier by an investment group to sell on.

A major manufacturing company bought the supplier I worked for and my thoughts were it was going to asset strip it for the brand labels and substitute the products with lower quality ones. I was proven right. Some key staff were retained due to their business relationships with the customer base, but the majority of staff were disposed of through redundancy due to duplication.

That was when the internet in the UK was in its early years.

20 years later and the on-line market place is where it is largely at. A supplier my present company deals with told me that 95% of their commerce traffic is now done on-line without any human intervention. This supplier has recently built a massive warehouse in Holland where no human staff are employed. Automation and robotics is the new now.

This is the new business model. 

When Toys R Us went bust a while back, I was shocked. This should have been a retail chain that should have survived, but it failed, as a casualty of super sites, like Ebay and Amazon - effectively the planet's middlemen.

Ebay and Amazon allow listing of items on their site, the same items often, the buyer makes a choice built on sales performance but mostly on price, the cheapest wins the deal. When an Amazon seller sells as a 3rd party supplier without the goods being in an Amazon warehouse, Amazon has a double win. It achieves a sale and revenue without the hassle and cost of storing, picking and transportation issues and takes a bit of revenue.

Plus it also helps if your company is based in a location with favourable tax levels and laws which the High Street mostly does not.

The on-line boom is good for some companies, but the convenience of on-line retail has taken its toll of the bricks and mortar brands, such as House of Fraser etc. 

The on-liners can operate cheaper, they don't have to have numerous shop floor staff on hand even when customer foot fall is slack, they don't have the multiple stores' business rates, running costs, staff costs, they can buy in cheap and sell quickly on, they don't have big rents or big leases to pay for.

This is why a House of Fraser type of takeover was a good deal, a lot of Bricks and Mortar that can be sold off, brands that can be cherry picked by a buyer and then sold on, the liabilities and overheads can be sold or disposed of largely quite easily and quickly and the future direction decided on whatever the buyer's plan is.

If you run a chain of stores for example with dated looking products, relying on peak time footfall, you are going to be hit hard. And that's why Debenhams is a walking Dinosaur.

People are 'time poor' these days and why waste hours going to a town to shop and try and find a parking space at probably some high price, when you can order on-line and return the item if you don't like it? Without leaving your house.....

That's why the High Street is sinking, those with the disposable income (pensioners mainly) are shrinking as a population - the pre WW2 generation had maybe 2-5 plus children in a couple 'generation', in WW2 it was about 2 per couple 'generation' and in the 60's on, the ability to choose a family or not has altered the demographic downwards with many couples choosing no family as an option.

Shrinking the 'generational population' has potentially shrunk demand consumption of goods for those original to the UK, but is buoyed by those who have come to live in the UK.

As we have seen even the mighty FW Woolworths could not survive the onslaught of the web. It wasn't 'Amazon big enough' to offer what people wanted or might want, it didn't have the floorspace or the warehouse space to be an Amazon.

Where can the High Street survive? Well, in my view, only niche shops offering specialised or unique products (where there is a market to service supporting it) could survive. If you offer a service that other on-liners don't, clearly this is an advantage.

The bottom line is customer footfall - the punter coming into your shop and buying a product. We probably buy on-line from places we have never visited, never will and develop trading relationships with people we are likely ever to meet over the years. 

Another key factor is how you deal with customer returns and warranty issues, the High Street business is good at that, they have the face to face contact to do so, but the faceless on-line retailer has to also do that too.

The High Street can't always better on-line price, it suffers from the overheads of staff, premises etc. On-line retailing cuts out human intervention to such a degree it more than pays for itself. If any humans work there, they are either packing the order or just booking the courier collection more than they may select the goods, depending on the set up.

Automation and robotics is taking over, algorythmical seeding is transforming marketing massively, sending the results to the iPhone or tablet, human intervention is shrinking.

When proxy living and big data get a hold and we subsume our 'daily dross' to computers to deal with, that will be a game-changer. The on-line situation will literally expand explosively.

Unless your High Street shop can offer something unique and or cheaper, pull the shutters down and sell up. 

Is the 'Man child' and 'Woman child' phenomenon an insidious control-based plot?

Ok you heard it here..

Perhaps this is the matrix? -  read on...

Is responsibility being bred out of society? 

Is society engineering a dumbing down of people in order to fit a 'control agenda'?

Well, that's the question....

A few years ago, I worked for a farm machinery repair company and were asked to take a couple of senior school students for a few days of work experience, this was an eye opener for a few reasons.

