Top Of The Pops 1973
Venice Sassone
The chart above shows annual recorded music sales revenues by format in the US from 1973 to 2015 courtesy of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Here are a few interesting observations:
In 2009, researchers at the University of Michigan, following a suggestion from Mr. Varian, ran an experiment to see how much time was saved by search engines. Two teams were given a set of complex questions; one was told to use a search engine to find the answers, the other the library. On average, the search engine team beat the library team by 15 minutes.
Kenny Everett looks at the weekly pop chart from 1973 and introduces the Electric Light Orchestra, Elton John, Michael Ward, Status Quo, Pan's People, Engelbert Humperdinck, Slade and Limmie & the Family Cookin'.
On October 4, 1973, Top Of The Pops celebrated its 500th edition. The long-running UK show, which launched in 1964, was required viewing in a nation that only had three channels to choose from, so producer Robin Nash pulled out all the stops.
In 1966 the Musician's Union had demanded that bands play live on the show, but after a series of performances that clearly demonstrated the shortcomings of several players, a compromise was reached. A band's singer could lip-synch, and the other musicians could mime, but only to a newly recorded version of the song's backing track. Theoretically, artists were required to record the new version in the presence of representatives from both the Musicians Union and the BBC.
Townshend didn't like the ruling. And three years earlier, he'd written a column for Melody Maker headlined 'TV miming: who is being fooled?', in which he made his position clear. "The TOTP team feels cramped by the restrictions," he wrote, "and artists like ourselves that spend weeks in recording studios at fantastic expense, don't feel like going through it all again to get a plug on television."
He went on: "I believe that my union, the Musicians' Union, is misrepresenting me, making rules that make me have to rerecord my own music each time I appear on television with no advantages to anybody at all. Not even studios gain by this re-recording, we have our own. It's absurd."
But The Who had to adhere to the rules. So on October 2 they went back to Ramport Studios in Battersea, where Quadrophenia had been recorded, and taped 5:15 again. And then, on the following day, they travelled six miles north to the BBC's Television Centre to film Top Of The Pops.
It's carnage. He kicks over Keith Moon's kit and tosses a cymbal into the wings, and smashing his own guitar. Moon joins in, and it all ends with Townshend flicking the Vs in the direction of Robin Nash as several wigs (presumably purloined from the BBC's props department) are tossed back at him. Meanwhile, frontman Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle continue as if nothing's happened.
Viewers watching the broadcast the following night could be forgiven for thinking that nothing beyond the ordinary had happened at all, as the BBC edited their footage so that Townshend's offensive gestures weren't seen. The Who's own footage of the event eventually emerged on the rockumentary The Kids Are Alright, where it was played over the end credits.
The Who subsequently received a lifetime ban from the BBC, which was lifted after the band's management wrote a letter of apology. And by 2007, when Daltrey and Townshend were interviewed on the same channel's Later... With Jools Holland, the singer couldn't even remember why they'd been banned.
David Bowie (1947-2016) was a famed British singer-songwriter and actor. Having had a music career spanning from 1963 to his death in 2016, Bowie first came to mainstream attention with the success of his 1969 single "Space Oddity," and spent the rest of his career experimenting with a variety of different genres (most notably glam rock during most of the first half of the 1970s). Bowie experienced a generally uneven amount of success throughout his career, most notably with a sudden creative slump from 1984 to 1992 following the massive success of his 1983 album Let's Dance, before experiencing a creative renaissance with 1993s Black Tie White Noise. Regardless, he is one of the highest-selling musicians in the world, selling roughly 100 million copies of his various works during his lifetime. Remaining musically active until his death, Bowie is widely considered one of Great Britain's definitive musicians, with this level of acclaim further amplifying after his death.
On April 13th, 1973, following the release of his widely-acclaimed fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Bowie released the first album he wrote and released as a bona fide rocker as well as his most commercially successful in the USA and the UK at the time (given its 100,000 pre-orders), Aladdin Sane, which he described as "Ziggy goes to America". The first single, "The Jean Genie," was released on November 24th, 1972, and later went on to become one of his best-known songs, also giving Scottish band Simple Minds their name due to the lyric "He's so simple-minded, he can't drive his module." A little over a month later, on January 4th, 1973 (three months before Aladdin Sane was to be released), the long-running British chart show Top of the Pops aired a pre-recorded performance of the song, where Bowie's entire four-piece band performed live (which was unusual for the Ziggy Stardust era), and then-guitarist Mick Ronson did an extended guitar solo. Unfortunately, tapes of this edition of the show were immediately wiped, like a lot of other BBC programs at the time.
