SPITFIRE BIRD
 

Have a feeling a few of you might like this - the video if not the audio too.

How bizarre, & pleseantly entertaining!!

Bizarre coincidence dept.! Whilst I was watching the Spitfire thingy above, I had the TV on as well...and some chap in the Bargain Hunt programme was buying a WW2 gun camera..complete with film cartridge..for £45. It remains to be seen how much it will sell for at auction...

Lovely combination of 40's imagery and more contemporary music, thank you.

Doubt the authenticity of the R.J Mitchell "Spitfire bird" quotes though. He hated the name and, when told of the naming decision, is quoted as saying
"just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose."

"40's imagery" is certainly what it is! I recognised many (if not all) of the scenes as being from the 1942 film, 'The First of the Few', with Leslie Howard playing designer and engineer Reginald Mitchell, and David Niven as a character named Geoffrey Crisp, which some believe to be based on Jeffrey Quill, a test pilot at Vickers.

To it's credit, at the end of the video the movie is acknowledged!

Buckin frilliant. That was an enjoyable 4 minutes :ok:

Just found that 'The First of the Few' is available as a free download from
The First of the Few : British Aviation Pictures : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive


PS
Just found this little film on that site as well
The Last Bomb : US Army Air Forces : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Brilliant :ok:

If I could be re-born.......

I'm sure I saw Angels One Five in there as well along with some Hurricanes!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_AA300_.jpg

Damn good movie though, as is First of the Few and Reach For The Skies :ok:

LJ

Yup, Hawker Hurricanes at 1min 48secs :ugh:

That comes from the original film
Also explains why in the film the closeup of the guns firing shows loose wing fabric material around the gun barrel openings

Excellent. Almost embarrassed myself at work. :O Thanks, backseatjock. :ok:

Might suit the microsecond attention span of today's 'yoof' but I really cannot imagine ANY of those originally involved viewing it with anything but amazed horror - particularly with that mind-numbing background noise - I'm referring to what passes for music nowadays. Awful, awful, awful!!!:yuk:

The really ironic thing is that the Motorik beat music style is directly cribbed from 1970's German "Kraut Rock" bands such as Neu! / Harmonia / Can / Kluster
The drumming is a direct copy of Klaus Dinger's style and the tape edit vocal technique from Holger Czukay. The guitar work is much like Michael Rother's as well
Maybe thats why I like it......

Question

That film was released in 1942
To what extent would the knowledge of the design / build of the aircraft be secret by then? How well known was the all metal construction? I just wondered if the closeup of the Hurricane guns firing was an attempt at hiding something they wanted kept secret??

Milo - quite so, and quite so. Although it should have gone on for a bit longer to be true to the original.

Bit sobering to realise that there were only eleven years (as far as I can tell) between the last operational Spitfire (running met flights) and the formation of Can.

Weren't 'live' guns identified by having material stuck over the gun ports & painted red....? So it would have been the same for a Spit or a Hurricane (at that stage of the war)..?

There isn't any detail that identifies that shot of the gun ports being particularly from either 'plane - but does only show two clearly metal ports.

For everyone except Cornish Jack, you may be interested to know that the band, Public Service Broadcasting, have an EP coming out, avbl via the tunes of eye on 28th May. It's a 5 track EP done in conjunction with the BFI where they have accompanied 5 film tracks or radio broadcasts from WW2. The EP is called The War Room and you can hear it on their website (might be on FB, forgotten).

Utterley brilliant band and vid.:)

Thanks McWSO!:ok:

Who did that soundtrack I wonder (the musical one!)

Great stuff. :ok:

Al R - re the band wot did the soundtrack - please see the post before yours (ie mine!). Indeed, great stuff.

:ok:

I just watched the vid - that'll teach me. Cheers. Great sound.

After watching the Typhoon and GR4s at Lossiemouth this afternoon, this was a wonderful way to end the day.

Oddly, the music goes quite well with Team America: World Police which is on in the background...

Cornish Jack gets my vote. Music should be tuneful, not discordant and noisy.

"Sceptic calling, Sceptic calling.....Hello?"

Nobody gonna take me up on the pun in relation to post number 4?

