The first-ever performance from Prince of his iconic song ‘Purple Rain’ is either a triumphant win or a big fat L—depending on which side of the fence you’re on. Either way, it’s fantastic watching.
Yes, it would appear there’s an almost continuous war being waged for those of us who binge on the “early performance” material of our favourite artists. While it is very easy to see why an artist may want to harness any early-career bootleg potential it’s also easy to see how having this work available to your die-hard fans to watch over and over again will likely add to a more engaged audience. Whichever way you cut it—the footage is unmissable.
The clip in question is Prince’s first-ever performance of his now-famous and simply iconic song ‘Purple Rain’. The video was shot around 1983, taking place at First Avenue and is a piece of the Purple One’s illustrious history.
Looking back now, and it is clear to see that the gig was a turning point for Prince and, although we can still hear people who attended the show profusely telling us how magical it was. Yet, at the time, reviewers from the Star-Tribune at the time noted they were becoming more and more “disinterested” as the song went on. However, those who were present at the time and enjoying it can be confident that they witnessed a piece of history.
At the time Prince was at that point in his career a fledgeling icon, having just seen ‘1999’ make a dent in the charts, the artist was ready to turn it up a notch. He had some big plans for the future.
So, while performing for Minnesota’s Dance Theatre charity show, Prince decided that this night would be the night to debut some of his soon-to-be most iconic material. He provided fans with future muso-collateral by performing for the first time some of the jewels in his musical crown – songs like ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, ‘I Would Die 4 U’, ‘Baby, I’m A Star’ and of course, what would become the title track from his next LP, as well as the title of his first motion picture, ‘Purple Rain’.
The footage below is likely not to hang around for too long as it holds itself as yet another battlefield for the YouTube guerilla war. So, while it is here, we suggest you enjoy all 13 minutes of it while you get the chance. It’s a meaty version of the track but its weight is warranted and wanted. The performance feels even more impressive knowing that Prince performed it, all 780+ seconds of it, with the crowd not knowing a single lick of it.
The song is a special track for many reasons. It will linger long in the pantheon of music, maybe it could’ve been a little better if Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks wasn’t such a scaredy-cat.
The singer reportedly turned down the opportunity to work with Prince on the album and the titular song. “It was so overwhelming,” she later recalled. “I listened to it and I just got scared. I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.’ I’m so glad that I didn’t, because he wrote it, and it became ‘Purple Rain.’
She said: “I’ve still got it, the whole instrumental track and a little bit of Prince singing, ‘Can’t get over that feeling’, or something. I told him, ‘Prince, I’ve listened to this a hundred times but I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s a movie, it’s epic.”
Expanded 40th anniversary edition, featuring newly discovered live tracks and notes from Pentangle bandmate (and Avocet collaborator) Danny Thompson. Bert Jansch was often quoted as saying “I’m not playing for anyone, just myself” and this feels no more apparent than on 1979’s ‘Avocet’, his beautifully meditative paean to British birds. This isn’t to say that Jansch was throwing commercial success to the wind, or was unaware of his audience, more that this album feels like a uniquely personal reflection of him. (The subject of British birds is one that Jansch held close to his heart. Indeed, just preceding this album was his 1978 split 7” single with Shirley Collins – with proceeds in aid of the RSPB.)
For fans of Jansch this is often the album that is singled out as his best work. The freedoms of a post-Pentangle career are much in evidence; folk rock and even trad folk give way to an album that is not only without lyrical accompaniment but really quite orchestral, classical even, in its composition. There are surprises in particular in ‘Lapwing’ (a dirge-like waltz that wouldn’t be out of place on a Nils Frahm album) and ‘Bittern’ (which speaks of Arthur Russell’s more experimental pieces).
Featuring ex-bandmate Danny Thompson, alongside Martin Jenkins (Dando Shaft, amongst others) with sleeve notes by Jansch aficionado Colin Harper (author of ‘Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues revival’). This new edition also comprises three never-before heard tracks, recorded live in Italy in 1977 with Martin Jenkins (‘Bittern’; ‘Kingfisher’; ‘Avocet’), as well as Danny Thompson’s recollections of the making of ‘Avocet’, recorded by Dave Thompson (Mojo Magazine) in typical style. Remastered by Brian Pyle from original tapes.
