9th Buddy Holly Week

From The Beatles Monthly Book, N°100, August 1984:

To draw attention to the 1984 Buddy Holly Week, which runs from September 8th to 14th, MPL recently ran a national competition to attract portraits, drawings or sketches of Holly. The seven best entries, judged by Paul McCartney, Humphrey Ocean and David Oxtoby, will be used as sleeve designs by MCA Records for part of a limited edition set of Holly singles, while the top hundred entries will be displayed throughout the Holly week at the Hamilton Gallery in Carlos Place, Mayfair, London, W1. Whether Paul himself will design one of the remaining picture sleeves for the box set is open to conjecture.

Mark Lewisohn

From The Beatles Monthly Book, N°102, October 1984:

The box set of ten Buddy Holly singles which was the subject of an MPL-sponsored competition (see August issue) was released by MCA Records on September 3 (number BHB 1). Entitled “The Portrait Series”, eight of the ten picture sleeves included therein (originally intended as seven with Paul McCartney supposedly designing one) comprised the winning entries in the recent ‘Draw Buddy Holly’ art contest, the overall winner of which was a 76-year old man! The other two sleeves in the set have been designed by Humphrey Ocean and David Oxtoby, Paul McCartney’s two fellow judges in the competition.

Mark Lewisohn

From The Beatles Monthly Book, N°103, November 1984:

To coincide with the recent Buddy Holly Week, a ‘MPL Presents….’ fourteen-minute documentary film, “The Music Lives On”, was shown (completely unannounced in the press or TV listings) at about 1.30 in the morning on September 8 on Channel Four, and again a few hours later the same morning on London Weekend Television. The programme included long extracts of Paul McCartney singing two songs, “It’s So Easy” and “Bo Diddley”, from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon on September 14 1979, which have never been seen before. Although Paul has long been contemplating the release of the film of that concert – we first mentioned it in issue 49 – this Holly tribute was a totally new production and carried a ‘Copyright MPL 1984’ credit line.

Mark Lewisohn

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