I presume you do all realise this was one of Leslie Howards last films?
He was shot down on the way back from Lisbon not long after - allegedly after standing in (possibly unwittingly) as a double for Churchill

Just a week ago, I downloaded and viewed "The First of the Few". I thought is very well done - much better than I expected. The only thing I found annoying was David Niven's character - a "Hollywood-comedy" version of a woman-chasing test pilot. Leslie Howard's portrayal of R J Mitchell was excellent.

Technically, the Scheider Trophy sequences were well done. Did they have access to real seaplanes or were they replicas?

Does anyone know who flew the aerobatic sequences in the film? Jeffery Quill or Alex Henshaw are the obvious candidates.

I've been musing more about the music, which is clearly a matter of taste, but is it appropriate?

I think it is. That style was created in the early-mid 70s (closer to the war than to us, chronologically!) by German bands like Neu, Kraftwerk, Cluster et al, as a conscious reaction to only having two popular musical traditions around them - German Schlager, and American/British rock'n'roll - and wanting to express their own culture in their own way. Neither Schlager, which is horribly vapid, nor rock'n'roll, which is the music of the conquerors, were any good. (Folk music, which in other circumstances has been a force for musical innovation, was also out of bounds. Looking backwards wasn't an option.)

At the same time, electronics became affordable enough to be pushed into the service of music making, making sounds and rhythms uncanny enough to reflect the increasing awareness of culture as being symbiotic with automation, cybernetics and the rise of the machines. Electronics as a distinct engineering discipline from radio, came out of WWII, which also drove many of the basic innovations behind its subsequent explosive development.

So you might not like it as music (I do!), but the connections between that music and the video are a lot stronger than at first apparent.

"Does anyone know who flew the aerobatic sequences in the film?"

According to the IMDB database "Bunny" Currant plays himself in the film as "Hunter Leader", though uncredited.

Bunny Currant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This thread identifies some of the others, and the location as Ibsley
Presumably one or more of these did the flying sequences?
Battle of Britain pilots in First of the Few - Key Publishing Ltd Aviation Forums

Don't know about the aerobatics but one quick scene looks like stock archive film. The scene shows a Spitfire filmed from above flying down a valley before overflying the camera. This was flown by ATA pilot Hugh Bergel and is described in his excellent book 'Fly and Deliver, a ferry pilots logbook.'

From Wikidpeadia

"Quill actually flies a Spitfire in the film, and had tested the Spitfire in battle, shooting down three aircraft while on temporary assignment to the RAF. Jeffrey Quill's log book records that the flying sequences for the film were made by him from Northolt on 1–2 November 1941, in a Spitfire Mk II."

and
"Film footage of the Supermarine S.4 in taking off from Southampton Water, and in flight, which is now available nowhere else. The film also includes footage of many real-life Battle of Britain fighter pilots in the opening and closing scenes. RAF fighter pilots such as Tony Bartley and Brian Kingcombe (with pipe) have cameo roles in the scenes at the dispersal"

I'm guessing - but maybe the original Supermarine films were lost when the factory was wrecked by bombs?

IBSLEY
 

You might be interested to know that there is a revival day at the former RAF Ibsley on June 3rd that includes a Spitfire and Harvard flypast in tribute to the 70th anniversary of "First of the Few" that was indeed filmed there. Very timely release of this amazing track. See this link for more 2012 Revival

First heard this on Radcliffe & Maconie on Radio 6 Music

Not normally my kind of music, but strangely compelling.

I've just listened to the whole EP 'The War Room' on Spotify. It somehow reminds me of an updated 'War of the Worlds' by Jeff Wayne.

Also by these guys: 'Lit Up'. Lt Cdr Tommy Woodroffe's famous drunken commentary of the 1937 review of the fleet put to music!

It's gawn, There's no fleet!

It's Gawn......Totally....!
 

Arkroyal;- "Also by these guys: 'Lit Up'. Lt Cdr Tommy Woodroffe's famous drunken commentary of the 1937 review of the fleet put to music!

It's gawn, There's no fleet!"

I'm new to Spotify and can't find this.....any hints...? :p

Video on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsP95AfBtkk

Links from there to the rest of "The War Room"

Re Post 33 - who said you could take my name (Gawn) in vain!

GQ2

You've probably found it by now, but search in spotify for Public Service Broadcasting, and you'll find the lot.

No magician who ever could have waved his wand could have waved it with more accumen!