I Love Lucy title card.
Someone –
well it was Julien Temple (and spelled that way) – said the closing
ceremony for the Olympics was like a 'bad night at the Brits' –
well I don't believe entirely with that opinion, but the show certainly came
and went in places.
There
was a wonderful moment when the familiar chords starting with 'C' on
the piano to the great John Lennon song Imagine
oozed into the arena; chords that we all know so well and obviously
played by Lennon himself, but when the lyrics were sung by a
children's choir, we kind of thought again about who the piano player
was, until the face and voice of John Lennon was revealed on a large
screen; then the crowd went silent taking a deep tearful breath
before gently joining in.
At that moment we realised that this was the only way John Lennon would ever appear in a show like this and a time like this unlike his former band mate who closed the opening ceremony a couple of weeks earlier; we knew that if Lennon had survived he wouldn't be there in person.
To be fair to Paul McCartney, he was probably asked to sing Hey Jude as he must be getting fed up of it himself. Some singers have committed suicide rather than sing 'that damn song again' – Del Shannon with Runaway for example.
I would have liked to have heard the Ralph McTell song The Streets of London as this was supposed to be a celebration of British pop music and that is the most famous of modern London songs and they were the London Olympics – not the British ones.
There was a
fault at the Opening Ceremony with McCartney's first song; the sound
'went funny.' That, to me, sounded like the sound filtering through
from the stadium rather like the bad sound you hear at the winter
Olympics, when the musical track is played straight from the skating
arena through the microphones and on to your TV. It has a kind of
hollow compressed sound and can be achieved when recording – to
make a song sound as if it's being sung live – by allowing the
playback on the speakers to be 'bounced' through the microphone,
picking up ambiance on the way.
But
my daughter told me it was his 'backing track;' I don't know how true
this is but I wouldn't have thought that something as big as the
opening ceremony with the money it cost to produce and the meticulous
care Danny Boyle demands, would resort to the Saturday
Night Live/Top
of the Pops
lip syncing technique.
Lip syncing,
of course, is what we called 'miming' when we were kids and it means
moving your lips to a recorded voice – either your own or someone
else's.
We all
remember Danni Minogue on Saturday Night Live when she just
sat there as her song was played when she couldn't hear the playback
and the unprofessionalism of some of the rock bands and performers on
Top of the Pops in the 70s; they came on to Top of the Pops
and made it quite clear they were lip syncing and what they were
doing was going back on something that has been a very important
technique ever since movies began.
I had a
terrible time trying to tell my parents that all music in film is
mimed to playback; there is no other way it can technically be done;
films are usually shot with one camera unlike multi camera TV which
adopted the format from I Love Lucy in the 50s.
I Love
Lucy was on film, of course, which is why the quality is so good.
When they started to shoot and/or record shows on video tape they
used the same multi-camera technique and it is only with
multi-cameras that you can perform live music without miming to
playback.
It's quite
simple: for music to be performed live with one camera the performance would have to be exact on every take –
every take exactly the same from every angle or it couldn't be edited. The tempo would have to be the same and
still it wouldn't sound right,
Paul
McCartney tried it in Give My Regards to Broad Street; a
terrible movie by the way and the live singing must have tripled the
budget.
In all those
old musicals, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Donald
O'Connor - the lot – lip synced to playback.
Then they had
to add the dancing track if they were tap dancing – they weren't
even wearing tap shoes!!
That was
called a tap over, by the way! They were so professional the
general public didn't notice and it wasn't till the aforementioned on
Top of the Pops and the like came along that it became an issue.
I think the
general public know too much these days and want to know too much
about how things are made then they are shocked to find that a David
Attenborough programme on the BBC didn't actually point a long camera
lens into a load of snow to witness a giant polar bear giving birth
to cubs.
I have had a
few instances of being present when pop groups have mimed and when
they have sung live.
When I was a
student we would go to a cathedral near Christmas for a service which
went out on TV as Songs of Praise. I was working at the time
backstage on a Panto at a theatre and one of the pop groups (60s talk
for band) in the show, The Kingsmen, sang their latest song. We, in
the cathedral, could only hear the musical backing as the singers
were singing into microphones which were going straight into the
broadcast. It sounded great, when it was broadcast a
week later.
Another time
a great English blues singer (there are some) Jimmy Powell was in a
drama and he sang live to a backing track. As the sound department
wanted to control the sound we couldn't hear him – just like the
church service.
I also had an
occasion to be in the Top of the Pops studio when they
recorded and even though they mimed it sounded live in there –
that's why it sounded so good as they only had to mix the audience.
Oh this is
boring you isn't it – here's me miming to a rock song I wrote and
in order to film it I had to shoot it about 20 times:
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