User:Humbledaisy/sandbox

EVERGREEN

The Stone Poneys are synonymous with their 1967 smash ‘Different Drum’, a baroque pop masterpiece they never meant to make. Linda Ronstadt never liked the record and over the ensuing five years, she worked hard to escape it. From supporting the Doors to working with Carla Bley, HUW THOMAS charts how Linda Ronstadt defied expectation and found her mojo.

When Linda Ronstadt is asked when she found her voice, she’ll say it wasn’t until the 1980s, that she grew into her authentic voice over decades. The public would beg to differ. From her first success with The Stone Poneys through to her blockbuster pop albums, Ronstadt’s voice cut through American radio like a knife, impossible to ignore and easy to fall in love with. Critics, preoccupied with her image and her relationships, often missed her eclectic approach. She built a career on fusing genres, her voice the only through line in experiments with folk, rock, country, jazz and rachera. Critics have characterised Ronstadt as a pliable industry puppet, too, but even the most cursory glance at Ronstadt’s early years – from the formation of The Stone Poneys through to her pivotal early 1970s country rock albums – will reveal an artist who always knew exactly what she wanted to do.

Linda Ronstadt’s childhood was saturated with song. Her father, Gilbert, had performed as Gil Ronstadt and His Star-Spangled Megaphone in the 1930s; once Linda and her three siblings came along, he’d serenade them with Spanish-language lullabies in his buttery baritone. The Ronstadt family lived in Tuscon, Arizona, roughly an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, and their Mexican heritage informed Linda’s musical taste. She loved the American country music she heard on the radio, but she was infatuated too with the ranchera music her father adored, considering it akin to “Mexican bluegrass”. Once she was out of the cradle, Ronstadt was singing anything she could get her hands on – doo-wop, traditional pop, even Gilbert and Sullivan. Her taste eluded definition. “Believe it or not they had a bunch of bagpipe players every year in the Tuscon, Arizona rodeo parade,” she told Sounds in 1976. “Bagpipe music used to thrill the fuck out of me!” By her teens, she was performing locally in a coffeehouse trio with her brother Peter and sister Gretchen, but her siblings didn’t share her drive. At 18, Linda upped sticks and headed for Los Angeles, joining her friend, fellow Tusconian Bobby Kimmel, where the action was. The move gutted her father, but Linda knew she’d made the right choice. "My musical background has always been completely random,” she later told Sounds. “That's one of the things that drew me to Southern California as a central sphere, a synthesis of everything."

L.A. was a big pond for Bobby Kimmel. A fingerpicking folkie enraptured by the music of Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten, he’d been the only beatnik in Tuscon but he soon found his type were a dime a dozen in California. At the Ash Grove folk club, he met Kenny Edwards, a teenage guitarist whose taste complimented his. The two had already amassed a backlog of light folk originals by the time Ronstadt turned up in L.A. She was, to put it bluntly, their meal ticket; with Ronstadt’s voice, the two musicians knew they could blow away no-hopers like Jackson Browne and Mike Nesmith.

It took one appearance at the Troubadour for the trio, calling themselves The Stone Poneys, to attract industry interest. Herb Cohen, the smart, squinting manager behind The Mothers of Invention, was leaning against the bar that Monday night waiting to be impressed. His eyes lit up when he heard Ronstadt sing. Cohen was the kind of man you didn’t want to cross – he claimed that he’d been a deadly gunrunner in the Caribbean – so when he told The Stone Poneys he could get their “chick singer” a record contract, his judgement went unquestioned but, as Ronstadt put it in a candid 1969 interview with Fusion, “that was the end of it, man. The beginning of the end.” Ronstadt was uncomfortable with the prospect of singing without Kimmel and Edwards and her worries grew when Cohen presented the group to Nik Venet, Capitol’s golden producer. "Nik and Herbie put their arms around me, took me out in the hallway and said, 'You realize that you're going to be a [solo artist] if you're good’," she told Rolling Stone in 1975. “I still thought the situation would resolve itself, that we would develop as a group and they would see it that way." The Stone Poneys, then, were over before they’d even began. Capitol signed them as a group but all bets were on Ronstadt and she was, as the liner notes for the first Stone Poneys album would put it, “Peter Pan still looking for shadow”.