Fortunately, cameraman John Henshall, utilizing the then-new fisheye lens technique seen in the performance, made a copy (which he only wanted for his showreel) and, on December 2011, was contacted by music-television aficionado Ray Langstone to share this historic David Bowie relic with the masses.[1] It has since been preserved in the BBC archives, screened at that year's Missing Believed Wiped event, and rebroadcast on December 21st, 2011, during the annual Top of the Pops 2 Christmas special, 38 years after its original airing in 1973.[2]
After a T-1000 was sent back in time by Skynet to assassinate a young Sarah Connor, a T-800 was sent to 1973 to protect her anonymously, as its memory files were erased so that no one would know who sent it. The T-800 saved Sarah, but her parents were killed by the T-1000.
Thus, the T-800 acted as Sarah's guardian and raised Sarah by itself, preparing her by teaching her how to defend herself against Skynet's assassins, along with forewarning her about key moments in her future. T-800 was then referred as "Pops" by Sarah. Pops also told Sarah about the role her son, John, would play in Skynet's downfall. Over the many years they spent together, Sarah formed a very strong bond with Pops, whom she sees as a father-figure and refers to as "Pops" and taught the T-800 restraint, leading the Terminator to attack only to disable and works on teaching it to blend in, though without too much success.
When the T-800 sent by Skynet to assassinate Sarah arrived at Griffith Park Observatory in 1984, Pops confronted it in a fight. It held the other T-800 off long enough for Sarah to deactivate it with a .50 caliber round to its chest. The two then traveled to downtown Los Angeles to save Kyle Reese, who was under attack from the previously-mentioned T-1000. They were able to rescue him, but Kyle was shocked by Pops's presence in the vehicle. During a short fight, Pops incapacitated Kyle by knocking him unconscious using the barrel of Kyle's gun. When Kyle woke up, Pops and Sarah explained him the changes to the future and that they'd been preparing for his arrival for over a decade. As they talked, Pops detected and shot off a Mimetic polyalloy tracking device from the door of their truck, which the T-1000 had been using to track them down.
The T-1000 successfully tracked them down and, after a brief car chase, found them in an abandoned warehouse. Upon arrival, it impaled Pops with a pole formed from its own mimetic polyalloy through the shoulder, pinning it to a wall and temporarily incapacitating it while the T-1000 went after Sarah, reactivating the damaged T-800 with a drop of its mimetic polyalloy in order for it to kill Kyle. Kyle managed to deactivate the T-800 once again and Sarah lured the T-1000 into an acid trap to dissolve it. Despite being badly damaged, the T-1000 managed to make it through the acid and nearly reached her, but Pops, having freed itself from the pole by then, grabbed the T-1000 and held it under the acid to completely dissolve it. However, doing this also dissolved the skin on Pops' right arm before Sarah neutralized the acid so it would not damage his endoskeleton. Pops and Sarah then removed the decapitated T-800's CPU and dissolved its body in acid so it could not be found and used to create Skynet by reverse engineering as initially happened.
Pops and Sarah revealed their plan to Kyle: they intended to use the Time Displacement Device that they had developed to travel to 1997 to prevent Judgment Day by destroying Skynet before it was ever created. They needed the T-800's CPU to act as the time machine's operating system. Due to its damaged skin, which would take years to regrow, Pops could not make the trip as was originally planned, as the magnetic field would destroy it. It would instead take "the long way" and prepare for their arrival in the future. While preparing the Time Machine, Kyle remembered "Genisys" from his time jump and told Sarah and Pops about it. Pops confirmed that it was possible for Kyle to remember the memories of an altered timeline by experiencing a nexus point while he was inside the other TDD's quantum field, convincing Sarah to jump forward to that time instead. Pops sent them forward in time to 2017 and remained behind.
Pops continued to gather equipment, supplies, and weapons for Kyle and Sarah's use in raiding Skynet in 2017. Over the years, its skin sheath regrew so it appeared completely human again even if it was elderly. During the preparation period, Pops took a position as a member of the construction crew for the Cyberdyne Systems Headquarters to gather intelligence and added Kyle and Sarah's data into an underground bunker, so that they could survive the destruction of the building if they could not escape. However, Pops was eventually laid off. Pops had also kept a collection of photographs and crayon drawings Sarah had made of the two of them when she was a child, along with her old cassette player. Due to old age and a lack of proper maintenance, its servomotors had started to degrade and occasionally experienced lock-ups.
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