The Angels and Status Quo
Heard this on the radio the other day and thought it was pretty amazing.
Lonely Night was a non album b side released by Quo a few years before the Angels wrote Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again. Apparently when Quo approached the Angels about the seemingly blatant ripoff they said bullshit prove it and play the song to us......then realised they must have heard the Quo song and forgotten about it (the seventies I guess) and eventually settled out of court. The bands were/are close and there were no hard feelings.
Thought it was an interesting story!
| Look Here -> |
I wonder if Andrew knew about this, he's a big angels fan like me & this is the first I've heard of it.
I do like Status Quo as well but have never heard that track till today.
Cheers, Tiny
"You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
The information is out there; you just have to let it in."
No way, get fvcked, fvck off
I heard about a few years ago, but had forgotten about it and never tried to chase up a copy of the Quo song. Thanks
I like this version
hinekadon (04-12-18)
I would sandwich the Quo song between the Angels version and Led Zeppelin "Rock And Roll"
Bump, hey Andrew (admin), noticed you're online, did you know about this before?? Just curious.
Cheers, Tiny
"You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
The information is out there; you just have to let it in."
No mate, first I have heard of it. I like Status Quo, but realistically only their well known stuff.Originally Posted by Tiny
Bump, hey Andrew (admin), noticed you're online, did you know about this before?? Just curious.
If does definately sound like it, but Status Quo are very "3 chord" ish in their music, so it seems to stand out more. But yeah, I can see the Angels would lose in court.
I have no idea why Australian Crawl havent gone Guns n Roses over this one, possibly cant afford to. :
Australian Crawl and Guns n Roses had the same record company, Geffen Records. And its common knowledge Guns n Roses are fans of 80's Australian Rock music.
I am annoyed with the Angels. Which one, I dont know.
I think it was last year (or year before) that they started their own Youtube channel. The quality of a lot of the clips was pretty average, so as a long time fan I contacted them and offered them all my quality clips for use on their channel. Free of charge....just a fan thats happy to help and some thanks for the music that is part of the soundtrack of my life growing up.
They didnt bother to reply.
Earlier this year , I spent a lot of time and effort to restore a clip from Countown - "Out Of The Blue" which is from the No Exit album, my all time favourite Angels album. Only 2 singles were released from the album (remember when entire albums were great ?), and . Neither had a music video made, but both were on Countdown so I fixed up both at seperate times.
Anyway, after a lot of effort with this clip , here is the end result.
Personally, I was pretty happy with it. I got rid of the fuzzy edges, improved the overall video quality, ditched the mono audio and replaced it with quality stereo audio. Doc Neeson is a bit of a pain to try and match audio to believe me, it took me several hours to do the whole thing. But hey, its great music that deserves it. In line with all my music videos in my collection, I also put the title and artist on the clip........I use the exact same font that ABC's Rage uses as you can see. The only way you can tell its not from Rage is because there is no Rage logo before the title and artist are shown.
Anyway, I put it on my channel very happy with the result. Within 24 hours, the Angels had ripped a copy and put it on theirs.
Notice how much the quality has degraded by comparing the song and artist text between the 2, I have no idea what they ripped it with but its rogered the quality.........don't forget I offered to send them all the good stuff uncompressed. When I upload it, Youtube compresses it, whatever program they used compressed it, and then they uploaded it again and it got compressed yet again.
Now it could be said that hey, its their music, whats your beef ? My beef is that I made the offer to supply them my clips which they ignored, but they are happy to steal them from my channel and put them on theirs....on the same day I released it.
To me, its bad manners. Or am I taking it too personally ?
On a separate note, what the opinion on Unpublished Critics V's Sweet Child ?
mkhannah (14-12-18),Uncle Fester (14-12-18)
Wikipedia states :
The Angels voluntarily paid an "out-of-court settlement" to Status Quo of a reported "six figure sum" to avoid any potential problems due to the numerous similarities between "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again" & the (non LP& virtually unheard of) Status Quo 1974 single B-side "Lonely Night". Status Quo's lyric of "'Cause I never thought I'd see or hear you again" being also similar to the re-written Angels lyric. Therefore, the stories that Status Quo still get a percentage of royalties is false, it was a one-off payment.