That first album, produced with minimal fuss by Venet and released in January ‘67, was a humble affair, more We Five than Count Five. Cohen had mooted a collaboration with Frank Zappa but the group were happier just making a record of their acoustic live set – they were about as rock and roll as a Mormon Tabernacle Choir at this point. The album features some strong Kimmel and Edwards originals in the amiable ‘Train and the River’ and ‘Sweet Summer Blue and Gold’, which sounds more like Pentangle than is reasonable for an L.A. group in 1967. ‘2:10 Train’, a Troubadour favourite later recorded by the Gentle Soul, is the obvious stand-out. It’s a folk blues boasting a perfectly-pitched Ronstadt vocal, one of only three solo leads she has on the album. The album was a flop but Venet was relaxed about it; Capitol had spent chump change on recording.

Nik Venet gave The Stone Poneys sound a facelift for their second album, Summer ‘67’s Evergreen Vol. 2. Kimmel and Edwards were somewhat sidelined as vocalists in favour of Ronstadt, though their increasingly Eastern-influenced songs remained in favour. Tracks like ‘I’ve Got to Know’ and ‘Driftin’ were lavished with stately baroque pop arrangements, making our three chamber folkies sound like royalty. Venet’s showpiece was ‘Different Drum’, a playful tune The Stone Poneys had half-inched from the Greenwich Village bluegrass group The Greenbriars Boys. The producer heard a cathedral in the song, speeding it up and encasing it in twinkly harpsichord and candied strings. Ronstadt, expecting to record the song with her bandmates, was mortified to find session players and an orchestra waiting for her in Capitol Studio B. “I had no idea there was going to be all these musicians,” she told NPR in 2022. “I didn't know how to fit the phrasing in. It wasn't the way I was used to singing it, so it really knocked me off my stride.”

Unbeknownst to The Stone Poneys, ‘Different Drum’ was a Mike Nesmith composition; he’d written it in 1964 but it had been passed over by the producers of the Monkees TV show, perhaps due to the decidedly grown-up lyric, a flustered rebuke to an unwanted admirer. It’s a song built for a rugged drawl, dripping with a certain kind of condescending masculinity. It is remarkable it found its way to Ronstadt. Her vocal flips Nesmith’s lyrics completely without, ‘girl’ to ‘boy’ aside, changing a minced word (not even “I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t pretty”). In Ronstadt’s hands, ‘Different Drum’ is no brush-off but a declaration of empowerment. In an era where women were lumped with fawning, absolving love songs like ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ and ‘Puppet on a String’, Ronstadt singing ‘I'm not ready for any person, place or thing to try and pull the reins in on me’ stood out like a sore thumb. It‘s not a love song or a breakup song. It’s a leave-me-alone song, sung so angelically that no earthly force could possibly question it.

Ronstadt didn't hear it that way herself. She didn’t want Capitol to release ‘Different Drum’, believing that her vocal had suffered against the arrangement, but the clash between Venet’s rigid backing and Ronstadt’s unbound vocal is a huge part of the record’s magic. She doesn’t sound hurried; she sounds resolute, as if she’s found a strength she didn’t know she had. “Linda did more for that song than the Greenbriar Boys' version,” Mike Nesmith told the Wall Street Journal in 2013. “She infused it with a different level of passion and sensuality. Coming from the perspective of a woman instead of a guy, the song had a new context. You sensed Linda had personally experienced the lyrics—that she needed to be free.” Ronstadt made ‘Different Drum’, well, different.