Firstly, they came equipped with a two sides of A4 paper list of things they were not allowed to do. Things like not use power tools, only use hand tools under supervision, not boil a kettle (Yes, honestly!) and so on.

We dispensed with the list, showed them how to use a small number of tools and left them to it, no one was hurt and they learned something.

We did bypass the kettle edict and the result was that the student had no idea how to make a cup of tea. I am not kidding. No pun intended.

When we asked about the list, it seemed that at school it was the same story.

It dawned on us, 'so what happens when you leave school and go out into the real world?' and that was just it. 

Unless they managed to acquire skills over and above clicking a mouse or using a touch screen they were pretty much useless in practical terms. Not their fault, but a culture of removing peril amounts to conditioning people to take no risk, to just sit there and do nothing and be dependent on others to fix things.

For an authoratative body imposing a regime like this is worrying. Who says these edicts must be followed and what is their agenda? From what I have seen, to create a generation of useless and dependent citizens, who will be easy to control.

This is further compounded by parents who want their children to stay living at home even after having graduated, parents who can't or don't want to let go or form 'same plane' relationships with their children. You see the Mums who look like and almost the same age as their daughters having some 'sister' relationship, perhaps the mothers are trying to recover their lost youth?

The 'Man child' 'Woman child' situation is in some respects due to high house prices and affordable housing problems, but it is only part of the problem.

What this creates is a situation where the young have no desire to take any responsibility because they are cushioned from 'reality' of paying rent, a relationship, housing, doing all that supposed boring crap. Its easier to sit on a beanbag and play with a gaming console and have food and laundry done for you.

And we go back to our work experience.  I know millennials who have little or no practical skills, their parents do the DIY, check their cars over. So when they are pushing up the daisies, what then? A reliance on Robots?

We need to skill up our young, because if we don't we are finished as a society.

Age Verification will fail because of Peer to Peer porn.

Why Age Verification is doomed to failure.

We all want to protect under 18s from adult material but the ideals of age verification are doomed to failure for a number of reasons.

This legislation is aimed at protecting the most technologically aware group of people out there in society -  those mostly under 18 who have greater access to computers and who are being taught how to code -  if they know how to code, they can build their own apps and bypass the mainstream checks or use virtual private networks to do so. 

Even if Google closes references to 'adult material' sites, the under 18s will just get their adult material from elsewhere. Has no one thought of this?

This 'underground' situation will likely take place through apps, via Peer to Peer transmission, or by physical transfer through sharing on SD Data cards. 

The result is it won't stop the problem of under 18's getting hold of, distributing or holding adult material, it merely drives it underground and drives them potentially into harms way, the very opposite of what was intended by this bill.

Those under 18 often have little or no appreciation of what they are doing is wrong or unlawful, to them it is just something that they just 'do', without fully appreciating the consequences or implications of the material.

We are now seeing the under 18s using and distributing adult material on an industrial scale due to the rise in smart phone, tablet and lap top use, devices which are almost 'necessity must haves' for people nowadays.

Much as in the old days of sharing porno mags between your mates at school, now it is peer to peer sharing literally of data and material between devices. Like the old days, pretty much unstoppable.

The Age Verification system will be a dangerous thing for law abiding adults who may want to enjoy pornography for their own pleasure, their personal data and lawful adult interests could well be open to data collection and potentially useable as 'history' in legal cases unless this data is secure and not for third party disclosure.

We have seen many disgruntled employee data thefts and sensitive information about an adult's personal and private interests, especially if you are a celebrity for example, could provide organised criminals with means of coercion for financial gain. Or as we used to call it, blackmail. 

We may yet see our first suicide due to coercion from held adult material related data that has been stolen or sold on from any implied threats to expose or publish the information, blackmail and demands for money that the victim cannot meet or refuses too. 

Clearly this legislation situation needs a rethink. This legislation was formulated for the right reasons to protect under 18's, but is bad in that it could open up people's data history to unscrupulous exposure, an eventuality which cannot be ruled out by the data holder. 

Any savvy kid is going to get hold of a legitimate verification code and it will be passed on and on. So, the scheme fails there.

It does not stop the peer to peer transmission that is the norm now, so we read in the media.

Age verification may potentially expand to any UK website and that could be bad news if you say want to go onto Amazon's UK site to buy some H B pencils, but have to prove your age because that site carries age restricted products available to 18+ only. 

The age verification legislation appears to be badly thought out and unworkable, it will cause more problems than it likely solves.

