Ken Loach: His Last and First 10

If it is indeed true that The Old Oak is Ken Loach’s last film, then he could’ve picked no stronger note to go out on. The film shows how far he’s come since the documentary-influenced telefilms he made in the Sixties, but it also reflects the themes he’s returned to again and again in the last six decades, and it shows how his cinema has been and remains an eloquent modern variation on Italian neo-realism.

For The Old Oak is both distinctly modern and yet is a thinking person's tearjerker in the manner of the Italian masters. It is structured by scripter Paul Laverty so that the emotional material appears throughout but most distinctly surfaces in the second act and then, well… I’ll leave out any spoilers from the impeccable ending.

Laverty has worked with Loach on 14 features, since Carla’s Song in 1996. His storyline revolves around pub owner T.J. (Dave Turner), who lives in a small British town that was devastated by the closing of its coal mine decades before. T.J. looks like a gruff sort, but he has no problem with the new arrivals in the town, a group of Syrian refugees, who are as poor as many of the town’s citizens. 

T.J.’s regulars loathe the Syrians, but T.J. soon has struck up a friendship with aspiring photographer Yara (Ebla Mari). Recounting the history of the town’s ties to its labor union, he remembers his mother’s favorite expression — “When you eat together, you stay together” — and soon sets up with Yara and his more open-minded regulars a three-times-weekly free dinner in the back of his pub. The positive feeling created by the event is not shared by T.J.’s regulars; what results from their actions unexpectedly leads to a very moving finale.

Throughout, Laverty’s storyline is abetted by Loach’s realistic depiction of the small town. The cast also do a superb job, with Dave Turner delivering a nuanced performance as T.J.

Loach has abandoned using documentary visual techniques but definitely retains his hold on the particulars of an environment. What is most important in The Old Oak, though, is the message, which is intertwined with the storyline and apparent in dialogue — as when one frequenter of T.J.’s pub laments the hatred manifested toward “the poor bastards below us.” Yes, some of the film fits together so early that one might deem it a fantasy but, Loach seems to be arguing, what transpires is an achievable fantasy (and is spurred on by one man deciding to take action).
*****

Oak is a new and timely tale, but its themes have been present in Loach’s work since the beginning of his career. As Oak is playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan, and the theater is starting a 21-film festival of Loach’s work on April 19, I wanted to also provide brief reviews of 10 of his earliest films, including three that will be in the Film Forum fest and seven that are found on the Ken Loach at the BBC box set. 

The films can also be found on various streaming websites, but I’d rather tout their appearance on the big screen. (Contact me privately for the online location of some of the films if you don’t live in NYC, but the BBC box is the first, best starting place.) 

Loach started working as a director of TV episodes on the BBC in 1964 and by 1965 had entered the heady world of the BBC teleplay. (The fertile ground out of which emerged great talents like Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke.) 

The earliest surviving Loach teleplay is “3 Clear Sundays” (1965), which aired as part of The Wednesday Play. That series found producer Tony Garnett working hand in glove with Loach developing a series of landmark plays, best described as telefilms, since the best of the Loach-directed entries contain much exterior shooting. (All the titles mentioned below were part of that series, until it became Play for Today.) 

“Sundays” is an anti-capital punishment piece that offers an intriguing look at the criminal milieu, but unfortunately the play has a hackneyed gimmick throughout, in which plot developments are sung in the style of old British pub songs. The hero is a simple-minded gent, whom we know is going to be entrapped by someone — it turns out to be two higher-ranking crooks with whom he shares a prison cell. 

The single best moment finds one of these crime chiefs saying about the government, “They’re worse than us.” (Thus, introducing a future Loach theme about working-class villains being bad but never as wildly corrupt as those who run society.) 

One of the best-known Loach teleplays is “Up the Junction” (1965), based on a book by Nell Dunn (who also scripted) about three working-class girlfriends and their ineffectual male companions. “Junction” is a fascinating counterpoint to the well-loved and much-lauded “kitchen sink” films of the Sixties, in that it presents both the “swinging” side of British youth (whenever the girls visit a local rock club), but it also shows the other side of its young heroines’ lives, replete with their factory jobs and houses that have no bath or inside toilet.