A radio station in San Jose (probably KLIV) picked up on ‘Different Drum’ first; the rest of the States followed. As the single circled the national top ten, Ronstadt found herself in the awkward position of touring on the strength of a record that embarrassed her. The Stone Poneys (or Linda Ronstadt and The Stone Poneys, as they were now billed) pointedly played a scrappy, harpsichord-free version of ‘Different Drum’ on tour. They struggled to curry favour with rock audiences too cool for a folk trio and had few natural allies on the live circuit. In Rochester and Cleveland, they opened for the Doors; Kimmel described the bill as “like Beauty and the Beast” while Ronstadt never forgot the fug of Jim Morrison’s snakeskin pants. The group, like Jim’s kecks, were disintegrating at an alarming rate. “I was singing one kind of music and they were playing really something else,” Ronstadt later told Fusion. “I felt they wanted to compete with me. They felt their masculinity was being threatened by being sidemen to a girl singer... ...all I could do was withdraw, but you can’t withdraw with musicians you’re trying to work and play with. You just can’t!” Kenny Edwards, restless and eager to play some real rock and roll, left in early ‘68, surely ending what had been a zombie group for some time.

In April ‘68, Capitol released Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III, a third album titled with deliberate ambiguity. There was no way the label would miss a follow-up album after a smash like ‘Different Drum’, group or no group. Kimmel and a flagging Edwards are still present on some of the material but this was a solo album in all but convoluted name. For all the confusion behind it, Vol. III is an excellent, assured record. There's no shortage of commercial material on it – Laura Nyro's ‘Stoney End’ and Dino Valente's ‘Let's Get Together’ would be hits for others – but nothing, not even the Mike Nesmith-penned ‘Different Drum’-alike single ‘Some of Shelly’s Blues’, sounds geared to pop radio. It’s far too loose, almost shambolic. It probably didn’t worry Linda. “The important thing with musicianship is how much you communicate,” she told Cleveland Scene. “You can be Procol Harum or Hank Williams, it doesn’t matter once you get over the sublime line.” Vol. III clears the sublime line with two bewitching psychedelic folk pieces, “By the Fruits of Their Labor” and the sitar-studded “Star and a Stone”, but the communication aspect had broken down. Sales were slow and The Stone Poneys finally broke up for good, with Bobby Kimmel learning his services were no longer required after one last futile tour.

Ronstadt now faced going it alone – just what Herb Cohen and everyone at Capitol had always wanted – but she felt certain that an audience accustomed to singer-songwriters would never truly accept her. “The record buying audience is composed of 12-year-old girls and they don’t like girl singers, man,” she told Fusion in 1969. “They’d rather listen to Tim Buckley or someone they can fall for.” Buckley, who is pictured on the back of Vol. III, was a spectral presence in Ronstadt’s life, his career always tangoing around hers. The two had lived in the same Santa Monica cottage but never at the same time. She recorded his ‘Morning Glory’, about the “fleeting house" they had in common, for Vol. III but they never collaborated musically. Ronstadt was never going to be part of that singer-songwriter world. She didn’t want to be an out-and-out pop star either. She now considered herself an interpreter, an ambassador for American song and with The Stone Poneys a spent force, she was witnessing a sea change in American music. Everywhere she went, she was hearing simple, down-home songs with big messages. “The pop music scene was freaked out for so long and now it’s like it’s coming home again,” she enthused to Cleveland Scene. “Country music is very real and groovy and it’s exerting so much influence on pop that even the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ has a country sound to it.”

For her first solo album proper, Hand Sown... Home Grown (1969), Ronstadt went full throttle down the muddy hillside and embraced country rock. She had nothing left to lose, having poured her own money into the last Stone Poneys album and plunged into the red. Ronstadt gathered material from some of America’s finest contemporary songwriters – Dylan, Randy Newman, Fred Neil – for an album she hoped would fuse a Nashville sound with a California sensibility, but she clashed with the guitarist for the project, Byrds man Clarence White. “Every session was an argument,” Ronstadt told John Tobler in 1976. “We didn't get along well at all. Ultimately, whenever I complain about something that's gone down in one of my records, I always end up with only myself to blame. No matter how good your ideas are, how original they are, how much feeling you have that you want to communicate, until you develop your craft and have it really whittled into a tool that you can use, it doesn't do you any good. All I could do was go pick musicians that I thought were great and that I thought would represent me musically, and Clarence White was one of them." She chose to forget about Hand Sown... Home Grown almost as soon as it came out.

