11/27/2005: Absence in the UK
VH1 ran the UK Music Hall of Fame show this weekend with some decent performances and some terrific archive footage. Unfortunately there were some glaring omissions in the tv version that are practically criminal.
Inducted into the UK Hall were Bob Dylan, The Who, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin, and Eurythmics. Of these, only Sabbath and Eurythmics performed while a few others were represented musically by other bands performing one of their hits.
The sad and typically Americentric broadcast on VH1 neatly edited out any mention of the other two inductees, Joy Divison/New Order and John Peel. If they'd been able to they probably would have edited out speeches by British stars who aren't necessarily well known in the USA too.
The BBC website has a huge section devoted to Peel, a BBC DJ for 30 years who was as much a part of British music as any musician until his death last year. He championed indie and non-pop, non-mainstream bands & artists and helped make many of them far more successful than they might have otherwise been. He also presented live performances that often rival any band's best show or record - listen to selections from the Peel Sessions for a taste. To omit him from the VH1 version of the show just because he was a Brit DJ and apparently thought of as unknown in the USA is ridiculous and insulting to his huge contributions to music.
Ditto with Joy Division. They're brilliant, always have been, and they even performed at the London awards show earlier this month, doing their hit "Love Will Tear Us Apart" that any "I Love the 80s" fan knows. So why cut them out?
VH1 also cut Ozzy mooning the crowd and telling them "I've seen more life at a fucking wake" - I guess those edits aren't so surprising, but they're pure Ozzy. The high points of the show were the video mini-retrospectives of each artist, and "Hey Joe" performed by Slash and Steve Winwood for the Hendrix segment.
Bob Dylan snubbed the entire event by not showing up or even doing a video acceptance, even after the show was supposedly arranged to fit into his schedule.. maybe he knew Peel & Joy would be deleted from the Americanized version.
