Bill Wymans Mobile Recording Studio.

 So America has a new president, and Trump is predictably being a cunt, not budging from office. So what the world right now needs is... The Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Studio or rather an old BBC programme about it.

Bill Wyman set up a project called AIMS and set off around the country to find local talent and give guidance and more importantly, a recording gig in the mobile studio. The culmination of this is whittling the acts down to a manageable amount and a charity concert at the Albert Hall in South Ken. in aid of the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The tape I have is the legendary "Gostbastes" tape which does indeed contain Ghostbusters but also has quite a bit of music on it. There is the back half of the Montreux rock festival 88 with Gary Davies as host. And this, AIMS project.

It takes in the East Anglia leg of the tour with a lot of local acts from Norfolk and Suffolk. We get a genuine look at the studio which has the mother of all mixing desks along with 1" tape and two engineers straight out of Rockstar Ate My Hamster.

In fact its a lot like that with a few local rock bands and a rather good Christian band called Supafrutas which is surely an oxymoron. No Christian rock is good especially one with a choir of kiddies.

There's a dutch guy going by the name Mola Mola who was one of the winners as such. Had a video made of his track, with some blue screen trickery and a spot at the titular gig at the Albert Hall. 

Along with all the guitar wankery there is a lingering shot of them programming a Yamaha DX7, the old techno workhorse, and some Simmonds drums, which you might remember from Italo Disco, which begs to mind, what tracks did the Stones use a DX7 on.

At 30 mins its too big for my Youtube channel but will upload to Archive.org so at least it'll be archived, though the tape isn't that hot in places as its quite jumpy and jittery.

Finally we are halfway through Hooded Hawk's book encoding. The original is all formatted and we are currently editing it down against my original UK edition so it scans nicely.

Anyway Bill Wyman AIMS tour uploaded, here.

Phantom Freighters and the like

Have a new selection of books for you to read now. This is the Phantom Freighter another Hardy boys mystery. Number 39 if you will. It comes in both the original and UK edition remake.

To be honest, it's not a bad little mystery, the lads are investigating a few related mysteries. A shipping company that really does not want them to travel with them, and a courier service delivering boxes to residences where the original owner is not in but a gang member is. 

There are a few differences from the original to the remake. Chet has a hobby where he's making lures for fishing and there is a section where they test them out.  

In preparation for their often aborted trip on the freighter the boys get smallpox shots and have some crummy passport photos done., while obviously outdated the photo bit is obviously relatable nowadays, especially from the booths you see in malls and bigger supermarkets.

Finally the ending is changed from Joe Hardy squeezing through a duct to enter the radio room of a ship to them simply tricking the captain in the original.  I know which one I prefer.

Anyway original is here and the remake is here. Enjoy.

VHS MESS

Finally have a few new bits of VHS Mess for you. On a video with the cryptic label of BFG, Snow White and Cartoons we had no hope of finding anything strange.  

BFG is of course the well loved cartoon version of Roald Dahl's book. It''s got David Jason in it as the titular giant. It's not bad.  Snow White is the Cannon Video version with Diana Rigg as the evil queen and Nicola Stapleton as a young Snow White, I guess fresh from starring in Simon and The Witch.

No it's the third one, that nebulously named cartoons that got my attention.  I kinda guessed that the Snow White might have been the Disney one (it's not,) but I guess the cartoon bit was some old Warner Brothers Merrrie Melodies stuff or Tom and Jerry.

What it actually is, is Fables of The Green Forest.

A sort of 70's anime version of Animals of Farthing Wood where no one really dies but the dubbing is fucking awful. No seriously there are whole episodes on Youtube in the original Japanese and what sounds like Spanish and its charming if a bit old.  

The English dub is shouty and horrible with some awful music to boot as well. The episode I have is a small lemming critter trying to evade a pair of foxes one is, for some reason, an old granny in a shawl.

He tunnels, they pounce and shout out. He tunnels some more and hides out in a barbed wire covered log and the fox fucks up his paw. Granny covers herself in snow to become a makeshift snowdrift. Lemming dude sees through this obvious disguise, evades her and gets picked off by an owl. 

Then the tape ends.

It has it's charms when not saddled with a horrible dub (there's a reason we went for subs back then) and there's a whole playlist up on youtube for you to look at. One of those 70's oddities to play along with Rascal Raccoon and Anne Of Green Gables.

Hate and more hate

There is a certain demographic of people that you can hate these days, with  no comeback whatsoever. Call them names, and class them as less than human and no its not any oppressed minority you'd usually suspect.

I'm talking about the working class white male. Most certainly Brexit voting, overweight with tattoos and a big England flag outside their house. They're fair game for the sort of middle class liberal Twitter limpets who post bollocks 24/7 to their feeds. 

They are the sort of folk they look down on. You can call them knuckle dragging, gammons and there's no comeback. They're not a minority but they should be. 