We’re so excited to welcome back Aussie modern rock heroes DMA’S & Electrifying Manchester indie-pop quartet PALE WAVES! This year also sees the return of Leicester’s Easy Life fresh from a huge UK tour, as well as folk-punk provocateur Ezra Furman. Plus we’ve got psych heroes Temples, Bristol’s favourite sibling fronted band Bad Sounds, former Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess & pop songstress SELF ESTEEM all just added for next year!
We’ve announced over 50 artists today and there’s still loads more to come from the Best Festival For Emerging Talent – Over 200 artists, 20+ venues, all across Leeds on Saturday 2nd May!
Starcrawler (who released their second album about a month ago) are all under 25, but they make bands twice their age look like frosted cupcakes. They also, in a way, resemble the early incarnation of Alice Cooper, and a lot of other stuff that sounds like rock.
There’s the bass player, Tim, who is what a bass player should be: unassuming, solid, off to the side, and a pit bull enthusiast. Austin, on drums, is the oldest at 24, and is super friendly to people, but very hard on his drums. Besides his guitar, Henri is really into t-shirts, until he gets onstage dressed in a cowboy get up, like a mutated combo of Gram Parsons and Jimmy Page with huge slime beast riffs and demented circus ringleader face. Then there’s Arrow who, when she’s not sitting on the floor, levitates five feet above the stage covered in blood.
Unlike most twenty-somethings, no one in this group really gets hammered on booze or does too much crazy shit. All of that goes into the performance. Not that it’s all pretend. Arrow has on more than one occasion been fucked up by dangerous stage antics. Over the course of the show, a plot unfolds which imagines several inventive ways for a person to destroy themselves. I won’t give away the ending, but there is a lot of blood. Things start with Arrow as a sort of badass demented glam queen until, rapidly and without warning, it all goes downhill in the best possible way. It’s glamour plus destruction, over and over, returning every night like a phoenix from the ashes. Or maybe a chicken.
Starcrawler in a soundtrack?? Now that’s a good sign :0 I love this band, saving rock n roll
Starcrawler’s cover of “Pet Sematary” by Ramones is out now on Rough Trade Records and also features on the ‘Pet Sematary’ film soundtrack.
It’s the 40th Anniversary of “Joe’s Garage Acts II & III” – released On this day in 1979!, The album features the incredible “Watermelon In Easter Hay” -a song that Zappa identified as one of his 3 signature tunes. It’s the official FZ Release No#29. What’s your favorite track from Joe’s Garage Acts II & III?.
Two months after the release of Act I, Frank Zappa completed Joe’s Garage with the two-LP set Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III, meaning that, counting the two contractual albums Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites, he released seven LPs’ worth of new material in 1979. Maybe that’s why Joe’s Garage seems so thin and thrown together, musically and dramatically, especially on its second and third sides.
“Joe’s Garage is a stupid story about how the government is going to do away with music (a prime cause of unwanted mass behavior). The album features Ike Willis as the voice of “Joe”, a stereotypical garage band youth who unwittingly journeys through the miasma of the music business. Zappa provides the voice of the “Central Scrutinizer” character—a mechanical voice that narrates the story and haunts Joe’s psyche
It’s sort of like a really cheap kind of high school play . . . the way it might have been done 20 years ago, with all the sets made out of cardboard boxes and poster paint. It’s also like those lectures that local narks used to give (where they show the pills leading to the weed leading to the needle, etc., etc.). If the plot of the story seems just a little bit preposterous, and if the idea of The Central Scruntinizer enforcing laws that haven’t been passed yet makes you giggle, just be glad you don’t live in one of the cheerful little countries where, at this very moment, music is either severely restricted . . . or, as it is in Iran, totally illegal.”.
Martin Scorsese once described “Janie Jones” by The Clash as the greatest British rock’n’roll song. One of the many wonderful things about that statement, not lost on Clash fans, is that however charged-up-and-ready-to-blow the opening track of the band’s eponymous 1977 debut album is, it’s not even the greatest Clash song; hell, it’s not even the greatest opening track on a Clash album. There’s serious competition for that accolade on each of their studio albums, but the title track of London Calling fights off all comers. Its ringing apocalyptic alarm announced the most extraordinary album of the late Seventies, which, almost unbelievably, was released 40 years ago next month on 14th December. It’s even being celebrated in its own exhibition at the Museum of London.