Ronstadt still wanted to nail that Nashville / California thing, though. For Silk Purse (1970), she sourced some genuine Nashville cats to back her; Area Code 615, a collective of Nashville session stars whose “funky country” sound had impressed her at the Fillmore West. They were hot property, line-dancing in the industry afterglow of Music from Big Pink, and leader Charlie McCoy was the real deal; he’d played on five Bob Dylan albums and come out of it making punchy, progressive Americana. Ronstadt loved the group’s dynamism (they were into bagpipe music too) but she wanted to avoid the assembly line discipline she associated with Nashville musicians, stressing to Record Mirror’s Charlie Gillet that “there's a tendency for all Nashville records to sound the same but I liked the guys so much, I couldn't say no." On Silk Purse, Area Code 615 play with a precision that might’ve rattled their California counterparts but they’re never passionless or predictable. They manage to make ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ sound like a lost All Things Must Pass track and Ronstadt matches their verve, belting out oldies like ‘Lovesick Blues’ and ‘I’m Leavin’ It Up to You’ with plenty of rootin’ and tootin’. The album’s centrepiece was less familiar. In New York, Ronstadt had met an unknown songwriter called Gary White who’d played a ballad of his, ‘Long Long Time’, for her consideration. She heard a universal ache in its chords and knew it could be a hit, if only Capitol would oblige. "People heard it and they went, ‘How syrupy. What are you going to do with that? It's going to put everyone to sleep.’” she told John Tobler in 1976. “I said, ‘This is a hit! You're crazy!’... they said, ‘OK, fine, we'll indulge you with this one if you promise not to bring us another country record.’ I'm going, ‘Country record? This is no country record, you fools!’”

Ronstadt’s vocal performance on ‘Long Long Time’ proved unforgettable. It stopped America in its tracks in the summer of the Kent State killings and earned the singer her first real hit since ‘Different Drum’ and a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance. Ronstadt was now successful on purpose, on her own terms, with a song she liked. Ronstadt soon dispensed with Herb Cohen (“He intimidated me. I did everything he did and related to him in a whiney, wimpy way.”) in favour of manager and producer John Boylan, the man who’d made Ricky Nelson hip again. She wanted to find band like Nelson’s and returned to the Troubadour on a recce. Leaning against the bar waiting to be impressed, she watched a band playing a note-perfect rendition of her version of ‘Silver Threads and Golden Needles’ from Hand Sown... Home Grown. Tickled pink, Ronstadt and Boylan hired the drummer, one Don Henley, and before long they’d put together a quartet of Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner. With their mellow backing, Linda finally nailed that California-cum-Nashville sound she’d been looking for. Her self-titled third album, released in January ‘72, was a perfect fusion of rock, country, folk and soul. More importantly, it was the first album she was truly happy with.

And that is, of course, how Linda Ronstadt formed The Eagles. If that particular act of altruism doesn’t fill your heart with gratitude, it must not be forgotten that, just before that album, Ronstadt sang on one of the most impenetrable, extravagant records ever made. Escalator over the Hill, Carla Bley and Paul Haines’ three-disc “chronotransduction” (or avant-garde Indo jazz rock opera), has been described by Marcello Carlin of Stylus as the greatest record ever made though “devoid of every quality which you might assume would qualify it to be the greatest of all records”. It is a 100-minute exercise in the meaning of meaninglessness with an all-star cast of singers and musicians – Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Paul Jones, John McLaughlin, Gato Barbieri – plugging into a musical National Grid and sparking. A dark, lumbering post-genre beast that took four years to make, Escalator is as far away from the designs Capitol had on Ronstadt as one could imagine, the ultimate rebellion. She told Bley she had never been confronted with music so difficult but her voice gifted the album its heart. Not for the last time, Linda Ronstadt wasn’t who you thought she was.

