There's Christmas crackers, celebrity guests (some of them even genuine), an appearance from Miss Top Gear and, by the sound of it, a jolly time being had by all as Top Gear celebrates the er, bit between Christmas and New Year in truly festive style. Also featured: the pick of the year's session tracks, interviews (most of them hilariously inept) with Dick Heckstall-Smith, Robert Wyatt and Sandy Denny (pictured with JP opposite) and a very, let's say "competitive" chat with Pete Drummond.
Many thanks to Mick Capewell at the ever-excellent
Marmalade Skies for supplying the tape of this show. (There's definitely a "Mick's tape" pun to be made there, but for the moment I can't be arsed.) For all you musos, here's the steps I used to rip the tape:
Maxell UR120 tape --> Pioneer DC-X88Z tape deck/amplifier --> headphone socket --> Stereo jack leads --> ADSTech Instant Music --> USB --> Toshiba laptop --> PolderbitS Sound Recorder and Editor --> Audacity --> LAME --> Kat's Karavan --> you
Feel free to pipe up with any suggestions if you think I've gone about capturing and encoding this all wrong, as I'm still relatively new to this. Oh and I did try to use Audacity to get rid of the tape hiss, but the end result was horribly metallic-sounding so I've left it well alone (apart from normalising).
(You may notice that this program does not, as promised in Peelie's intro, feature anything by the Keef Hartley Band. I can only assume that whatever track of theirs Peel was planning to play got bumped, because they're not mentioned in the outro. Certainly the show appears complete, with perhaps a little bit missing from the middle of the news bulletins.)
Total running time: 1hr56m. Files are 192K MP3.
PART 1 (29:20)
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- Johnny Walker handover
- Miss Top Gear ("Pat Campbell of Nottingham") turns on the studio lights(!)
- Top Gear theme
- The Rolling Stones - Live With Me
- The Plastic Ono Band - Dizzy Miss Lizzie
- Richie Havens - High Flying Bird (session)
- Chat with Dick Heckstall-Smith
- Colosseum - Lost Angeles (session)
- The Incredible String Band - This Moment (session)
- News
PART 2 (30:18)
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- News (continued)
- Juicy Lucy - She's Mine/She's Yours (session)
- Michael Chapman - Postcards Of Scarborough (session)
- The Family - Cat And The Rat (session)
- Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Orange Claw Hammer
- Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Wild Life
- Roy Harper - Tom Tiddler's Ground
- Chat with Robert Wyatt
PART 3 (27:33)
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- The Soft Machine - The Moon In June (session)
- Griffin - What A Day It's Been (session)
- Tyrannosaurus Rex - A Day Laye (session)
- Chat with Sandy Denny
- Fairport Convention - Farewell, Farewell
- News
PART 4 (28:49)
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- News (continued)
- Joe Cocker and The Grease Band - Lawdy Miss Clawdy (session)
- Banter with Pete Drummond
- Led Zeppelin - What Is And What Should Never Be (session)
- Blodwyn Pig - It's Only Love (session)
- The Beatles - Mean Mr. Mustard
- Viv Stanshall no-show
- Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - Sofa Head (session)
- Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - Give Booze A Chance (session)
- "Disinterred 33 1/3": The Firehouse 5 - Running Wild
- The Fairport Convention - Jigs & Reels Medley (The Lark in The Morning/Rakish Paddy/Foxhunters' Jig/Toss The Feathers) (session)
- Top Gear theme
Here's a snippet of Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone from BBC 6music last week: a version of Good King Wenceslas recorded by a choir of various Top Gear stalwarts in 1970, including Soft Machine, Sonja Kristina (Curved Air) and Marc Bolan.