Fender Custom Shop 56 NOS & 56 'Hank Marvin' 22 fret neck Custom shop guitars review

Fender Custom Shop 56 NOS & 56 'Hank Marvin' 22 fret neck Custom shop guitars

Overview

We're looking at two Fender Custom Shop 56 Stratocasters today, both are NOS 'New Old Stock' finish and Fiesta Red coloured.

The top guitar in the picture is a 'Standard 56' for the purposes of this review, the lower one is a 'Hank Marvin' style stratocaster- a guitar based on the guitars built for Hank Marvin, lead guitarist with the Shadows, Cliff Richard and the Shadows and a solo artist in his own right in the 1990's by the Fender Custom shop.

The classic look of the 56 NOS Custom Shop Stratocaster in Fiesta Red

56 NOS Guitar

This example is a 2015 Team built guitar and is finished in Nitro cellulose Fiesta Red, in a more red shade than the usual more pinky tone, often referred to as 'Coral Red.'

The Neck is finished in a clear coat cellulose lacquer and the whole guitar feels very resonant.

The body is Alder, 3 piece and has vintage contouring. As this is a custom shop guitar, the body contours are cut more deeply than on many lesser priced models. The body is to the well known 'vintage' dimensions, routed for 3 single coil vintage pickups and for a 6 screw tremolo bridge. 

The one piece 21 fret vintage profile Birdseye 2AA Maple neck is nicely shaped, more of a D shape than a C and is quite full. The radius is 9.5" which is an improvement over the vintage radius and playing is easier with no note choking.

The neck is quite deep, which may be an issue for some with smaller fingers or used to the later C shape neck, which I tend to prefer. The frets are quite chunky and not the 'vintage wire' type which some may wish to change.

Hardware is Gold plated Fender with Fender stamped Kluson design machine heads at the headstock, butterfly wing string post for the E and B strings (which could be a round type if strictly a 56 replica), gold screws and vintage 6 stamped saddle 6 screw tremolo bridge.

Electric hardware is old style push back cloth covered wiring, full size 250k potentiometers and a 3 way pickup switch. This is a real step backwards, a complete waste of time as most players will change to an Oak 5 way at the earliest time. As they have changed the neck radius then why not logically, install the 5 way switch at the time of build? 

About the first thing anyone is going to do is to replace the archaic 3 way switch! -

like I'm doing in this photo. Fender Custom Shop - please take note -

don't waste time buying and fitting a 3 way switch here. Fit a 5 way, from the outset!

Pickups are the new Custom Shop 54's and they sound very nice, when you fit the 5 way and can slot into the in between sounds, they really sound nice for those 'Mid position' tones, which it is more difficult to get by 'balancing' a 3 way switch 'out of phase'. 

The scratch plate is the 50's single ply white type in brilliant white, the other plastic parts such as pickup covers, back plate, trem tip and pot knobs are also in 'new' white and not the 'aged' white. So essentially, the guitar looks like you just unpacked it.

Many who buy the 56 NOS in Fiesta Red are trying to have a guitar like the one that British guitarist Hank Marvin first used in 1959, bought for him by bandleader Cliff Richard. Although this guitar has a C shape neck.

56 NOS 'Hank Marvin' 22 fret neck NOS Stratocaster in Fiesta Red

The 56 NOS 'Hank Marvin' 22 fret Custom Shop Stratocaster

Overview

The 22 fret guitar came about as a result of British guitarist Hank Marvin's signature model Stratocasters. The first ones made in the 1990s with Lace pickups Hank wasn't that happy with, lower priced signature models were the Squier Japan and Fender Japan 'vintage reissue' guitars, the Squier having a c shape neck and the Japan Fender a completely incorrect V shape neck.

Both these signature models were limited run of 500 pieces and are collectible in their own right these days. A short run of 250 Mexican made signature guitars had the correct C shape neck.

A custom shop run of 54 '1959' replications of Hank Marvin's original Stratocaster was made for Oasis Music of Ringwood, Hampshire, these featured the 1958 C shape neck.

When Hank Marvin embarked on solo tours with his backing band in the 1990s, Fender again became involved in building him a signature guitar. By this time, Hank was in contact with Chris Kinman who was building his Kinman pickups, initially for Stratocaster guitars.

Hank became an endorsee of the pickups for a few years and had them installed on his new custom shop guitars with a Di-Marzio pickup in the bridge position.

