[THD]

Well The Joy of the Guitar Riff was shown last night on BBC 4 followed by Great Guitar Riffs at the BBC. As I predicted they didn’t know the difference between a riff and a tune and sometimes seemed to be saying that a guitar solo was a riff, or a guitar intro was a riff ! Well not in my (Song )book it isn’t ! So it ended up as a trawl through post war electric guitar styles- entertaining enough, but not what it said on the tin !

Some new stuff ,but also repeated footage of Dave Davies talking about slashing his speaker cone , and Tony Iommi telling of his industrial accident etc

Worse than that (,unless I fell asleep or was abducted by aliens for a minute or two,)there was no mention of Oh Well let alone Fleetwood Mac!! Heresy !!

How they could focus on Bohemian Rhapsody as a riff based song(well they could focus on it cause Brian May was one of the major interviewees and interesting he was too ) but completely ignore the Beatles and their major riffage -Ticket to Ride I feel Fine ,Paperback Writer, Come Together,Hey Bulldog ! Or perhaps some German Aristo hippies slipped something into my coffee, because , in the footage of Cream playing Sunshine of Your Love at one of their farewell concerts at the Royal Albert Hall (one of which I was at as it happens !) Eric Clapton managed to subliminally put on a wide lapelled orange jacket, mid guitar solo ,non subliminally wear it for a while , and then subliminally take it off before the final notes died away Meanwhile, Ginger Baker’ green kaftan thingy somehow morphed into a multi coloured psychedelic floral shirt and then back again Wow ! That’s something more than else ! Far out !Man! (I’ve got the Bad Sartorial Continuity Blues or in Ginger's case: blouse ! ) But Sunshine of Your Love is a riff song- I’ll give them that !

Ironically the prog that followed these two :More Guitar Heroes at the BBC, which has been shown before, and is not anything to do with this new rifffest (that’s a word with three f’s in a row that I’ve just invented !) seemed to contain more riff songs than the preceding one !

For UK viewers these two Riff progs will be repeated on Sunday night BBC4 and will be on iplayer

Blues power!