I've been trying to find a specific ~5-minute clip I was somewhere in 2005 for years. I was shown on the BBC's "Homegrown Hollywood", which was a fairly obscure anthology of British-made short films about a variety of topics, mostly by small independent film-makers, from "art films" to short documentaries. It had quite a bit of good stuff (and also quite a bit of not so good stuff, it was very mixed).

The specific clip is about two old women reminiscing about their husbands, both of whom died during the battle of Britain decades ago, ending with both in tears and "you never quite let go, do you?" I felt it was a very powerful statement about the long-lasting effects of war that go well beyond the immediate casualties and victims, at the time probably directed towards the Iraq war, but it really applies to all wars.

There is almost zero information about this, including at the BBC Archives as far as I can determine, probably because the clip itself wasn't actually produced by the BBC. I suspect I will never find it again, and that it was seen by relatively few people in the first place since the programme aired at 2am (I found some other clips they aired, such as Toothpaste[1] and a few others, but not this one).

To this day, in spite of being very short, it's still one of the best and most impactful things I've seen on TV.

One can't help but wonder how much fantastic material is out there, seen by only a small audience, only to be lost and never seen again.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAsn9u3e8U

Recently discovered that this is the song playing on the radio in the crashed car you find near the end of the Doom map MyHouse.wad - because of course it is

Sort of reminds me the Reply All episode "The Case of the Missing Hit": https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx which involves a similar search for an unidentified song (though in this case, just one that someone remembers having heard, rather than an actual recording).

The song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJjuBcmPCeQ

I have like a billion demo tapes from the 80s and 90s from bands I tried out for or whatever, many of which include fairly well written pop songs in the approximate quality range of this song. so... this seems like someone's demo tape with a pretty good song that caught on regardless of not being identified? one would think this occurs often, at least if we put more old demo tape songs on youtube

The main related subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/

They've put in a significant amount of effort. Most of the guesses in this HN thread have been debunked already.

I’ve enjoyed seeing the communities that form around these songs. There is a similar song called “Fond My Mind” that has seen many re-makes and adaptations despite having an unknown origin (likely from Brazil in the late 80s/early 90s).

This reminds young me and my teenagers friends discovering an audio tape my mom's second husband made in the late sixties / early seventies (we found it two decades later)... That cassette was pure gold. We'd listen it non-stop at home, during road trips, etc. Thankfully because he was well organized, he had written down all the names of the artists. It was only reggae stuff. But he wasn't that much into reggae, so obviously it was made with the help of someone who knew about reggae.

And so we started searching for all the songs. There was one we couldn't find anywhere (this was pre-Napster days btw and back then lyrics weren't sufficient to find a song).

The hand-written text on the cassette's sleeves read:

"Zap Four - This is is reggae music".

Impossible to find.

Turns out, one day I found it. It was not "Zap Four" but "Zap Pow". For all these years I had misread the handwritten text.

Reggae fans, enjoy, because that's one heck of a good one (and not a very famous song):

https://youtu.be/-6G6PiRGCaU

I have my own mystery song, but a much more recent one, one of the songs that was playing at Google I/O. The soundtrack for the weekend was largely popular stuff from groups like CHVRCHES, but this one I could never identify using every technique I could think of. I put a minute-long clip of it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48gK7Krx0TQ if anyone here happens to be able to figure out its origin these days.

Still weird that they could not identify it. I often listen to recordings where I am an unique likely listener for years, as well as my own bootlegs. But it is never a problem to identify music or even find much more knowledgeable people to ask for pointers.

There is one song that I encountered on youtube a decade or so ago, that I haven't been able to find since. It may have been deleted by the user, or something else altogether but I sometimes just think back and wish I had my penchant for archival back then. Doesn't help that the I recall the title being so vague that a search would yield like 300m results.

I’d only heard about this a few weeks ago. I’ve seen hunts for mystery songs go down before (“On the Roof”, what’s up!), but for some reason something about this one just feels off. Like that photograph of the track list - just seems a little too perfect that this is the one other bit of evidence.

For some reason, my BS detector is telling me that someone recorded a fake song a decade and a half ago, the long troll turned out far better than they ever could have imagined, and there’s no way they ever come clean about this.

Oh, I just remembered my lost media white whale. Back during the first season of “Survivor,” there was a guy who would record hilariously amateurish songs about what was happening on the show. One I remember and can still kind of hear was about how internet leaks and rumors held that Gervais wouldn’t be eliminated. (Gervais was eliminated.) After the mid-2000s or so, I was never able to find anything about that guy or those songs again.

Isn't it interesting that this rose to prominence in the last few weeks because someone included it in the most mysterious DOOM WAD on the Internet?

Posts like these remind me about a lost track that I'm trying to find the name of. I even have a reward for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK8l0pkyiy0

Found online soo many years ago in a random website because it had a name similar to another track I was looking for.

This song gives me major Russ Ballard vibes

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW3M-yio9tLtffeHaqZs-pXqK...

then again ... this is just a "mystery" because someone announced it as such and wrote about it somewhere. the rest is people with too much time making memes about it. apart from that it's just some rather average song someone recorded. that may sound a bit negative, but this whole meme mindset / pseudo culture thing is kind of growing old on me.

So many of us (myself included) have become accustomed to being able to find or identify just about anything with the right software, tools, or community. But there are just so many recordings out there like you mentioned - demos, one-offs, etc. that only one or two people would even be able to identify.

Despite the reach of global communication, there's a good chance those people never find out that others are searching for this info. They may not even be alive anymore.

A year or two ago, some friends and I had the theme of "rare or weird songs" for a monthly "bring your own music" listening party. Since the previous theme was "songs from your childhood/youth" and I like to throw in a bridge to the previous theme when possible, I brought in the recording of a practice session I did with a band back in college around 2000.

I'd since digitized the cassette tape and probably have the only copy of this recording in existence. The band played one show and it was generally just a fun project among friends. We never recorded a proper album, only set up a tape recorder during one practice session as we ran through the whole set.

There must be hundreds of thousands of similar recordings out there from bedroom projects and bands-that-never-were.

Yep, same. Also there's dozens of songs that I totally lost to time, because of lost hard drives, tapes thrown away after being converted to disk, some stuff from 2010 that I lost the multitracks when moving countries.

Some friends had some songs almost 20 years ago that was actually played in the radio by a DJ friend of ours. It wasn't any good, but I reached out to the four of them and asked if they still have it. Nope, the four of them have no idea where the songs are.