Hyde Park 1969 silent 8mm film (King Crimson, Alexis Korner, Family, Rolling Stones)

0:00 Pre-show footage 2:00 King Crimson 3:04 Alexis Korner’s New Church 3:58 Family 4:15 The Rolling Stones A note about the film: This footage seems to come from a silent 8mm source. The footage originates from Greg Lake’s archive as he explains in this interview from around the time of the Epitaph release: (1:18) “Interviewer: Now, I know we have this footage which I believe is your footage from Hyde Park. Is that right? Greg Lake: I believe it is, yeah. I don’t know where I got it from. I think it might have come off the Stones Mobile or something. It was just something I had around for years and years and years and I just noticed it just said King Crimson on the box and so one day I had it transferred and it was just... a lot of it, of course, had deteriorated but there was just that little section left so... I gave it to Robert, I thought you know...“ The way Greg speaks about it in that interview seems to imply that he had the original film reel and that he gave it to Robert Fripp. If this is true, then presumably the original reel would still be in DGM’s or Fripp’s personal archive. As for it’s origin, there is also a separate rumour that the footage was in fact shot by Greg’s parents but I have yet to find a source for this. The official edit of the footage set to “21st Century Schizoid Man“ originates from the ELP DVD “Beyond The Beginning“, which was released in 2006. This edit, combines clips of the silent footage set to the studio version of the song and acts as a sort of abbreviated music video. The subsequent DGM edits, released on the 40th Anniversary edition of ITCOTCK and later YouTube, simply overlay the live audience recording from Hyde Park on to this edit. When examining this unedited footage closer, there are a few shots of KC not used in the official edit, notably you get two shots of Robert’s guitar (although not his face) and also towards the end you get two clips of Greg singing what looks like the chorus of “Epitaph“. In closing, the source of the available footage is not an unedited 40 minute version of the full show and, all things considered, whoever made the official edit did a pretty good job of getting something out of not a lot. Still, it wouldn’t have hurt to include the shots with Robert, especially as they seem to be from 21CSM as well.
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