Watching Loach’s “kitchen sink” dramas, one is thrust right into the lives of the characters; his work in this regard has no “angry young man” antihero protagonist — some of his lead characters do have rebellious attitudes but there is none of the heroic bravado of Burton in Look Back in Anger or Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 

I’ve noted before that one of the best “commentaries” on the kitchen sink films is the “SCTV” sketch “Look Back in a Bloody Rage,” where it is emphasized that “putting a bun” in a woman’s “oven” is the central theme of Sixties British cinema. (Leading to a punchline where it is inserted in the post-kitchen sink A Clockwork Orange). Getting pregnant is indeed a major plot point in Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, A Taste of Honey, and even the non-sink Alfie. 

The aftermath of the abortion.

Loach flipped that cliché on its head by including the trauma-of-pregnancy plot element into his films but also emphasizing that an unexpected pregnancy is only one of many different predicaments a working-class young woman can find herself in. “Junction” was criticized for its brutal depiction of a woman suffering great pain after having an illegal abortion — what was obviously being protested here was not the after-effects as portrayed, but the fact that a drama was reflecting the life-threatening chances that working class young people had to take to get themselves out of an all-too-common problem. 

One very interesting aspect of Dunn’s script for “Junction” is the repeated discussions of death that the characters engage in. (Reflecting their knowledge that it’s always around the corner for those not born of privilege.) The telefilm also has a great musical soundtrack comprised of songs performed live (including two Beatles songs sung by the girls), plus two songs by the Kinks, The Crystals’ “And Then He Kissed Me,” Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and various tunes sung in the rock club by a local band. 

Two notes relating to “Junction”: Avoid the theatrical film made from the same material, which is quite dull compared to the telefilm. Also, for those wondering, the Squeeze song is set in the same town and features some of the elements that the girls undergo in the telefilm, but the finale of the story told by Difford and Tilbrook is different from Loach’s film. 

The next Loach teleplay, “Cathy Come Home” (1966), is one that garnered 12 million viewers on its first airing. (10 million had watched “Junction.”) It remains one of his most devastating films, as it presents a grueling downward spiral undergone by a lower-class young woman (Carol White, who had starred in “Junction”). All she and her boyfriend/soon-to-be-husband are guilty of is making some bad decisions, but they also are the victims of governmental edicts and endless amounts of red tape as they are forced to move from living in an apt to living with his mother, to squatting, to living in a mobile home, to residing in a temporary homeless shelter. 

As noted above, Loach was strongly influenced as a filmmaker by the Italian neo-realists and cites Bicycle Thieves as the film that transformed his view of cinema. “Cathy” functions very much like a neo-realist film, with raw, emotional moments occurring in what is otherwise a realistic depiction of modern society. As had been done in “Junction,” Loach and scripter Jeremy Sandford added here the voices of real people to whom the fictional events we’re watching have occurred, as well as other voices reciting the brutal facts that underlie the reality of the situations we’re watching. 

The devastating climax of "Cathy."

The extras were all real people in different real settings, and some of the supporting players were non-actors. Loach also began urging his actors to improvise their scenes around this time. The result is a film that has a very raw edge to it, but it is overwhelming in its effect, like the work of John Cassavetes and the filmmaker whom Loach is often compared to/linked with, Mike Leigh. 

Loach’s next telefilm was “In Two Minds” (1967), a sad, often disturbing account of a young woman’s depression and schizophrenia. The script by David Mercer finds us being told about the young woman by a psychiatrist and then several scenes in we find ourselves in the girl’s POV for a while, then out to a fly-on-the wall perspective, back to POV, etc. 

Sadly, this particular film’s realism seems fake at times, thanks to the not-great performances of some of the supporting cast, whose characters (most prominently the mother) lecture the young woman with not-exactly-subtle speeches. Regardless, Anna Cropper gives a dazzling performance in the lead role, and the end — in which, post-shock therapy, she is reduced to being a case study for a psych class — is truly wrenching. 

Poor Cow (1967) was Loach’s first theatrical feature. It stars Carol White (from “Junction” and “Cathy”) and is another Loach-Nell Dunn collaboration. Here the lead character is in prime “kitchen sink” territory but her journey does refreshingly include some very happy moments, in between her suffering in an abusive marriage and her becoming a model for a sleazy “camera club” of horny guys pretending to be high-fashion photogs. 

