22-09-2018, 16:05
Right Down the Line – a BBC Scotland documentary on Gerry Rafferty. It’s on YouTube in four parts. They mention in the film that while he had hits on both sides of the Atlantic and got huge amounts of airplay in the USA, he never played a single gig there – did not like the limelight one little bit, was deeply suspicious of the biz at large and disdainful of anything commercial. Not an easy character, by all accounts, all of which is forgiven for his simply genius music.
It was a good watch – about an hour long in all … some apparently rare interview clips with the man himself, and it was interesting to hear Billy Connolly speaking about him, which he does with a great deal of fondness - gets quite emotional at the end ... also, Barbara Dickson who has a lovely empathetic understanding of him, as an artist, at any rate ... I think people wanted to help him with his struggles with alcohol, but he was so fiercely protective of his privacy and probably prickly with it, that I expect he just shut them down/out. Quite sad really. His liver had just had enough in the end. (Oh dear, looking back over this I must say that it's not as depressing to watch as I have made it sound in last few sentences!)
It was a good watch – about an hour long in all … some apparently rare interview clips with the man himself, and it was interesting to hear Billy Connolly speaking about him, which he does with a great deal of fondness - gets quite emotional at the end ... also, Barbara Dickson who has a lovely empathetic understanding of him, as an artist, at any rate ... I think people wanted to help him with his struggles with alcohol, but he was so fiercely protective of his privacy and probably prickly with it, that I expect he just shut them down/out. Quite sad really. His liver had just had enough in the end. (Oh dear, looking back over this I must say that it's not as depressing to watch as I have made it sound in last few sentences!)
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." ~ Bill Watterson