OT (ish): Radio Concerts & Peel Session repeats

[februarycallendar]

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "jon223491" <crazyhorsegbr@...> wrote:
>
> Haze,
> 
> Just want to thanks for these. The 1975 and 1976 VdGG sessions are quite possibly my all time favourite Peel sessions.

I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but they're certainly up there (and on their own terms as music, not simply as a bridge between what Peel had played before that and what he'd go on to play - VdGG/Hammill don't need to be justified by saying that, they stand alone).

> Also like to say a very big thanks to all of the uploaders and those involved in the tape transfers and all who contribute to this, and it can't be overstated enough, very important 'archive'. I know it's been said many times before but it's almost criminal that the BBC didn't treat their own archive with the same loving care in the past. Thankfully that's changing.

I've said quite often in various other places - but never here from memory - that the BBC is worse now than then because it is better, or better because it is worse, depending on what your priority is.  The indifference and disdain for pop and rock music and popular culture generally - which, at its worst, created a culture where it was seen as impossible, paradoxical, even absurd to apply a proper sense of public service and moral responsibility to light entertainment and thus allowed Savile to do what he did - was the price we had to pay for Play for Today, The Ascent of Man and the rest, while the absence of such things today is the price we pay for popular culture being treated far more seriously and representatively.

I wish we didn't have to choose, but the history and nature of this country makes it inevitable that we do.  Most of our fellow Europeans, at least in the countries which were democratic from 1945 to 1990, don't have this built-in problem.

RPC