The film features intertitles by Dunn that read like dialogue. One reads “Never marry a thief,” which could be amended to “an abusive, very bad thief,” for her husband ends up in jail, which is a relief to every viewer of the film. Entering at that point is the guy who becomes the love of her life, her husband’s caper-mate, played by Terence Stamp (qualifying as Loach’s first work with a “movie star”). The relationship she has with Stamp is idyllic to the point of being unrealistic (he sits around his flat singing her “Colours” by Donovan) but again it is a welcome interlude in her life and in the film, and serves as an example of Loach depicting joy as well as sorrow. (The sorrow returns, because Stamp’s character is as bad a thief as the husband and is soon hauled off to jail.) 

At one point our heroine notes that she needs “different men for different moods.” While older viewers must’ve found this notion distasteful and immoral, younger viewers surely understood that she was the equivalent of the “angry young men” in other kitchen sink films. (Although a female making that kind of decision about her love life was roundly condemned by society at that time, and that is depicted in the film.) 

Returning to television, “The Golden Vision” (1968) is a pleasant but not major work by Loach that intermingles footage of players and coaches from a real football club with fictionalized accounts of a group of football fans who live their life around the games. Some amusing moments occur as a result of this single-mindedness. The best include a Best Man trying to speed up a wedding so he can get to a football match and another gent talking through a strip show about how great the players on his team are. 

One of the best-known of Loach’s early films is his second theatrical feature, Kes (1969). It has a slower pace than his telefilms (reinforced by fades to black between scenes) and is a perfect character study of a young boy’s alienation from his family and classmates. The plot, in short, revolves around him stealing a kestrel from a nest and training it as a falconer would.

The scenes in which the boy trains the bird are jubilant and convey a sense of liberation (although the bird is of course tied with a rope while flying). The home and school scenes have an air of imprisonment — although a football match run by an egomaniacal phys-ed coach is one of the best-ever depictions of why gym class is such a stone drag to any kid who is not enthralled by the notion of throwing or catching a ball. 

Loach utilizes no distancing techniques here — he places us directly in the boy’s life in both its joyous and godawful moments. There is a sense that the boy has no real future offered to him by his school or the job prospects his school promotes. Without giving away the unforgettable ending, one does come away believing that his experience with the kestrel will make him a different sort of adult than he was going to be. 

Although all of Loach’s work has a political aspect to it, in 1969 he turned specifically to the plight of the worker in the workplace with “The Big Flame.” The film is shot in the same docudrama style as “Junction” and “Cathy” but is devoted to an account of Liverpool dock workers who are trying to surmount the odds by turning a strike they’re having into an opportunity to run the shipping business on the dock. 

This particular account does not include much about the worker’s home lives — we see their beleaguered wives, but the focus is on the workers. What is most important, given Loach’s preceding telefilms and his future theatrical features, is the fact that he offers us a triumph (in which the workers indeed do a better job of running the docks) followed by a fall (in which the bosses separate the two heads of the workers from the rest of the group and chaos results).

Norman Rossington (Hard Day's Night)
 in "The Big Flame."

The last sequence is not unhappy, however, and reminds one of Chris Marker’s belief that the younger generations will take over the fight against the Establishment. We watch the message of the Liverpool dock workers being spread by a proselytizing worker with only a few listeners taking note of him in a nearly abandoned field. The last image is of three children listening intently to the man’s message. Perhaps the future will indeed offer better things?

The next telefilm, this time on Play for Today, a rescheduled version of The Wednesday Play, was another account of a worker’s strike, “The Rank and File” (1971). We are told in an opening title that this film is based on real events that took place in 1970 in Lancashire. Similar issues to those in “The Big Flame” are introduced, but here the focus includes the pressure put on the workers’ families by an ongoing strike and various negotiations with the bosses and the British Trade Union Congress, which one worker notes is “there to break strikes!” He’s not wrong. 

"The Rank and File."
(Note the sign.)

Loach used a more kinetic style of editing in the meetings scenes, producing an intense can’t-escape-it feeling for the negotiations, which are often dispiriting events in which the workers are handed empty promises by the boss. It is the Trade Union Congress that gives them the biggest screwing, though, and while the end isn’t as openly tragic as the one in “Big Flame,” there is still an amazing scene where one older worker near to retirement, who had participated in the strike (as had all the workers), is told his pension has been nullified and he’s being fired and rehired in a different position which offers him no pension at all. 

