Frank Zappa - 1968-10-23 - London, UK (DVDfull pro-shot)

(DVDFull pro-shot)

Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention
BBC Studios

Lineage:
BBC Master > VHS > DVD > Authoring

01 - King Kong
02 - In The Sky
03 - Apathy Interview

Mintypinto's notes
OK folks, so here's the story. Just over 15 years ago I had a friend doing some research work at the BBC, I gave her a short shopping list of things that I would love to see her raid the archive for and amazingly she came up trumps with a few selections.
The 23 minute session that FZ and the MOI did at the BBC in London.

Now the ridiculous bit of the story.
The video tape supplied to me was of fantastic quality, a dupe taken from the master and put on to VHS. I kept the video for years and watched it a few times, amazing playing, the band are in top form, JCB and Art Tripp keep up a tremendous rhythm with Roy Estrada and all solos from the band are great.
About 5 years ago I got a friend to digitize the tape to DVD along with a load of other stuff that I had recorded off TV, he did a pretty good job and I was so pleased with it that I threw the VHS copy away.
Of course as time has gone by, technology has got better and better to the point where I could have made a better copy on my £150 TV DVD Harddrive recorder.
Dohhh!
Anyway, if you have a fantastic copy of this already, don't download this but share your copy with us all.
If you have a good copy of this, download this one, it may be better.
And if you have a poor copy or worse still, don't have it at all, this download is mandatory. It's brilliant.
Incidently, I noticed at 20 minutes a very quick fade in and out of sound, the band go from King Kong to another track which to the untrained ear may sound like a segue but it ain't. This implies the band played for longer then is on the tape but this is all I was supplied with. My guess is that the edit was done at the time and what ended up in the BBC archive was all that was left.
Still, we are lucky to have this much great video, fortunately the cameraman were not trying to imitate a bad acid trip by pull focusing and zooming in and out all the time as was the style of the day so what we get is a fairly well shot recording of FZ and the Mothers at the top of their game.