The Velvet Forum

New update to Oliver's website has uncovered this photo..



...taken from a studio in Hilversum, Nederlands circa 1971.

NOW, where's the footage to go with it???

jimjim wrote:...taken from a studio in Hilversum, Nederlands circa 1971.

Now I know I saw this picture somewhere before (prob. in a Dutch music mag) but I always assumed it was a VPRO performance, not AVRO.

Anyway, I think I'll contact the Dutch Audiovisual Archives to hear if they have anything from that Top Pop broadcast. Don't get your hopes up too high, though, it may well be that this is a still and that the original tapes were erased for re-use as was the custom then, certainly with a "light" subject such as pop music.

arjan wrote:Don't get your hopes up too high, though

Well, in short, it was as I feared. I sent a mail to Beeld en Geluid ("Sound and Vision", formerly NAA, the Dutch centralised audiovisual archives for the public broadcasting corporations); they told me they had nothing and suspected nothing much would exist anymore.

But to make completely sure they directed me to a company called Toppop BV who apparently administer the Top Pop rights and whatever remains. I spent some time on the phone with them; they recognised the picture as being from Groothuizen's book but a database search of their archive also yielded nothing. They said that if they didn't have it, 98% chances would be that the broadcast would no longer exist.

They also suspected the picture was a still (i.e. a photograph taken by a "regular" camera, not a film or video camera). Might be worth tracking that one down, but as for the moving images and the music, alas.

-- As an aside, a 1974 KRO program called 't Is te Doen (which I had never heard of) features a kind of promo/film impression for "Sunday Morning" directed by one Leo Jansen (Leo Jansen geeft zijn filmimpressie van "Sunday morning" van Velvet Underground 3'03 -- Leo Jansen offers his film impression of "Sunday Morning" of Velvet Underground 3'03). This program is available. Should be interesting and very strange, though, that a broadcasting corp like KRO (prudishly Catholic at the time) would allow anything by our heroes to be broadcast, even the prettiest-sounding song they ever recorded.

jimjim wrote:New update to Oliver's website has uncovered this photo..

OK, so I went to the local library and grabbed me a copy of the book* to have a look at the picture. The Velvet Underground are even mentioned on the back cover blurb, where it brags about famous acts that played Top Pop ("from Abba to Zappa and from Vader Abraham to the Velvet Underground"), but apart from that, nothing much in the actual text. Only the bare fact that they were recorded at the AVRO studios in Hilversum on October 11, 1971, playing "Rock and Roll".

It transpires from the book that the all-blue surroundings they were playing in was an early attempt at the bluescreen post-production projection technique, which tells us that the picture is indeed a photographic still as opposed to a transmission grab (which would include the undoubtedly horrible 70s projection).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the post-Lou lineup, from left to right it's Doug, Maureen (playing a "real" drum kit!), Walter Powers III and Willie Alexander.

* Richard Groothuizen, Avro's Top Pop. Baarn: Tirion, 1999. ISBN 90-5121-815-X. No specific photographer's credits, but it appears the Avro internal documentation department is responsible for most of the pics.

you are awesome arjan, thank you.