Okay, rage informed me today with this message regarding Moir Sisters tribute :-)

Hi Jason, we'll be doing a tribute next Saturday morning (7/2).

Great job Jason.

Well ... Myself, Nathan and Patrick are the only ones on Facebook so all the 3 of us can do is try to represent us bunch all here

Don't forget 'Steve Faulkner'. He contibutes too!

Saturday morning 7th Feb:

09:30am

MOON DUO Animal (Sacred Bones Records)
THE MOIR SISTERS Good Morning (on GTK, 1974) ()
NATIONAL MUSIC INDUSTRY AWARDS February 28th, 1975 (Rage)
THE MOIR SISTERS Interview on GTK, 1975 (Rage)
THE MOIR SISTERS So Excited ()
JOHN FARNHAM You're The Voice (Live on Countdown, 1986) ()
MARGOT MOIR Scarlet Skies ()
DRALMS Crushed Pleats (Fat Possum)
LXURY featuring DEPTFORD GOTH Square 1 (Greco Roman)


10:00am

Wow, that is an amazing tribute for what was really only an artist with minimal chart success but spent a long time in the music industry. Whoever put this together at Rage is doing a brilliant job.

I wonder if the National Music Industry Awards segment will show Ian Miller collecting the award for producer of the year - I know he won it but don't know if it was on this show. He had been enjoyable company at a few Hawthorn games until he passed away in 2009.

Also hope it is the clip for So Excited as I have only ever seen the short snippet on Countdown once.

There was some rare footage shown this morning.

That is the first time I have ever seen that clip in full for Good Morning. An ordinary clip really but as a lover of rare old footage I thought it was great to see.

In the intro for the 1975 Music Awards there was a still of the Moir Sisters on Countdown from an episode that was wiped a long time ago. They appeared on the Feb 8 1975 episode so I imagine it was from there.

I had not seen the clip for Scarlet Skies (1989) before. An interesting song. It didn't chart (not even in the Top 100) and surprising that it survived all the purging in the 90's. There is another clip from 1989 on YouTube called Watch Out.

The John Farnham clip from the 1986 Countdown was complete from start to finish. It was not lifted from the episode but must have been on a separate storage tape to be complete with no voiceovers.

I see the video for 'So Excited' is on YouTube.

Also, I read a post on the rage facebook page. A viewer asked:

'Did rage pay tribute to Joe Cocker after he passed away December last year?'

rage reply: 'We pay tribute to a lot of musicians, but don't commit to featuring everyone who dies as we are not a tribute show. There was a lot of coverage in the news about Joe already, and sometimes we prefer to leave it at that'.

So, I think we are pretty lucky to get a special on this one.

So I take it that was Margot Moir as the back up singer on stage with the blonde punk hairdo of the studio performance of 'You're The Voice'? Boy, what a departure from her previous looks.

Guru, just confirming that John Farnham always sang live on Countdown? If so, he sounds amazing.

Lastly, I see in my Encyclopedia of Australian Music that the 'Silver Skies' singles was released in 1990, but don't give it the month of the year. Do your records show 1989?

Oops 'Scarlet Skies'

The blonde punk appeared to be Margot, certainly looked similar to her other 1989 clip Watch Out.

I am sure Farnham mimed all his performances on Countdown. On his 'live' performance shown this morning the song fades at the end although John is still singing the same which is a fair giveaway.

I hadn't heard of Scarlet Skies but when I googled it there were about 10 sites saying it was 1989, including sites selling the single so they would work off the copyright date printed on it. Maybe it was produced late 1989 and released early 1990. I had not seen it before so wouldn't know either way. I sort of stopped following music closely around 1987 when I started working. Maybe Nathan would know as he is an expert in this era.

We probably lucked out not getting a Joe Cocker clip special but as I mentioned at the time I wouldn't have minded the Countdown that he hosted and there was also a Rock Arena which had a Cocker special on it and either of those would have been fine. I just get sick of seeing his performance With A Little Help From My Friends all the time. They did show a Countdown with Up Where We Belong on it at No.1 which I thought was for that reason.

I don't think I'd actually heard of the Moir Sisters before, but that was a great tribute.

If you were interested enough, you could try contacting ARIA directly - their database has outside the top 100 peaks, down to at least as low as #200, from at least early 1989. The in-house produced ARIA chart commenced in June 1988, so they don't have data before then. Sales data began being tracked electronically at point of sale in March 1997, and from then onwards they have below the top 200 chart info. Though as I'd never heard of that Scarlet Skies track before, it's quite possible that it missed the top 200

I too am sometimes amazed at what obscure, non-JJJ-friendly stuff has survived the library culls, from time to time. Although I suspect rage source a lot of this stuff from the ABC archives, which are separate to the rage library. Theoretically, all of the culled videos could still exist in the archive - they just haven't necessarily been catalogued well/consistently/at all yet, so it may take a while to find things. It's a pity though that more effort isn't made to properly catalogue/see what's in the archives.

As for that John Farnham Countdown clip, that was interesting, as it went to the fade-out of the song, and had no Countdown titles etc. over it... which leads me to suspect it was sourced from one of the Countdown 'source' tapes (or whatever they're called), rather than being directly lifted from a show. Also, there was no audience cheer/clapping over the intro or outro, so obviously it was re-dubbed by rage (or maybe it was recorded that way rather than actually being in front of the live studio audience).

Rage recently replied to a comment on the Facebook page about a Joe Cocker tribute:


Brendan Shane Did rage pay tribute to Joe Cocker after he passed away December last year?
Like · Reply · February 6 at 4:32pm

rage We pay tribute to a lot of musicians, but don't commit to featuring everyone who dies as we are not a tribute show. There was a lot of coverage in the news about Joe already, and sometimes we prefer to leave it at that.



I'm surprised, actually, because like him or not, Joe Cocker was widely known and liked. They've paid tribute to a lot of artists who've had far less of an 'impact'. It's bizarre they didn't play even one song as a tribute.

^ oops, I see Michael already posted the response from rage. (I can't edit my posts in this thread or some reason).

Joe Cocker is the sort of artist you'd think Rage would be all over tribute wise.

I agree there Guru - a very good segment and thanks for the direct reminder, I probably would have forgotten to record it without that.

I will check that 1975 Music Industry Awards show for Ian Miller for you, I do have the whole show stored away in my mountain of DVDs. Come to think of it, I am not sure why they do not show the whole thing in retro month at some stage, it is interesting to watch now and it does include those brief wiped Countdown snippets from 1974. Renee Geyers performance from the same show also aired again this year (and Skyhooks "Horror Movie" has in the past which is a brilliant clip of them!!)

With regards to Joe Cocker, well as much as I like him I am with Rage on this one, it is not a tribute show, and they sure as hell must have been sick of that same one guy asking over and over in facebook all the time. Time to draw the line somewhere. There is only a limited amount of footage to show anyway, much of it very grainy. What they obviously missed was showing the 1986 Countdown that he hosted, now that would have been appropriate.