Another interesting quote from an article :
Even more interesting....Bob Spencer of Skyhooks and the Angels :Bassist and vocalist Bernard ‘Doc’ Neeson came up with Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, and a version was recorded for the band's debut album. Vanda and Young were convinced it would be a hit, but its likeness to a Status Quo B-side, Lonely Night, became impossible to ignore. So the Angels re-recorded the song, speeding it up, and adding the "ambulance siren" opening guitar riff.
And finally, from the Status Quo forums :
BOB YOUNG: “In 1973, on Quo’s Australian tour, we met a band called The Angels. Later on they wrote a song called ‘Am I Ever Gonna See You Face Again’ that became a huge hit for them. It was a great song, but it was a bit of a rip-off of a song that had I believe had started out as one of ours – ‘Lonely Night’. Play the two back to back. But it was settled out of court and the two bands didn’t fall out over it, we’re still friends.” [Author’s note: Talking to this writer in 2015, John Brewster of The Angels admitted: “I might have heard [Quo’s song] at a disco,” adding: “Al Lancaster used to live next door to me and would constantly dig me in the ribs and say: ‘You bastards, you stole our song’. One day I challenged him to prove his claim. So he brought over a copy of ‘Lonely Night’ and I played him ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again’ and when I heard ‘Lonely Night’, I nearly fell over.”]
Based on all the above, I think its very safe to say that they did deliberately rip it off.
And mine as well
I think you are taking it a bit too personally, the Angels probably don't run their youtube channel or website.
It's probably some pimply faced nerd kid.
EDIT: & you did such a good job on that Countdown clip, they believe it was theirs to begin with.
Last edited by Tiny; 14-12-18 at 09:48 AM.
Cheers, Tiny
"You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
The information is out there; you just have to let it in."
It is the Angels official Youtube channel, ie, its theirs, the bands and not a fans.... its linked to their website through which I initiated contact.
Nah, a pimply faced nerd would not do a bad job, someone in their 60's is more likely to I think
This degradation is not their fault.
This is happening lately with many YT videos but I can not figure out why some are degraded and some are not.
I have tried all the videodownloader plugins for Firefox that I am aware of, getting the same results.
Some are fine and I can download in FHD or even 4K and others are only available as 360p with extremly LoFi audio, while they are streamed in high quality.
This typically happens with all videos carrying the Vevo watermark so it seems logical that they have implemented some sort of restriction that block downloaders from accessing 720p and above.
However I got the same with your video. Sounds streams well but the download is only available in 360p and then sounds crap.
I can see that you have used 480p but the downloaders only see 360p.
Maybe you have to set something when you upload to allow 720p or resize and actually upload in 720p. Avidemux can do that very easily in less than a minute.
Thank you for your good work.
It is the great effort of people like you who can maintain quality on Youtube to fight against the stream of vomit that the Music Industry pukes out these days.
Last edited by Uncle Fester; 14-12-18 at 12:25 PM.
Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...
It would have to come down to what you are using to download from Youtube with.
I have no problem downloading my Out Of The Blue clip at 480p with 4k Video Downloader. I gave up on the "grabbers" and browser extensions, I found dedicated software is easier and far more reliable after many disappointments with other methods.
100% with you on today's standards of "music". I fix them up for my own Music Video collection, but put some on Youtube, particularly Australian stuff. Its unfortunate some arsehole companies feel they have to copywrite block some songs, it makes it very hard to get some stuff, and Rage these days is a joke apart from January which is Retro month where they also play Countdown episodes which I also collect. As music videos were not big in the 70's and 80's, fixing up a Countdown clip to look and sound great gives the song an actual music video.
Just out of interest, I have downloaded the clip using 4K Downloader and just re-uploaded it. I listed it as private, so its not showing on my channel and you can only see it with the direct link. This is it embedded below :
Just out of interest (again !), I just tried 4K Downloader to see if it will give me this clip from my channel thats in 1920 x 1080
I did the same as the Out Of The Blue clip, downloaded it at what I uploaded it ( in this case 1920 x 1080 ) using 4K Downloader and uploaded it again to Youtube. This is the result below :
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on levels of degradation with compression between the 2 Divinyls clips (as mentioned, 1st was upload to Youtube after being recordered from Rage on ABC's HD channel in 1920 x 1080 and the second is that clip downloaded with 4K Downloader and re-uploaded). I'll admit I am no expert on this topic, but do have a bit of experience with using clips that have been downloaded from Youtube. Always interested to hear anyones opinions on compression loss........as an example, the Divinyls clip that I originally uploaded was 185mb in size. Downloaded from Youtube at 1080, it was 92.6mb.
