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The Old Grey Whistle Test

The Old Grey Whistle Test

List Price: $24.98
Your Price: $22.48
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Wait for Volume Three
Review: For some reason a search on Amazon of "Old Grey Whistle Test" only comes up with this initial DVD. Although very good, there have been two other releases of the show since then.

DVD's 2 & 3 are single disc formats with the latter being by far and away the best of all three. I initially bought the DVD primarily for 2 songs.... John Martyn's "Couldn't love you more" (with Danny Thompson on bass) and a 23yo Jackson Browne singing "Jamaica say you will" from his first album. The absolute highlight however is Steve Marriott and Humble Pie doing a classic version of "Black coffee". If you buy the disc for no other reason, you won't have wasted your money.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Wait for Volume Three
Review: For some reason a search on Amazon of "Old Grey Whistle Test" only comes up with this initial DVD. Although very good, there have been two other releases of the show since then.

DVD's 2 & 3 are single disc formats with the latter being by far and away the best of all three. I initially bought the DVD primarily for 2 songs.... John Martyn's "Couldn't love you more" (with Danny Thompson on bass) and a 23yo Jackson Browne singing "Jamaica say you will" from his first album. The absolute highlight however is Steve Marriott and Humble Pie doing a classic version of "Black coffee". If you buy the disc for no other reason, you won't have wasted your money.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: If not for anything else, buy it for Rory Gallagher
Review: Hands Off is simply amazing. Rory works his magic here!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Where's The Mission's performance ????
Review: I believe the UK version of this DVD has a performance by the goth-rock band The Mission. It it not included in the U.S/CANADA release. Are we not fans also? Christ! What a rip off! I will pass, thanks!

Oh look! Someone has posted the UK versions on the internet in vcd format, I'll grab that instead, as it includes all the performances, including The Mission.

Now the DVD producer looses my money and its their own fault. Dumbasses!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Don't Miss This!!!
Review: I bought this the day it went on sale and I'm not disappointed!!! There are some negative comments posted to this site complaining about what isn't on this disc. How about what IS there??!!!! U2, REM, Talking Heads, XTC (when was the last time you saw them perform??), Captain Beefheart, Roxy Music w/ Brian Eno, Elton John as a baby and an interview with John Lennon that made me cry. Rory Gallagher, Tom Petty, Bill Withers, Tom Waits and just for fun, The Ramones. This is AMAZING!!

Who knows why the BBC cut it down to one disc from the original 2-disc U.K version (dumb move, I agree), but before you follow the advice below and buy the 2-disc U.K. set, BEWARE! IT WON'T PLAY ON YOUR U.S. DVD PLAYER! Let's see, you can have one amazing, incredible time capsule of a disc that you can watch or two discs shipped from the U.K. that you can play frisbee with. Tough choice there.

Buy this DVD!!!! You won't regret it!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Edited Keith Richards Interview
Review: I have the complete Keith Interview on a poor-quality VHS tape. I was hopin to upgrade.
Too bad they decided to edit his interview. (Something they'd never tell you about ahead of time)

The Lennon interview from 4-18-75 seems to be complete. And it's excellent.

Richards was in the middle of his 8 yr Heroin "Experiment" at the time.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Definitely Worth Seeking Out
Review: I picked up this DVD today and decided to watch a couple of clips from it during lunch today. I ended up not only watching the entire DVD in one go, but then forced my wife to watch several choice bits from the DVD later tonight!

Thoroughly enjoyable, with clips that I had only seen bits and pieces of over the years in documentaries about rock and/or some of the performers. Excellent performances, and thoughtful intros by the individuals from the program really make this a very entertaining package. The interview were fun to watch as well, and I was happily surprised to find that the Lennon interview was about 20 minutes long (I had expected something that was just a three minute filler at best).

I was also quite happy to see that the entire package (both the music and the extras) were all subtitled in English! BBC/Warner had done this for quite a long time, but had dropped the ball in subtitling the extras on quite a few recent DVD releases (The Red Dwarf DVDs and the Singing Detective boxset, to name two). Nice to see them back on the game here. It is doubly so as I've seen so many musical collections on DVD that were subtitled or captioned in the spoken sections of the programming, but not during the songs themselves (the MPI Beatles releases over the years and the Criterion's edition of Gimme Shelter readily come to mind here), so this is great to see.

Probably the best musical DVD I have seen all year . . . and I've seen plenty. Rush out and buy it if you have any interest at all of the music from the '70s and '80s.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: UK version plays on US region 1 machine
Review: I received the UK version. The region is '0'. It plays on my Pioneer PAL/NTSC player which only has region 1.

Am not reviewing the dvd; only stating that the UK version will play on region 1 machines.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: UK version plays on US region 1 machine
Review: I received the UK version. The region is '0'. It plays on my Pioneer PAL/NTSC player which only has region 1.

Am not reviewing the dvd; only stating that the UK version will play on region 1 machines.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: You need this, really
Review: Imagine the owner of the rights to the "Saturday Night Live" or "Midnight Special" broadcasts of the 70's had the brains to release a 3-hour DVD of some of the classic musical performances on those shows...well, don't hold your breath, but in the meantime this is the next best thing (actually, probably even better). There's some great stuff on here, XTC, Talking Heads, Edgar Winter, Springsteen and REM really standing out for me personally. If you're a fan of even a few of the groups on here you'll probably enjoy the rest of it just as much. Let's hope there's a second volume released in the very near future.


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