(Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames - In 1964 riding the epitome of cool)

(The Rolling Stones - in 1964 - not fooling anybody with the squeaky clean act)

If I haven't already screamed the praises of BBC 6 Music on an almost daily basis, forgive me. Without them a lot of incredible and incredibly rare material would probably never see the light of day. Because of that, you really need to bookmark their site and refer to it every few hours or so and prepare to be amazed.

This weeks installment of the Backstage Weekend takes us back to 1964 and a recently discovered program that hasn't been heard since it first aired on the BBC World Service March 18, 1964. Called The Mike Raven Rhythm & Blues Show it featured, at the time, many of the up-and-comers from the British Invasion period. As far as I can gather, Mike Raven is actually a pseudonym for Alexis Korner who sings one song with the Blue Flames. The half hour show is pretty evenly split between Georgie Fame and The Rolling Stones. Georgie Fame is probably not as well known now as the co-billed band, but in 1964 he had a top ten hit in the U.S. (Yeah-Yeah) and a pretty good following in Europe. The Rolling Stones were slowly evolving. Still very much in the Chicago Blues mold and featuring co-founder Brian Jones on guitar, they played mostly covers of other songs and hadn't really hit yet in the U.S. (It's All Over Now, they're first big hit really didn't until around August, if I remember). So this is an interesting, and very historic glimpse of a band on the way up and what the scene was generally like in the U.K. on a typical March day in 1964.

And it's in stereo.