I'm reading up about the anti statue protests up town. It's a mix of the far right, football thugs, patriots, white van man and dare I say it, concerned ordinary working class blokes who decided to protest in London against the far left hysteria.  Of course it all kicked off with the police and that, but the same happened with the BLM marches last week, and they were never branded as such.

To be honest, I hate both sides, The left being vandals and never being called out on their shit, the far right for being violent thugs as mentioned. They make it worse for the centrists such as myself and if you think its some Youtube alt right spiral, well I've held these views since the mid 90's. It's nothing new and in 30 years time will still be going on just with no push back on far left ideas as they take the piss out of the far right (and rightly so.)

Anyway you'll be wanting something to cheer yourself up, after that. I found an old clip on the end of a Bruce Lee tape of the One O'clock news, with a young Michael Buerk reporting on a microlight journey from the UK to Australia. 

A brief bit of searching on line I found what it referenced, here. Its a link to the MAAS museum in Sydney who have the actual microlight as an exhibit. The bloke doing it was an ex journalist and went around the world in a microlight back in 1998. So this is a bit of a dry run for him.

More Tapes

Still in lockdown,  Have decided to go through my VHS collection (minus the Pron,) to see what can be kept and salvaged and what cannot.

Today's videos are two from the early 90's it turns out. The tape labelled three Saturday shows has some football highlights from  the Rumbelows cup, with Ian Wright as today's studio guest. America's top 40 with Casey Kasem (Shaggy) and some awesome shade thrown at him by the presenter and the Onion Field as the featured film.

Our other choice VHS contained Streetfighter II Anime which I thought was a rip from Bravo but turns out its just taped onto an existing blank tape and when it runs out we have the back end of an unknown film from the BBC and Some Channel 4 kids programming.

Which is boss as it contains the last half of Mork and Mindy, an episode of a Bill and Ted cartoon (never knew this existed,) A white fang cartoon and best of all The Finder aka Finders Keepers.

This is based on a children's book by the same name and is Australian (same vintage as Round the Twist.)

Actually pretty good, and is the stand out find here. A little blond kid takes part in some intergalactic gameshow. He can find things with a magic beeper and the episode I saw they had a time barrier which accepted lost things from the real world. They have an archive here of episodes, up on youtube which I recommend you do.

Finally we had some stand out ads. A few celeb shots for British Gas, Boom bang a ban Burt Reynolds on gas fires and Gangster Bob Hoskins for cookers.  A few music promo bits which are going to be a bastard to pass (album collections for Madonna and The Pogues and a lazy comp for carnival greats which include tequilla and the Lambada).

Obscure standouts are Mitsubishi (fax machines) Geosafari (edutainment cringe) and Texas Instruments (graphing calculators which is a surprise.)

Oh and a nice primary coloured Channel 4 logo that looks like it's made out of paint.

A final note, we've switched videos from the DVD combi unit to a sharp standalone video and its getting better results, a few tapes are playing now including the 3 shows one which was a right bastard in all machines previous. We can see my cousins kids school play, from back in the 90's rather than listen to audio as previously done.

Gypsy Girl and ads.

We've been attempting to digitize some old tapes via OBS screen recording program, with the main aim of getting some stuff that my aunty had digitized from 8MM film of various family bits and pieces onto disk or file, edited and put up on Youtube.

For a trial run decided to take a run at a tape that contains (Deep Breath,) Halloween H20 and Sky West and Crooked aka Gypsy Girl.  A star vehicle for Hayley Mills and a lot of old actors from TV, not limited to, Lovejoy's Ian McShane as a gypsy kid in love with Hayley. Catweazle aka Geoffrey |Bayldon as the vicar and Annette Crosbie as her mum, better known as Victor Meldrew's long suffering wife Margaret in One Foot In The Grave. Apparently up on Netflix, so give it a watch, it's worth your time.

Its a good film and proves that she could indeed act, she plays a sketchy, spacy mentalist type of girl obsessed with burying every dead animal in the church yard. There's a laugh out loud bit where she finds a dead bumble bee up a tree and presents it to the vicar for a Christian burial.

Ads itself are interesting too. There is a spot for Ebly a wheat alternative to pasta, something called BB Soda which seems to be the year 2000's version of Tab clear, (born 1992, died 1992) and a few spots for Southend on Sea and a your shout on Crown |Green bowling, by two lads from Streatham Hill.

We also have a tape from Channel 4's the human body from 1984 and the tail end of money matters which is cool. This is based on the book, Body Machine by noted heart surgeon Christiaan Barnyard, and seems to be on reproduction from what I've seen.

Will have to redo them though before I put them up. They seem to be using the laptops internal mic to draw sound rather than the TV itself, which is annoying as I can be heard commenting and at intervals, taking the piss. Maybe routing the sound through audacity may help, or more likely poking at the sound settings in OBS which maybe less a Heath Robinson way of doing it.