The only way for Loach to end the film was with the voice of one worker, seen over photos of the real workers who conducted a strike in 1970 and their children (again, those who can rise up in the future). “The only question is one of political leadership and the foundation of a party that will lead the workers to power…. I go along with Trotsky — that life is beautiful, that the future generation cleanses [us] of all the oppression, violence, and evil. And enjoy it to the full.” 

The last “first” item I will cover here is Family Life (1971), Loach’s theatrical remake of “In Two Minds.” It was a project that producer Tony Garnett really wanted to happen, since he felt that “Minds” didn’t cover the material well enough. The film is indeed a bleak one, as here there are only a handful of short scenes in which our schizophrenic antiheroine (Sandy Ratcliff) is happy. (She is at least given a boyfriend in this version of events, but he is not able to save her.) 

The film is very austere and was not a financial success. It did, however, allow Loach to work with non-professional actors yet again and to encourage them to improvise in their role. The main “villain,” the girl’s mother, was in fact played by a non-pro who seemingly was quite adept at lecturing her about the way kids act “these days.” 

Young Ken.

The most interesting thing about the picture is that it doesn’t work quite as well when it introduces new material into the story. However, when it settles in its third act into redoing the events from the end of “Two Minds,” it is riveting and disturbing to watch. 

Loach directed more than two dozen fiction features and shorts, and several documentaries (and even political party broadcasts) in the 52 years between Family Life and The Old Oak (which debuted in the U.K. in 2023). We can only wish him a mellow retirement (he’s 87) and, like the children in his strike telefilms (and Old Oak), continue to learn from his work as time passes.

Kuchar movies and other underground classics -- Catch 'em while you can!

Two classy men of the Bronx.
(George and Mike Kuchar)

There are countless articles appearing each week about the availability (or non-availability) of different films. The general consensus among diehard cinephiles is that, while certain streaming services are very good at presenting arthouse and indie cinema, the best way to get and keep the films is through owning “physical media” (the new name for discs, tapes, what-have-you).

But then again, there are those films that are just simply NEVER going to appear on any streaming service. The ones that are not “economically viable” to acquire and only have a “limited audience.” Those of us who want to see these films thus have to scrounge, and when a trove of them appears on the most visible (and most visited) video site on the Net, I have to draw your attention to them.

In this case, I felt that I should do this sooner than later, even though the poster in question — a gent named “Ray Cathode” — is still in the process of building his channel. The reason I feel I have to do this right away is that he’s including one filmmaker in the bunch whose Estate generally hounds people who reproduce or post his films. (My take on this: They don’t want the secret getting out — that secret being that his films were numbingly dull until others came along and directed the films for him.)

From the above, I’m sure you can guess who I’m talking about. (Further clues would include the wearing of a wig, the state of Pennsylvania, and soup.) Including this particular artist’s films gets your account taken down – even the YT channels that used to hide his work by renaming the films and never posting his name (and removing the initial credit for a specific museum) went down.

Thus, I urge you to see the films that “Ray” has put up before any litigious pains in the ass decide to take action and remove his trove from public view. For this person (I’ve been using the male pronoun since the person is using a male name) has put up a veritable treasure chest of underground and weirdo cinema.

Mike Kuchar.

I will put the emphasis here on two gents whose work I absolutely love and have saluted before many times on the Funhouse TV show and on this blog: Mike and George Kuchar. Twin brothers from the Bronx who gave us some absolutely delightful films that exhibited a super-low-budget style that influenced many who came after them (most prominently John Waters). 

Mike was an interview subject on the Funhouse; I made two episodes out of our talk, which was wonderful — rarely have I had a guest to whom I could speak about "high" and "low" culture in adjoining sentences! I spoke to George about doing an interview, but he was busy at the time he was in NYC. To show you the kind of gent he was, he called me from San Francisco and noted that if I were to come out there he'd love to do the interview. Sadly, that was a short time before his revealing that he had prostate cancer. He left us in 2011.