HUW THOMAS

In The Stone Poneys

From supporting the Doors to appearing on Escalator over the Hill, HUW THOMAS charts how Linda Ronstadt defied expectation and found her mojo.

Not to be confused with Big Day Out.

A Grand Day Out
Directed by	Nick Park
Written by	Nick Park Steve Rushton
Produced by	Rob Copeland
Starring	Peter Sallis
Cinematography	Nick Park
Edited by	Rob Copeland
Music by	Julian Nott
Production companies	National Film and Television School Aardman Animations
Distributed by	National Film and Television School
Release date	4 November 1989 (1989-11-04)
Running time	23 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	£11,000

A Grand Day Out is a 1989 British stop-motion animated short film starring Wallace & Gromit. It was directed, animated and co-written by Nick Park and features the voice of Peter Sallis as Wallace.

Park began making the film in 1982 as his final year project at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. It was completed with Aardman Animations in Bristol

A Grand Day Out debuted on 4 November 1989 at an animation festival at the Arnolfini, Bristol. Its first television broadcast was on Christmas Eve 1990 on Channel 4. A Grand Day Out was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1991.

Plot

Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his dog Gromit run out of cheese. Believing the moon is made of cheese, they build a rocket and fly to the Moon. There, they encounter a coin-operated robot resembling a gas cooker or oven. Wallace inserts a coin, but nothing happens. After he and Gromit leave, the robot comes to life and gathers the dirty plates left at the picnic spot.

The robot discovers a skiing magazine and yearns to travel to Earth to ski there. After repairing a broken piece of landscape and issuing a parking ticket for the rocket, the robot sneaks up on Wallace and prepares to strike him with a truncheon. It freeezes when the money Wallace inserted runs out. Wallace takes the robot's truncheon, inserts another coin, and prepares to leave with Gromit.

Returning to life, the robot follows Wallace and Gromit. Wallace panics, and he and Gromit retreat into the rocket. Unable to climb the ladder, the robot cuts into the fuselage with a can opener and accidentally ignites some fuel. The explosion throws it off the rocket and Wallace and Gromit lift off. Dejected, the robot fashions discarded fragments of rocket fuselage into skis, and skis across the lunar landscape. It waves goodbye to Wallace and Gromit as they return home.

Production

Nick Park began work on A Grand Day Out in 1982 as his final project at the National Film and Television School.

In 1983, Park contacted the English actor Peter Sallis, well-known for his television role as Norman Clegg in the Yorkshire-based sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, through his agent. Sallis agreed to take the role after receiving the script and making a demo. He travelled to Beaconsfield to record his dialogue with Park's direction, later commenting "he never once commented on the actual noise that I was making... ...it seemed as though I had got it, in a sense, in one."

Sallis then recorded additional "oohs and aahs" as Wallace in a Soho studio.

During his time at the school, Park met Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman, who invited him to join them on Morph.

The shape of the rocket in A Grand Day Out is influenced by cartoons like Tintin and films like H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon.

Park later recalled that his parents built and furnished a caravan from scratch during his youth, telling How Did They Do It? "it was only after I made A Grand Day Out that I thought, 'oh gosh I have made a film about my dad!'".

In 1985, Aardman Animations took him on before he finished the piece, allowing him to work on it part-time while still being funded by the school.

Park was influenced by the slapstick comedy of Laurel and Hardy.

Though Park completed the film around the same time as Creature Comforts, he considered it earlier work.

The story was partially dictated by Park's love of "old-fashioned science fiction, with archaic rockets rather than hi-tech".

Park initially intended Wallace's pet to be a cat, but favoured a "cartoon dog shape in plasticine".

To make the film, Park wrote to William Harbutt's company, requesting 1 long ton (1,000 kg) of Plasticine. The block he received had ten colours, one of which was called "stone"; this was used for Gromit. Park wanted to voice Gromit, but he realised the voice he had in mind – that of Peter Hawkins – would have been difficult to animate.