Hank was seen in photographs sporting his 'new' Stratocaster, these were almost an 'upgrade' to the vintage pre-CBS (1958) guitar he had been using in the later Shadows up until 1990. The 'new' 90's guitar had a vintage single coil routed body, Birdseye Maple neck, Truss rod adjuster at the Nut end, Sperzl locking machines and Kinman pickups fitted. The 12th fret dots on the fretboard were also closer together in the '1963 spacing' style.

Hank had sets of 'Vintage' and 'Modern' Kinmans in his Custom Shop guitars, so he could use them on either modern or old Shadows tunes accordingly. Hank incorporated the 'Easi-Mute' tremolo arm designed and made in the UK which allowed easier palm muting of notes. More recently Hank has reverted to Fender pickups of the 50's variety.

Comparison of headstocks of the 56 NOS (top) and the 56 NOS 'Hank Marvin' (below)

The Fender Custom Shop 56 NOS 'Hank Marvin' Stratocaster in Fiesta Red

Our example here is a team built 2007 year made guitar. Essentially a replication of Hank's late 1990's Custom Shop guitars. These are not officially called the 56 NOS 'Hank Marvin' but the buying specification was all but that in name!

The build came about as players wanted to own a guitar like Hank's contemporary guitar from the 1990s, so a couple of UK music shops put in a specification to the Fender Custom Shop to make replicas of Hank's then current guitar.

The body is a 5 piece lay up of Alder with single coil routing and vintage contouring. Now you may think that 2 or 3 piece bodies are preferable, but the woods here are so good in tonal quality and density that they work as well as the 3 piece on the other 56.

Some years on and the cellulose has started to sink around the joints of the wood blocks, but this is normal for cellulose.

The neck is a 22 fret one piece 2AA birdseye maple, with a slight 'overhang' onto the scratch plate for the 22nd fret. The profile is a 'soft V' shape but is more like a slightly fatter 'C' shape, it is easy to play and not too wide or deep. The truss rod adjustment is at the head end and the wood in this area where the peg head starts is thicker than on a vintage 50's type neck. This does not affect playability as it is beyond the playing area. The neck also has the '1963' closer spacing for the twin dots on the fretboard at the 12th fret.

This guitar was purchased secondhand with 11-56 Elixr strings on, the neck was quite bowed and a set of 9-42 interim D'Addario 9-42's was fitted and the truss rod adjusted, as bought the guitar was barely playable. It has now been set up and is about as slick standard of my other guitars. 

The finish is Fiesta Red nitrocelluslose with a slight honey tinted neck.  

Hardware is Gold plated Fender standard fare with Gold Sperzl locking machine heads as standard. Essentially as used on Hank's guitars.

Originally the guitars were fitted with Fender's Noiseless single coil pickups as Fender allegedly would not install the 'non-Fender' Kinman pickups in the guitars, so the pickups were changed in the UK to Kinmans before sale. Although Fender installed Humbuckers in some of their guitars, it is curious why Fender did not install the 'correct' pickups for the specification?   

This specification guitar was of quite limited in production, about 12 being produced per year for a limited amount of UK retail outlets. Thus, they are rarer than the 'standard' 56 NOS standard guitars.

With a choice of Modern, Vintage or Future Vintage 'Gipsy Jazz' Kinman pickup options, all variants used by Hank Marvin, the pickup sounds to replicate Hank's material whether old or new was there. 

This guitar has the Future Vintage hotter pickups with a 64 in the bridge and 63's in the neck and middle pickup positions. A standard 5 way oak type switch is fitted, the wires are the solderless push together harness option from Chris Kinman, along with a Kinman K-9 harness which features a push button pot on the lower tone pot and the middle pot also acts as a variable position pickup selector switch, allowing one to get the mellow 'Gypsy Jazz' sound on one setting, if desired.

Side by side comparison

These 56 NOS are really  'a tale of two Stratocasters,' similar but different, the 56 'as was' type of build to the 56 'evolved' type of build. The sound of each variant is different due to the electronics, the 54 pickups give a nice vintage tone and are not 'crashy' sounding as some pickups were from the pre-CBS era.

The Kinmans give a real 'Hank' sound. Both sets are clear for both rhythm playing or single note work. Its a choice of what sound you're after.

Playing wise, the 'Marvin'  'evolved' model is easier to play due to the neck shape. Side by side for the money, even if I wasn't looking for the Hank Marvin sound, I'd choose that one for the easier playing neck and the 5 way switch fitted from 'new.'

Finding the 'Marvin' type of 56 NOS is not that easy these days, so if you do find one, don't delay if you really want it! The 'stock 56' is not a lost cause neckwise, there are people who will reduce the wood on the back to make it easier to play if that is an issue. 