Edit. Turns out you can mute the internal mic and just have audio from the capture box instead.

Staying in.

Here's another boring update. Been self isolating and not that is not a euphemism. Not been out since Friday. Having to look for stuff to do around the house, to keep busy as this is definitely not my regular schedule.  

Took a look online at my DVD / Video combo that I got from my aunties place, and what I thought was a good project (seeing if its a DVD recorder) failed when I had a read through of the manual archived online.  It can copy DVDs to VHS but not vice versa.  

Will have to use Obs and  my capture card to rip stuff from videos that I have.  It's not the best idea but will like to archive the stuff I have so I can fill up some space for more junk.

More stuff to come includes some Vietnamese tapes (mostly UK stuff and junked what looks like a lot of  Karaoke tat.)  Maybe even the Pron tape which is 2 thirds Channel 4 stuff, including a episode of Quincy. Have the last of my mandatory use it or lose it leave days to take before the new tax year kicks in. So will give it a go tomorrow.

Still VHS Mess

Still working out how to grab stuff here. Virtualdub has as sync problem where audio plays naturally but all visuals are sped up like in old Benny Hill.  Ironic seeing that I'm trying grab some bits from the end of Benny, specifically some bits from channel 4's new years line up.  Eurotrash, Adam and Joe show and TFI Friday with Chris Evans before it goes into Mel Brooks Robin Hood Men in Tights.

We have old Vegas here cracked and patched for it and will try again to see if it will grab stuff from the dongle as well.

VHS Mess

Been messing around with a new TV grabber from Lidl's of all places.  It comes with a few things such as all the plugs you'll need to connect it.  It should, if we get it to output sound correctly, be a good alternative to me sticking the phone in front of the screen and hoping that the footage grabbed comes out clear and not shaky. 

You get Power DVD with this too and its a bit rubbish, thinking that the home taped Benny Hill special is copyright (I guess it is but we want ad breaks and trails for the channel including the terrible one of Rory Bremmer and Richard Whiteley).  Virtual Dub is the best I have with the sound screwed up but the oddest is capturing through VLC. 

We have a weird sine wave feedback tone and some echo too, given the credits for  this is strange enough. Here's a reversed clip to give you an idea what to expect.

I'll play around with it some more and give a few direct clip uploads to Youtube if I  remember.

Marè Video

Here is a odd thing we've had this video in our collection for absolutely ages, and possibly longer as it came from my Grandad's place, who had it originally. 

Fuchsia's to give it its full title is a VHS tape with a selection of 300 or so Fuchsia varieties set to classical music.  That's it, no cheesy presenter, or over the top graphics, just the familiar video title font and various clips of Fuchsia.

I know full well why we have it as my Grandad grew them as well as Pelargonium's and some cacti left over from an old aunt's collection, which is how I got my bug for them.

Apart from that Google has drawn a blank special e included.  Here's a few shots of the outer sleeve and video, if anyone knows who they were or if they are still going please comment. 

I think they are Dutch.

I'll get a proper scan of this after xmas if I remember.

As per the caption they're Dutch from the town of Ede and that's it as far as I can tell.  If you have an interest in Fuchsia's and the like there is a massive database here.  Its the sort of thing Grandad would have loved.

Video Tat

Happy new year everyone.  I've been on a periodic rampage through a load of old VHS tapes, trying to see what can be salvaged, and what can be thrown out if anything.  It all started with a vague recollection that there was something odd at the end of some teen porn I had.  Not illegal strange but more like remnants of the program left over, an artifact of recording if you will.  It took a while to locate the tape in question and the remnant actually turned out to be a good 2 hours of footage.

So what do we have.  The first hour is some "golden showers" porn involving two actresses who could be anywhere from 18-30 due to make up and stuff, there are bits of another porno (I actually wrote porneo instead which I've realised is the most excellent thing ever) after this before breaking down into the real meat of this blog post.

Its the end part of  something called The Maternity Show with Blue Peter's Mark Curry as host.  There is a clip of two dwarves talking about pregnancy before a clip of Mark talking about old toys with an expert. This is the initial clip I thought was from Blue Peter as Mark used to be presenter and for some reason this was inflated into footage of the Blue Peter time capsule in my mind which of course it wasn't.  

The rest of the tape is made up of Quincy which aired on BBC1 according to Wikipedia and Channel 4's Escape From Colditz complete with ad breaks.  This includes ironically sexist car advert where a prize tool rates off a load of mechanic guff that women simply would not appreciate, and more junk.  I did try and cam  the lot with my digital camera but there was a lot of flickering and the porno element would simply not be suitable for the professional people who do VHS recovery jobs.  I did have a have a dongle thing that copied stuff across except it didn't do anything.  Which was a shame.