August 15th 2016 - 40th anniversary of Charlie Gillett playing Elvis' demo tape

[johnfoyle]

Well spotted. Another explanation suggests itself to me. Charlie's show was on a Sunday night. I can't remember the details but was Ross living in the house in Twickenham in 1976 that he had lived in since the 1960s? Perhaps Elvis was visiting with him & his family that Sunday evening , a thing lots of people do at the weekend. Elvis's scenario of going to the kitchen to listen on his own may be explained by the fact that he had to go there to listen uninterrupted , with the self conscious solitude a added bonus. Grasping at straws , I know....

[erey]

Well spotted. Another explanation suggests itself to me. Charlie's show was on a Sunday night. I can't remember the details but was Ross living in the house in Twickenham in 1976 that he had lived in since the 1960s? Perhaps Elvis was visiting with him & his family that Sunday evening , a thing lots of people do at the weekend. Elvis's scenario of going to the kitchen to listen on his own may be explained by the fact that he had to go there to listen uninterrupted , with the self conscious solitude a added bonus. Grasping at straws , I know....

Good try, but...

EC grew on the upper storey of a two-storey block of one-storey flats. Ross moved back into that flat after EC and Lillian moved to Liverpool. Later, EC and his wife moved into the flat directly underneath Ross and, by then, Ross's second wife and their children. (In UM&DI, he jokes about the neighbors fearing "some kind of MacManus commune" was forming.)

In UM&DI, EC is clearly saying he is listening to himself on Gillet's show while sitting in the flat downstairs from the one he grew up in.

I should probably add something about this to the EC geobiography I'm slowing working on here: http://www.elviscostellofans.com/phpBB3 ... 1#p7726697.

I think the fact that the August 15 date puts EC's Gillet debut right on top of, if not slightly after, his first dealings with Stiff is what really torpedoes it.

[johnfoyle]

I posted about this vagueness on a Stiff page on Facebook.

It has drawn a robust response from Will Birch -




John Your friend can doubt me, but I didn't make it up. On 26 April 1995 Charlie Gillett wrote to me (following our interview) and supplied me with a 6-page computer print out of all of the artists played on Honky Tonk, by year. On the 1976 page it states: D.P. Costello Lip Service 15 Aug, Wave A White Flag 15 Aug, Blame It On Cain 29 Aug. BTW I looked at the Elvis Book and could find no suggestion that it could have been earlier than August. Hope this helps, W.


Will may be being a bit touchy in interpreting the queries as a 'doubt' and a implication that he might ' make it up'. Whatever - if it's a by product of the diligence with which he has written his excellent books I can live with it. It's good, in the end , to get this clarification.

[erey]

Thanks for putting yourself out there and getting this information out here, John. If it makes Will Birch feel any better, you can tell him we're not actually friends.

Since EC has said for many years (and says in UM&DI) that Gillet approached him about recording for Oval Records, and that this discussion dragged on for a while but ultimately went nowhere, before Stiff did, it seems perhaps it took a little longer than previously assumed for Stiff to make a definitive move toward EC.

[johnfoyle]

Mark Perry makes a interesting point

'Anyone figured out why EC "went into the kitchen and turned out all the lights" to listen to this? 'Honky Tonk' was a Sunday lunchtime show, wasn't it? '


The most I can find is this from Charlie's note with a Ace compilation

' I had just passed my thirtieth birthday when I got my own radio show in March 1972, being set loose to play pretty much whatever I wanted, Sunday lunchtime on the BBC’s local FM station, Radio London. Just 45 minutes at first, it was fairly soon extended to an hour and then to two hours, broadcast every week until 31 December 1978.'

This from a obituary ' Rather, from March 1972 until the end of 1978 he was his own man and presented Honky Tonk on Sunday lunchtimes, mandatory listening for music cognoscenti. '.

So, either Elvis's kitchen was sadly lacking in natural light or he really should have tried harder to remember stuff.