I’ll link to six items below. I used to be able to make these “survey” blog posts much longer and have many more links, but embedding from YouTube is apparently now in the trash can for blogspot blogs. Despite Blogger and YouTube both being Google properties, there is no cross-pollination between the two sites anymore, and a dedicated person like myself can go insane trying to find videos that CAN be embedded at this point.

George Kuchar (and friends).

For some reason, the whole enterprise has transformed into a situation where YT embeds are blocked, providing the blogger with a black screen with a “watch on YouTube” link. As that is incredibly ugly and extremely pointless, I’ll be doing fewer blog entries that link to YouTube videos, because: a.) sites like ok.ru have a broader variety of films anyway (including several Media Funhouse episodes!), and b.) the notion of “experimenting” with HTML code to see which videos appear as full thumbnail/old-school embeds and which are black boxes with a YT link is the way to sheer madness.

In the meantime, here are five links-with-thumbnail image and one actual embed. (I guess the film in question slipped through the net.)

“Tootsies in Autumn” is an early 8mm film by Mike Kuchar that shows off the controlled chaos of the brothers’ films — they worked mostly in tandem on the 8mm films, then split to make their own solo 16mm films and, later on, many, many videos.

“Tootsies” is silent cinema reborn as brightly colored kitsch with the soul of an overripe melodrama. 

“Born of the Wind” is another early item that shows off the visual storytelling style. It was directed by Mike and shows off the brothers’ love of (again) melodrama and horror pictures. 

 

“The Craven Sluck” by Mike is a stunner – here is a sci-fi thriller that foreshadows everything in the early work of John Waters. 

Watch “The Craven Sluck.”

“Eclipse of the Sun Virgin” (1967) by George shows off his wonderfully tacky and torrid taste, with Catholic imagery, Americana, pop culture, and the tininess of urban apartments. 

Watch “Eclipse of the Sun Virgin.”

“Forever and Always” (1978) is George’s reflection on relationships. Both Kuchar brothers were gay and both did include homoerotic imagery in their films (Mike’s is mystical and idyllic; George’s was earthy and straight from the crotch), but here he depicts boy-girl love and the inevitable un-romantic thing that results from said union: kids. The site of our female lead carrying around her kids through a children’s carnival tells you all you need to know about the possible benefits of birth control. 

Watch “Forever and Always.” 

“Route 666” (1994) is a crazy and wonderful short video that reflects George’s later concerns: extreme weather (he was a “storm chaser” wannabe, spending weeks in Oklahoma each year to see the big storms come), being haunted by pop culture artifacts (in this case, a marionette with a Donald Duck voice), and indelibly kitschy imagery, taken from gift shops all around the country. 

Watch “Route 666.” 

Those are just six of the Kuchar films on the “Ray Cathode” YT channel. There are 18 more up there as of this writing. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t list the other filmmakers whose works “Ray” has posted.

A quick laundry list on the channel: Anger, Brakhage, Burroughs, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell, Werner Schroeter, Zappa, and yeah, the famous artist-turned-filmmaker (whose work might be down, but hopefully not all of the Cathode channel, by the time you read this.) Also, Ken Jacobs’ seven-hour found-footage epic Star Spangled to Death and, for the kiddies, the Satanic Panic fave “Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults.” 

Note: Thanks to “Ray” for posting all this stuff (a bit of advice: remove the Factory guy’s stuff!) and to Jon Whitehead for leading me toward it.

Raise the Candles High: Deceased Artiste Melanie

Melanie was a best-selling folk-pop performer who became a cult musical figure. She is remembered very fondly by those who were her contemporaries in the hippie age group and by younger people who latched onto her music later on (like myself) when she was releasing a slew of albums that found her toying around with the idea of reinvention but also always staying true to her singer-songwriter roots. 

The best-known facts about her were that she played at Woodstock when the audience lit up candles (and matches and lighters) in the rain (thereby inspiring her Top Ten hit “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain”) with the Edwin Hawkins Singers) and that she wrote and sang the novelty-sounding hit “Brand New Key.” What was really remarkable about her, though, was that she was a very accomplished songwriter and had a killer voice — she was indeed a “belter” in the classic sense. She also recorded a broad array of covers, some of which are instantly forgettable, but others (including her epic take on “Ruby Tuesday”) are better than the original versions. 