Youfilm - has the Internet killed film and music as a career choice?

'Flying Squad'  a Tin Hat films production -

a retro film similar to the Sweeney series of the 70's -

in my opinion, this 'youfilms' approach is the future.

Then there was YouTube

YouTube is a great resource for old videos of things gone by, but at what cost is the Internet killing off future talent?

I can remember in the 1980's when I was in a pub band with some friends I was at school with, that all we needed was to go to a pub where an A&R man from a record company was likely to go and see if we could get lucky and get signed. 

Much the same had been the case since the late 1950's when luminaries like Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde had been talent spotted.

I remember going to music shops and seeing someone trotting out a note perfect rendition of something on a guitar and likely that was all they were good for, the music shop player I called them.

Fast forward about 30 years and we got television shows like the X factor and the like. It hasn't surprised me to see that some of the performers have been outed as semi professionals or even professionals who are looking to make it bigger. Not the amateur performer who does it and thinks they might have a chance.

Going on youtube you can see countless people copying note for note music performances, but then you don't get the same amount of original material.

The music industry took a real hit when applications such as ITunes and Spotify started up, bands could circumvent the old A&R circuit and get 'discovered' on the Internet and then sign a contract when they had an established audience and greater pull. And get a better deal in the round.

The advent of the digital music download has hit the big companies who sold CDs, DVDs and the media packaging cases too. But, the trend for 'Big Noting' your CD and DVD collection by having it on show in your front room, has meant an upsurge in physical media unit sales.

The future of film

So how will films fare in the future? You can find any number of films on youtube and under a 'fair use' policy, it seems getting around copyright issues?

Films today are big business and big money. The cost has always been there, but is there not now a trend for the 'art house' film making its presence felt?

About twenty years ago, I was involved with a group of 1940's scene enthusiasts and we made a short video on a preserved steam railway, they later wanted to do a film set in the winter of 1944, but there were changes in the group membership, so it never got much further.

Recently I came across a company called Tin Hat films, who were making self financed small films. I saw their 'Flying Squad' film, a sort of version of the Sweeney for want of a better description.

It was impressive, they had the 'right' cars, the right sets and proved that a small independent unit of enthusiasts could turn out a quality, professional film for little finance. The problem is how to get the investment back. Would 'the industry' support these people or see them as some sort of 'black leg labour' taking away jobs from the 'established' arena?

With an episode of something like 'Morse' or 'Lewis' likely to cost a million pounds an episode to make, quality productions clearly cost, but only the large television networks have the pockets deep enough for them. True, these get sold around the world, but is there not also a place for the smaller players?

This 'youfilm' type of product is not new, but in my view, it is the way forward - that is a gathering of people with the resources and talent to come together and create good films. Essentially a script, players, film, locations, props is the recipe to start with. 

Having written books for stage and film adaption, planning is also a big and important part of the project. 

With many actors out there already, is there the room for these independent productions? Indeed, Euston films that filmed the Sweeney was such a company and that was over 40 years back. 

My parents both worked for the BBC in the heyday of the organisation and I have been out on location to see the creative process taking place. The difference is the money. 

The small, 'youfilm' units need some money, but by a collective process and gathering, they can and do achieve results as good as some mainstream broadcast providers.

The question remains - in the 'youfilm' future, how do these smaller players fit in and can they make sufficient living from it?

I think they can. 

In the next 12 years one in three jobs is likely to be lost to automation, this is going to leave some people without livelihoods. This is where a Basic Income Guarantee payment will have to come in and will start a new 'cottage industry' situation - films will be a part of that.

The BBC as a publicly funded broadcaster is an anachronism now, in a world where there are countless commercial channels.

The BBC model will have to be rethought, it is a poll tax on viewing and should commercialise as much as possible to compete.

I thought twenty years ago that demand viewing would be the future, this has now come to pass.

Star Treknology - reaching the final frontier

Star Trek 'Treknology' - 50 years on,

most of it is now Science Fact - not Science Fiction.

Transport of delight

Some of the technology from the Star Trek original series has come to be commonplace today, yet one area seems to have eluded science - that of transportation.

But is science going about it the right way?

The 'dematerialistion' to the atomic level and 'rematerialisation' in to the solid, is maybe not the way forward.

Maybe the way forward is to take the whole entity from one place to the next in one piece.

This does involve knowing about where your target location is and the environment there. It seems to be the way to go, rather than the assemblage route. 

In short, we need to know more about the universe and to develop the technology of future travel.