![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/paice3.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/mcbride5.jpg)
He said a hey, hey, hey yeah!
A newly restored and robotically upscaled Gillan live video from the BBC’s Rock Goes to College series. It is the ever so frantic performance of New Orleans, complete with guitar demolition (wonder where Bernie got this from).
Thanks to Steve for his relentlessness.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Outrageous behaviour from Bernie. Mind you, tensions were building at that time, were they not? Possibly a symbolic gesture by Bernie? Cheers.
August 2nd, 2025 at 01:55Ohhhh John McC is really good, and the rest of the band: WOAH 🤩
Ian, however, sounds a tiny bit weak in his vocal performance. But ok, the last song at a concert, so maybe he just needed some hot coffee…☺️
August 2nd, 2025 at 02:18Bernie has a lot to learn from Ritchie re the proper execution of a Strat – The Art of the Kill … Very messy the way he does it.
Sound of the vid is pretty dull too, doesn’t sound like that was upgraded at all.
August 2nd, 2025 at 05:26Love it!! Nice vocals from Gillan and a great duel between Gillan and Bernie in the “hey hey hey” section, great stuff!
August 2nd, 2025 at 08:56Madness that makes you laugh.
August 2nd, 2025 at 09:19It’s a fun band that never took themselves seriously and that’s why they fit the purpose but they didn’t evolve with time hence why it was short lived.
Peace ✌️
If you look closely, you can see Bernie swaps his stage strat for an obviously old wrecked one ( like Ritchie used to do ) …right at the end of the show .
Curiously, Bernie also seems to yell something at Gillan towards the end …..and if you recall your John McCoy interview, he mentions Bernie yelling at Gillan during shows ” Where’s the accounts !?” …maybe this is one such example
August 2nd, 2025 at 11:28fantastic, 10000% hard rock, pure orgasm!
God bless Gillan for her solo career and her musicians!
August 2nd, 2025 at 12:28“Ian, however, sounds a tiny bit weak in his vocal performance.”
https://preview.redd.it/vi4ldytkeajy.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=416f546a6387bd2f289b1efc4d4076a711a99498
Watch this freshly-baked David Coverdale fan girl
https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChsSEwieo8jmkuyOAxV0qIMHHQowAXoYACICCAEQChoCZWY&co=1&sph=&cce=1&sig=AOD64_0i8faZaI6ymvem9TelDA4G2rqspA&ctype=5&q=&ved=2ahUKEwj0icHmkuyOAxU2_7sIHTlVK4MQwg8oAHoECAkQFA&nis=2&adurl=
use any opportunity now to put down our beloved Ian!
Oh woe is me, from sanctity to replaceability, ‘tis only a short path of abandonment in the dark, damp & cold caverns of a woman’s heart.
Credited to Ewu Gnunroh
August 2nd, 2025 at 12:47If truth be told, I always thought GILLAN’s penchant for releasing vintage rock’n’roll or otherwise ill-chosen covers (—> Stevie Wonder civil rights songs) as singles as a somewhat lame cop-out. I know Ian is an Elvis nut, does vintage rock’n’roll well, but releasing 50s and early 60s chestnuts in the early 80s, where is that different to what these guys did, it’s a novelty approach:
https://youtu.be/qigUdmLyMBs
(the 1976 remake)
https://youtu.be/m8OMmvON_DA
(the 1961 original)
It’s good fun, but it’s lightweight and it doesn’t establish you as a serious artist with own material having something to say playing that type of music on TV shows, I’m sorry to say. It’s another example of GILLAN devoid of true management focusing on the wrong things. You were never gonna crack the US charts as a Brit band with the ex-Purple singer by covering Elvis, Gary U.S. Bonds or Stevie Wonder songs, that is either brainless or presumptuous.
And it’s not like GILLAN’s arrangement (or Ian’s singing approach) was that radically different from the 1961 original, they gave it the standard frantic speeded up freight-train-on-a-rampage GILLAN treatment, big effing deal, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band re rearrangements they were not:
https://youtu.be/J9Ib8sC_wX8?si=EJ3SHPhhscdnk9Nl
It’s especially ironic as by that time Gary U.S. Bonds was having hits penned – audibly so – by Bruce Springsteen in the US:
https://youtu.be/aKxfxixwdXE?si=OPPyMha8wP_TAs-t
I know, I know, Rainbow did Russ Ballard songs and Whitesnake turned Bobby Bland’s Ain’t No Love into one of their early signature songs, but both bands forged new styles with those songs (Rainbow leaving the dungeons behind and Whitesnake making the Blues part of their musical image), I don’t see how GILLAN’s regurgitated golden oldies served the same purpose of introducing GILLAN’s album music to the public.
That doesn’t mean that I couldn’t enjoy a song like that thrown in as an encore at a GILLAN gig or as a B side of a single, but as the lead single of your forth album as a hard rock band trying to establish itself internationally?
Everything around GILLAN was pretty much scattershot and “let’s throw this against the wall to see what sticks”. In contrast, both Rainbow and Whitesnake were efficiently run with a vision that in DC’s case even became reality, he managed – with strategic input from John Kalodner – the feat of becoming a US household name again nine (!) years (impossibly long as rock band careers go) after WS took its first slither in 1978.
August 2nd, 2025 at 14:39the king in smashing is for ever Pete of course, but Bernie is not bad…
August 2nd, 2025 at 16:09