My own fascination with her music began in the late ’70s when she had come back from a hiatus where she continued to record but didn’t tour, as she was raising her children. By the time she returned to full-fledged activity as an artist, the recording industry had moved on. 

There were also difficulties with record labels (this after she had run her own indie record label, Neighborhood Records, with her producer-husband Peter Schekeryk) — the oddest notes one finds online about her recording career are that two full albums were recorded in ’75 and ’79 and were kept by the studios they were recorded in because the bill for the recording time hadn’t been paid. This coincides with accounts of difficulties (not, I must stress, in any way with Melanie herself — there are no bad stories I’ve ever heard about her) that were relayed to me by a person who collaborated with her at one point.

One major obstacle was chronicled in an article sadly called "Look What They Did to Her Songs" that appeared in The Australian on June 5, 2014 (article behind a paywall). It turned out that Schekeryk sold the publishing rights to every single song Melanie wrote before 2004 without telling her. The story is reprinted here and it's a rather stunning betrayal but, since she was not aware of what he had done, their marriage was seemingly a happy one, as it lasted from 1968 until his death in 2010.

I got into her music at the point where she was no longer having hits but was a steady presence on the concert scene and on television. One of the two times I saw her perform was when I cut some classes in HS to see her receive the “skate key” to Manhattan from borough president Andrew Stein. (She performed a solo concert after the rather dubious ceremony.) 

I then saw her again, several lives later, at the B.B. King Blues Club on 42nd Street in the early 2010s. Her voice was pitch perfect as she belted out her best-known hits, as well as a bunch of new songs and covers.

*****

In honor of her really underrated body of work — there are indeed a few dozen albums with hidden gems hidden everywhere — I thought I would offer a dozen videos as a “survey” of her work. 

A little note here about which videos were chosen: I haven’t done a blog entry on a musical figure in many a year, but now I prob rarely (if ever) will, as way too many music clips on YT can’t be embedded in a blog. Thus, in some instances I had to pick videos that had nothing going on visually because I wanted to include the song and the better video for the song is verboten as far as embedding. I’ll list a few interesting Melanie YT channels at the end, but I wound up not using videos from two of the best because they turned the embedding feature off.

I’ll start out with the first song I heard from her on record. The two-record set “The Best… Melanie” from Buddah was a collection of the most notable songs from her time with the label (1968 to ’71).

From Steve
Hoffman's 
music board.

What is most impressive about the set, and any subsequent of “best of” that Buddah put out, was that they included non-hit album tracks that showed the raw, folkie side of Melanie and also her initial forays into pop tunes with orchestral backing. (Count me as a sucker for strings and horns on a pop tune.)

The Buddah comp was later released with a rather ridiculous cover concept — you could fold over the cover and make a cube with color drawings of Melanie! Rather bizarre, but perhaps this was thought of by the same person who included the famous line “Rub gently to release the magic of Melanie’s garden” on the cover of the U.K. release of her later Buddah collection Garden in the City. 

The first track on the collection was this somber, emotional cover of George Gershwin’s “Somebody Loves Me.” Quite a note to start off a greatest hits package!

 

A YT poster who has put up some dazzlingly rare tracks by Melanie (anyone want to hear her singing at four? Or the single for a girl band she wrote before her own recording career began? Or her mom Polly singing?) put up this collection of 1968 demos. Two of these songs became fan-faves, and there’s also an early version of her earthy cover of “Ruby Tuesday.”

 

There is no way in hell I can embed the very entertaining video versions of her doing “I’m Back in Town” (a very Broadway-esque tune, done with proper B’way-pit orchestra backing), so I’ll opt for this item instead, which finds her performing a song that was a hit in France before she’d had a hit in the U.S.! French TV had certain ways of framing female artists, and here she visually resembles nothing less than a ye-ye girl, albeit a seriously folkie ye-ye.

 

A great half-hour concert that aired on U.K. TV. I wish the poster had not “stretched” it to fit a rectangular screen (TV images look dreadful when stretched), but the live performances here of six of her best songs are great.

 

Her biggest hit was this tune, which appears in various permutations on YT, including a version where the vocal is isolated (that shows how she did sing the hell out of this little ditty). There was also a cartoon made of it, but that features the Sonny and Cher cover of the song. (As it was made for their CBS show.) Here’s the version that became Melanie’s biggest hit.