He contacted, favouring the actor's "

Sallis recorded his lines as Wallace in 1983.

Park offered Peter Sallis £50 to voice Wallace, and was surprised when he accepted.

Park wanted Wallace to have a Lancashire accent like his own, but Sallis could only do a Yorkshire voice. Inspired by how Sallis drew out the word "cheese", Park chose to give Wallace large cheeks. When Park called the actor six years later to explain he had completed his film, Sallis swore in surprise.

Gromit was named after grommets, because Park's brother, an electrician, often mentioned them, and Park liked the sound of the word. Wallace was originally a postman named Jerry, but Park felt the name did not match Gromit. Park saw an overweight Labrador Retriever named Wallace belonging to an old woman boarding a bus in Preston. Park commented it was a "funny name, a very northern name to give a dog".

According to the book The World of Wallace and Gromit, Park originally planned the film to be forty minutes long and to spoof Star Wars with numerous characters and a fast food restaurant on the Moon. Park shrank the story when he realised it would take him several more years to complete.

Home media

The short film was released on VHS in the 1990s by BBC Video. It was also reissued as a DreamWorks Pictures release along with The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave on the Wallace and Gromit in 3 Amazing Adventures DVD by DreamWorks Home Entertainment on 20 September 2005. In the United States, it was released on DVD on 10 February 2009 by Lionsgate Home Entertainment and HIT Entertainment. In the United Kingdom, it was again released on DVD in the 2000s.

Lionsgate Home Entertainment later released it on Blu-ray for the first time, under the release's name Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Collection, on 22 September 2009 in time for the 20th anniversary of the franchise.

Release

The short was first screened on 4 November 1989 at the Arnolfini in Bristol, UK, as part of the Bristol International Animation Festival.

It debuted in the United States on 18 May 1990.

The film toured US film festivals over 1990.

It was also shown on Channel 4 on 24 December 1990 in the UK. It later aired on BBC Two on 25 December 1993 to promote The Wrong Trousers.

Awards

The film won the prize for best animated film over 15 minutes at the British Animation Awards 1990.

It was nominated for the inaugarual Golden Cartoon award in 1991, losing to Creature Comforts, which Park began work on as he was finishing A Grand Day Out.

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, A Grand Day Out has a approval rating based on reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. It won the inaugural Best Short Animation award at the 43rd BAFTAs in 1990 and was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 63rd Academy Awards in 1991. Creature Comforts, another Park short, was also nominated for both awards and beat A Grand Day Out for the Academy Award.

References

Russell Harty
Born	Frederic Russell Harty (1934-09-05)5 September 1934 Blackburn, Lancashire, England
Died	8 June 1988(1988-06-08) (aged 53) Leeds, West Yorkshire, England
Resting place	St Alkelda Church, Giggleswick, North Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Talk show host
Years active	1967–1988

Frederic Russell Harty (5 September 1934 – 8 June 1988) was an English television presenter of arts programmes and chat show host.

Early life

Harty was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, the son of fruit and vegetable merchants Fred Harty and Myrtle Rishton. He attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School on West Park Road in Blackburn. In 1954, he began studying at Exeter College, Oxford, where he obtained a third-class degree in English literature.

Teaching career

On leaving university, Harty taught briefly at Blakey Moor Secondary Modern School in Blackburn before moving in 1958 to Giggleswick School in North Yorkshire. There, he taught English and drama and served as a housemaster. Among Harty's pupils were the journalist and television presenter Richard Whiteley and the actors Graham Hamilton and Anthony Daniels. In 1964-65, Harty lectured in English literature at the City University of New York.

Broadcasting career

Harty joined the BBC in October 1967, replacing John Laird as producer of BBC Radio 4's The World of Books. Ronald Eyre, who'd taught Harty at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, assumed chairmanship of the series in December 1967. Over 1968 and 1969, Harty produced a variety of programmes for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 including The Arts This Week and The Critics.

