The Chambers Brothers - Colour Me Pop, London, Britain, 8-1969

Here's something that I wouldn't have put together and posted except for the fact that it's so damn rare. I feel good when I can help bring back recordings like this from the brink of being lost forever.

In 1968, the BBC started a music-themed TV show, "Colour Me Pop," that was broadcast in color (a big deal at the time - most shows in Britain wouldn't be filmed in color until 1969 or even later) and usually focused on just one musical artist per half-hour episode. The show only lasted one year, but it was basically succeeded by the similar show "Disco 2," which then was succeeded by "The Old Grey Whistle Test," which ran for many years. There were dozens of episodes, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on the show here:

Colour Me Pop - Wikipedia

Unfortunately, the video footage has been lost for all but a handful of acts. There's more audio, but the vast majority of that has been lost as well. One of the few acts where the video footage survived was the US soul music group the Chambers Brothers. They're best known for their psychedelic soul hit "Time Has Come Today" in 1967. Although they were filmed for Colour Me Pop, the show was cancelled shortly thereafter, so the footage was never actually shown on TV. (I don't know exactly when this was recorded, but I think August 1969 is a good guess.)

In 2018, some mysterious person posted a bunch of videos from Colour Me Pop, Disco 2, and the Old Grey Whistle Test on YouTube. One such video was the full show with the Chambers Brothers. Somehow, the footage has survived even though it had never aired. Unfortunately, later that year, YouTube deleted that person's account for copyright violations.

I recently found out the Chambers Brothers recording existed thanks to a mention in that Wikipedia entry above. I looked high and low on the Internet and couldn't find any mentions of it after that person's YouTube account was deleted. But I reached out to some musical associates, and one of them, marley, actually has the audio for the full show. So here it is. Hopefully this will spread around so it won't disappear from the Internet again.

Not all of this is from Colour Me Pop. It turns out the Chambers Brothers only played 25 minutes of music. Since that's rather short, I looked around to see if there was anything else I could add. I found they did two songs for the US TV show "Playboy After Dark" in 1968. So I added those as the first two songs here.

As I mentioned above, I'm not that big of a fan of this band, but they have one undeniably great original song, "Time Has Come Today." This ends with an impressive 11-minute long version. As for sound quality of this show, while it's not excellent, I'd call it very good.

With the two extra songs at the start, this album is 30 minutes long.

If anyone has the actual video and wants to link to it in the comments, that would be great. And if you have other super rare material like this that you think needs sharing, please let me know so I can help share it. (Perhaps someone grabbed some of that Old Grey Whistle Test material that got posted in 2018 and then disappeared, for instance.)

01 I Wish It Would Rain (Chambers Brothers)
02 Love Is All I Have (Chambers Brothers)
03 I Can't Stand It (Chambers Brothers)
04 Do Your Thing (Chambers Brothers)
05 Are You Ready (Chambers Brothers)
06 People Get Ready (Chambers Brothers)
07 Time Has Come Today (Chambers Brothers)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15288191/TChambersB_1969_ColourMPopLondnBritain__8-1969_atse.zip.html

The cover photo shows the band on TV in 1969, but I don't know the details. I took the text of the band name from one of their album covers and turned the black writing to blue to make it stand out. The "Colour Me Pop" text below with the colored stripes is taken directly from some of the visuals used on the show.