 

Most of the videos on Melanie’s own YT channel are forbidden to be embedded, but here’s one that can be properly placed on a blog, and it’s an amazing one. Melanie guests on the Everly Brothers’ own variety show (!) in 1970. The other guest stars, with whom she and the Everlys sing “This Little Light of Mine,” are (culture shock 101) Tina Turner on her own and Bobby Sherman!

 

Here’s footage of one of her several appearances on the laidback Mike Douglas Show. She performs “The Nickel Song,” an incredibly catchy reflection on the music business (in the guise of a human jukebox, namely the performer). This is the medley version of the song, where she starts out with an older nickel song, Teresa Brewer's "Music, Music, Music," and then moves into her own composition (which is another one of the many Melanie fan-faves). I’ve always been very fond of the line “They’re only putting in a nickel, and they want a dollar song...” 

 

And speaking of covers, Melanie did two perfect covers of Phil Ochs songs. She performed both at the concert that was held at the Felt Forum to commemorate his life. The first, more serious one (which is definitely worth a quick search on your fave music platform) is “Chords of Fame.” Here is the lighter of the two, the cryptic, bouncy, and absolutely blissful “Miranda” given a great “reading” (as they used to say) by Melanie here. 

 

 A really great video featuring Melanie post-“comeback” (no, she never really did go away, but this is when she was touring again) in ’77 singing her rousing and very emotional cover of “Ruby Tuesday” with a full band. Whoever edited the clip uses that footage as the base but then flashes back to the Sixties with various images, including the younger Melanie.

 

During the height of her pop stardom, Melanie was on Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan a few times each (clips from some of those appearances are on her YT channel). When she came back she needed to appeal to a younger demographic so somehow she was booked on… the Brady Bunch variety show? Well, at least the song, “Cyclone,” is a very solid one that she also promoted on American Bandstand. NOTE: Every single video that contains the longer version of this song, or is visually interesting (or is jarring, like the Brady Bunch one), is un-embeddable. So it’s not included here. 

Three last videos to highlight Melanie’s influence on others. First, one of the songs she sang with Miley Cyrus in a backyard concert that is up on YT as individual songs. Here, Melanie and Miley duet on a hard-driving version of one of Melanie’s greatest and most timeless songs, “Look What They Done to My Song, Ma.” It was nice to see Miley introducing her fans to Melanie with some of her best-remembered songs.

 

Here's a perfect matching of composer and singer: Melanie doing vocals for a project by Stephen Merritt, he of the Magnetic Fields. Merritt writes beautifully heart-wrenching little numbers and Melanie had just the right voice to sing one of them. And so she did for "The 6ths" (a Merritt project) on this number in the year 2000. Here definitely is Melanie in a new milieu, being perfectly suited to the material (although the plunking behind her is a bit maddening). Thanks to friend Steve for this one.



And for the closer, an album track that wasn’t a hit when it came out, but it was fondly remembered by Melanie fans. Melanie’s version recently popped up on an episode of the brilliant “Black Mirror” series, which was a really nice surprise. It’s an incredibly catchy tune, with a flute-and-strings backing. 

It turns out that Charlie Brooker and his “Mirror” compadres didn’t actually dig this one up completely out of the blue — the original recording was heavily sampled by an Australian group called the Hilltop Hoods for their 2003 song, “The Nosebleed Section.” As with a lot of songs that use *incredibly* catchy hooks from elsewhere, it’s obvious this tune wouldn’t’ve existed without the Melanie original. 

Single nicest sight in the Hoods'  video? The band’s younger female fans singing along with the part of the song that contains Melanie’s original vocals. (Processed with filters to sound like a 78.)

 

Some last links: 

 —Melanie’s own YT channel, featuring a lot of great footage. 

—The gent who put up the super-rarities from Melanie’s mom’s stash (!).

—A super fan's collection of rare concert videos and tunes on TV.

—Another fan's Melanie video-trove.

—And… a “missing” album recorded in 1979. (As noted above, the studio was never paid so the tapes were kept by the owners!) Some very nice mellow vocalizing here; this shows Melanie going down a different path that she didn’t pursue. Thankfully, the album is now in the hands of the public.