He got his first break in 1970 presenting the arts programme Aquarius, that was intended to be London Weekend Television's response to the BBC's Omnibus. One programme involving a "meeting of cultures" saw Harty travelling to Italy in 1974 to engineer an encounter between the entertainer Gracie Fields and the composer William Walton, two fellow Lancastrians now living on the neighbouring islands of Capri and Ischia. A documentary on Salvador Dalí ("Hello Dalí") directed by Bruce Gowers, won an Emmy. Another award-winning documentary was Finnan Games about a Scottish community, Glenfinnan, where "Bonnie Prince Charlie" raised his standard to begin the Jacobite rising of 1745, and its Highland Games.

In 1972 he interviewed Marc Bolan, who at that time was at the height of his fame as a teen idol and king of glam rock. During the interview Harty asked Bolan what he thought he would be doing when he was forty or sixty years old, Bolan replying that he didn't think he would live that long. (Bolan subsequently was killed in a car crash at age 29 on 16 September 1977.)

In 1972 he was given his own series, Russell Harty Plus (later simply titled Russell Harty), conducting lengthy celebrity interviews, on ITV, which placed him against the BBC's Parkinson. Parts of Russell Harty's interview with the Who in 1973 were included in Jeff Stein's 1979 film The Kids Are Alright, providing notable moments, such as Pete Townshend and Keith Moon ripping off each other's shirt sleeves. In 1975, he interviewed Alice Cooper and French singer Claude François, and was one of the first to acknowledge the fact that the Paul Anka song "My Way" was based on a French song of Claude's called "Comme d'habitude". He would also interview François again in 1977. The show lasted until 1981 and some of his interviews included show business legends Tony Curtis, Danny Kaye, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, David Carradine, John Gielgud, Diana Dors and Ralph Richardson. In 1973 Harty won a Pye Television Award for the Most Outstanding New Personality of the Year.

He remained with ITV until 1980, at which point his show moved to the BBC. In November 1980 he interviewed the model Grace Jones. Jones was nervous and distracted during the interview before a live studio audience and Harty found the interview an uneasy one to conduct, and appeared to be intimidated by Jones, commenting nervously to the audience regarding her demeanour on stage as "It's coming to life, it's coming to life!" Joined later on stage by other guests including a bemused Douglas Byng, Harty was compelled by the seating arrangement on stage to turn his back on Jones, who was left sitting there in silence for an extended period. After several protests she repeatedly slapped him on the shoulder, causing a memorable event in 1980s British television. Initially shown on BBC2 in a mid-evening slot, Harty's chatshow ran until 1982 before being moved to an early evening BBC1 slot in 1983 where it was now simply titled Harty. The show ended in late 1984, though Harty would continue to present factual programmes for the BBC for some time afterwards. In 1985, Harty was invited to the Prince's Palace of Monaco, by Prince Rainier, to conduct his first interview since the death of his wife, the actress Grace Kelly in 1982.

He was the subject of This Is Your Life in December 1980, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the London department store Selfridges.

In 1986 he interviewed Dirk Bogarde at his house in France, for Yorkshire Television, at Bogarde's invitation. He began working on a new series Russell Harty's Grand Tour for the BBC in 1987.

Personal life

For the last six years of Harty's life his partner was the Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill. Latterly they resided in Harty's cottage in Giggleswick, North Yorkshire.

Harty was a friend of the playwright Alan Bennett. Bennett spoke of Harty and his family, in relation to Bennett's own family, in the essay "Written on the Body" taken from his semi-biography Untold Stories.

Death

In mid-1988 Harty became ill with hepatitis B and was admitted to St James's University Hospital, Leeds. Around this time The Sun tabloid newspaper began publishing stories about his health and private life, claiming that the disease was "related to an HIV/AIDS" infection and that Harty was in the habit of using teenage male prostitutes.

He died in St James' University Hospital on 8 June 1988 at the age of 53 from liver failure caused by hepatitis. At his funeral Alan Bennett commented in his eulogy that "the gutter press had finished Harty off." His body was buried in the graveyard of St Alkelda Church at Giggleswick.