Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Validation from BBC Wales

A Badfinger documentary was aired on BBC Wales Radio today that is well worth the effort to locate and listen to. You can find their website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/
Once there, look for the section near the middle of the page that says "Radio" and "Listen Again." Scroll to the bottom of this list and you will find "Without You - The Badfinger Story." Apparently the program is available for review for the next week, so don't procrastinate too long.

The reason the program is relevant for this blog is the parallel it has to the "Without You" book. Most of the people interviewed also appeared in the book (with the notable addition of Pete Ham's daughter, Petera). And again, Joey Molland was absent, but more on that later. I won't bother to reproduce quotes from the program since most of the comments are nearly identical to those found in the book. Essentially, we have the same people saying the same things. This is important because we now have a production independent of the book that arrives at the same conclusions.
Yes, Stan Polley is the villain of the story, and this point is driven home quite strongly. But we also have Bill Collins, Bob Jackson and Tom Evans (the latter from his telephone conversations) reiterating the internal strife that also destructed the band. Marianne Evans and Petera also emphasize their strong dissatisfaction with the 1995 ASCAP event, and Collins quite clearly states that there was never any written contract between the band members to divide publishing or songwriting royalties - for "Without You" or any other song. If there had been such contracts then Collins would certainly have known about them because he would have been the one to draw them up. Kathie Molland, however, continues to this day to insist such a contract exists. The motivation for this assertion is, in my opinion, purely mercenary.

My question now is for the conspiracists out there who insist that author Dan Matovina had a hidden agenda against the Mollands when producing his book. How do you explain the results of the BBC program? Does the BBC have a hidden agenda against the Mollands, too? Perhaps the whole world has a hidden agenda against them; or, at least, those parts of the world that refuse to swallow the garbled nonsense put forth by the Molland distortion team. The conspiracy theorists accused Matovina of altering the VH-1 Behind The Music episode because he was reported as having some involvement in the program. Aside from a couple brief and innocuous comments in this BBC radio show, Matovina appears to have had nothing to do with this new production.

Kathie Molland recently complained on another website that they were not contacted by the program. However, narrator James Dean Bradfield cited that their attempts to contact the Mollands had been unsuccessful. Joey must have some sort of management contact available since he tours often, coupled with his MySpace page (his wife has one too) and his email address is easily found using a Google search, so it isn't as though he is difficult to locate. Giving the Mollands the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they accidentally deleted the email(s). Not applying that same doubt, it's possible they do not want to cooperate with an independent documentary because of the tough questions that will be thrown at them. If so, they simply ignored the BBC overtures.

Hopefully this radio show will air in the United States in the near future. Wherever it appears, it is worth the 53-minute investment of time.