Back in June of 2022, I was just starting out as an intern on the Jon Mallia Podcast which is a weekly running Maltese podcast with an accumulated 2.5 million views on YouTube (at the time of writing). This is me doing live mixing for one of their episodes, aged 20.

It transpired that one fine afternoon, Freddie Portelli was to be invited as guest. Just in case you’ve never heard about him, he’s one of the most successful singer-songwriters on the island, being colloquially known as the “Maltese King of Rock n’ Roll” and immortalised through countless LPs, CDs, books, documentaries and even a theatrical production.

At one point during Freddie’s podcast, he mentions the tale of a long-lost music video that his band had shot in Germany back in 1966… one which he had never gotten the opportunity to watch. In this clip, he explains it much better than I ever can:

Having just returned from the Berlin Film Festival, I decided to reach out to some of the contacts I had made and try to locate this relic. A few emails later, and… I had found it!

But there was a catch. There always is.

Despite being shot on 16mm film, the footage had been converted to Betacam prior to digitisation, resulting in significant quality degradation. If I were to show Freddie this footage, I wanted to make sure that the footage quality would live up to his expectations.

I therefore went through the effort of conducting some light restoration on the footage by using a combination of Topaz Video Enhance AI and Adobe Premiere Pro. This is how it turned out:

Just a couple of days later, I found myself at Freddie’s villa in Mellieħa, drinking beer and (most naturally) listening to hand-picked selections from his endless library of music. Indeed, no selection of words can really summarise the crazy amount of adventures he’s had throughout his life. Still, the day I had met him to gift him the footage, he somehow managed to do just about that.

P.S.: Due to the deal I struck with the archive that owns the footage, I am not legally allowed to share the music video publicly. However, do get in touch if you are interested in acquiring the footage for commercial purposes.