With 30 years of research, over 700 pages, and a foreword by Peter Noone, Mike Pender, Tony Crane MBE, Brian Poole, Steve Ellis & Billie Davis,‘Channelling The Beat!’ more than lives up to its subtitle ‘The Ultimate Guide to UK ‘60s Pop on TV’. Profiled are over 150 “British Invasion” artists and among the 100’s of legendary shows featured include the UK’s ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’, ‘Top of The Pops’ and ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’, the US’s ‘The Ed Sullivan Show, ‘Shindig!’ and ‘Hullabaloo’, Europe’s ‘Beat Club’, ‘Popside’ and ‘Twien’.
Peter Checksfield writes about the inspiration behind ‘Channelling The Beat’:
It has nearly always been the visual side of music that has interested me, as much or more than the actual music. Being born in 1963, I’m a little too young to remember all but the tail end of the ‘60s (one of my earliest clear memories is Brian Jones dying), so it was during the glam rock years where, often, musically light-weight acts made a huge impact on me. Yet it was always the music up to (roughly) 1966 that interested me the most.
As soon as I was 18, I bought a VHS recorder on hire purchase, within a few years progressing to a 2nd machine so that I could make copies, while gradually building up a network of contacts via ads in magazines. The one thing that was even harder to come by than actual footage though was accurate information! What were all these mysterious overseas shows that I was getting clips of, names like ‘Beat Club’, ‘Shindig!’ and ‘Popside’? And as for broadcast dates? Forget it, that just wasn’t possible.
Of course, things gradually got easier with the internet, but there was still as much mis-information as proper info out there. So, I waited for someone to write a book on the subject. And waited, and waited. Eventually, I knew that the only way I’d get the book I imagined, would be to write it myself! So, I gathered up all the info I’d collected over the previous decades, rechecked and added to it (and in the process found that much of what I “knew” had been wrong anyway), until I had lots of accurate, well-researched info. Next came the (relatively) easy job of arranging it to some sort of sensible order, resulting in “Channelling The Beat!”.
Channelling The Beat!: The Ultimate Guide to UK ’60s Pop on TV is available from Amazon.