So Youtube have shrunk its size by 50%. You do have to hand it to them though, if I attempted to do the same there is no way it would look that good.
Edit : It reminds me of cassette recordings when you copy a cassette, then the copy would get copied etc. I can remember playing around with it when I was about 11. I had something like this :
I just copy pasted the link and can now download in 480p.
Can't say the the sound has changed that much compared to the Angels link that they stole from you and I can also download.
Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...
The original when uploaded :
Audio Bitrate : 191 kbps
Sample Rate : 44.100 khz
Video
Data Rate : 3847 kbps
Total Bitrate : 4039 kbps
The original downloaded from Youtube :
Audio Bitrate : 125 kbps
Sample Rate : 44.100 khz
Video
Data Rate : 569 kbps
Total Bitrate : 695 kbps
Angels Stolen Version Downloaded :
Audio Bitrate : 95 kbps
Sample Rate : 44.100 khz
Video
Data Rate : 330 kbps
Total Bitrate : 426 kbps
Its interesting to see the compression battering this clip has got from the original to what ended up on the Angels channel.
The Angels were somehow silly enough to upload it at 360p, I didnt realise this earlier and presumed the degradation was from some sort of software compression. Obviously whatever method they are using is shit, and perhaps explains the poor quality of a lot of their clips. I have no idea why anyone would deliberately download this clip at 360p, the size difference to 480p would be negligible ...mind boggling.
While I am bagging them
Maybe I just cant get over originals, I was always a Bon Scott man and never took to Brian Johnston
Tiny (14-12-18),Uncle Fester (14-12-18)
Nice tuneJust out of interest (again !), I just tried 4K Downloader to see if it will give me this clip from my channel thats in 1920 x 1080
I did the same as the Out Of The Blue clip, downloaded it at what I uploaded it ( in this case 1920 x 1080 ) using 4K Downloader and uploaded it again to Youtube. This is the result below :
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on levels of degradation with compression between the 2 Divinyls clips (as mentioned, 1st was upload to Youtube after being recordered from Rage on ABC's HD channel in 1920 x 1080 and the second is that clip downloaded with 4K Downloader and re-uploaded). I'll admit I am no expert on this topic, but do have a bit of experience with using clips that have been downloaded from Youtube. Always interested to hear anyones opinions on compression loss........as an example, the Divinyls clip that I originally uploaded was 185mb in size. Downloaded from Youtube at 1080, it was 92.6mb.
So Youtube have shrunk its size by 50%. You do have to hand it to them though, if I attempted to do the same there is no way it would look that good.
Edit : It reminds me of cassette recordings when you copy a cassette, then the copy would get copied etc. I can remember playing around with it when I was about 11. I had something like this :
The first one sounds little more open, the acoustic guitar more crisp, the stereo room appears wider although obviously panned instruments are still placed exactly in the same position. This my subjective opinion.
I don't know that much about the deeper details of digital compression algorithms and what kind audio information is lost through re-compression.
YouTube splits what you uploaded in separate Video and Audio paths, converts MP3 to AAC, etc and handles them in a way to save space and reduce bandwith.
Therefore all downloaders need to handle these separated Video and Audio files and convert/mux them.
Both videos could be downloaded in FDH around 90MB (they are actually 480p of course) and the sound of both downloads was awful, like AM radio
compared to the streamed versions.
I will look for an installer videodownloader for my MAC but I never experienced such audio quality loss before using these plugins.
I also remember using the 4K Video Downloader a while back.
I have probably about 50 GB of downloaded Music videos in very good audio quality but I have noticed that some that I downloaded a few months ago
are now only showing up in 360p and download with LoFi audio.
So it seems obvious Youtube is doing something to thwart downloading and the downloader applications need to catch up.
I will play around with this later tonight. Bit busy ATM
Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...
I have no doubt that they get regularly pressured by record companies/rights holders to tighten things up to stop downloads, just like the networks do with downloading from catch up TV like ABC iView etc.
Download applications don't just need to catch up, they need to stay up to date. I have stuck with 4K for that reason, far too many others are to slow to act to fix things.
Though realistically, we have it pretty good. There is some great stuff on Youtube and being able to download it free of charge makes it even better.
+1 for 4k Videodownloader, whoever it was on this forum that tipped us towards it deserves another beer,
Cheers, Tiny
"You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
The information is out there; you just have to let it in."
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