London Calling landed at the close of an extraordinary year in Britain. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher had won her first Tory majority, ending the era of post-war consensus politics, and replacing it with a no-compromise, anti-protectionist, monetarist regime that would preside over denationalisation and the decimation of Britain’s traditional industries. The class warfare that had simmered below the surface of British society since 1945 would be openly waged by the Thatcher government, which would mobilise the state against its people and let free-market economics do what it would. The echo of its mantra – “a price to be paid” (three million unemployed) – can still be heard today in talk of “short-term pain” (watch this space). In 1977, The Clash had demanded “a riot of our own”; Thatcher was ready to respond with mounted police, truncheons, and the army if necessary. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony” indeed.
But all that was still to come (as was The Clash’s musical response to it): 1979 was aberrant in other ways. A sitting MP – Airey Neave – was blown up and killed by an Irish republican bomb as he drove out of the Houses of Parliament; another, the former leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, was on trial for incitement to murder. The Yorkshire Ripper was at large. Sid Vicious, on bail awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, died of a heroin overdose. Had punk’s promise come to this?
The Clash, meanwhile, had lost their standing as the movement’s most resolutely anti-commercialistic band when they had Blue Öyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman drape their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope in the power-chord sheen of American rock. Whether or not it was an attempt to crack America, it was a long way from “we’re a garage band” and “I’m so bored with the USA”. The band felt “bruised by the experience” and by the criticism they had faced, says filmmaker Don Letts, who documented what happened next in his compelling The Last Testament – The Making of London Calling (2004). Singer Joe Strummer himself said “We’ve had our fill of bullshit, and now we’re back to the drawing board. We’re really f***ed, but I don’t think we’re f***ed enough to quit. We’re way beyond that!”.
“Their backs were against the wall,” says Letts. There was a sense, he adds, that they needed to “hunker down” and redefine what The Clash should sound like. The result was “London Calling” which would prove beyond doubt that trying to sound like a big US rock band was a waste of time, because, in 1979, the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world sounded like The Clash.c
“London Calling” celebrates the romance of rock’n’roll rebellion in grand, epic terms…” wrote Rolling Stone, “…it digs deeply into rock legend, history, politics and myth for its images and themes. Everything has been brought together into a single, vast, stirring story.”
It was a double album: 19 tracks. Not all were classics (does anyone really love “Lover’s Rock” or “Wrong ’em Boyo”?), but almost all demanded to be included. And from track two, the deranged psychobilly cover of Fifties British rock’n’roller Vince Taylor’s “Brand New Cadillac”, it was clear that London Calling wasn’t going to be quite like anything else. By the time you reached the jazz guitar and whistling that leads into track three, “Jimmy Jazz”, all bets were off. That side one ended with the exuberant ska pop of “Rudie Can’t Fail” showed that this wasn’t an album that opened with its one great song; they were just going to keep on coming.
Side two signalled a step change in Strummer’s lyrical concerns. “Spanish Bombs” introduced spotty teenagers across the world to the Spanish Civil War: “The freedom fighters died upon the hill/ They sang the red flag/ They wore the black one”. “Lost in the Supermarket”, sung by guitarist Mick Jones, showcased one of The Clash’s secret weapons, that high, girlish, heartfelt voice of Jones, which mixes ardour with the pang of something lost. It gave The Clash a soulful instrument other punk bands didn’t have. And, ironically, it helped The Clash break America, when it was put to use on “Train in Vain” – not listed on the album, except for where it was scratched on the run-off groove – which had a run at the US Billboard chart.
For Letts, though, the album isn’t about the greatness of individual tracks, though he has a place in his heart for “London Calling” and bassist Paul Simonon’s “The Guns of Brixton”. It’s about the juxtaposition of musical styles from far and wide.
Letts had first come into contact with the band in west London in the mid Seventies, when he noticed two lone skinny white boys [Simonon and Strummer] in a basement reggae club. He recalls thinking it was pretty brave at the time. He recognised them later when they wandered into the clothes shop he ran on the King’s Road in Chelsea, Acme Attractions, but it was his then girlfriend Jeanette Lee – later to join PiL – who first took him to see them play at an out-of-the-way venue in northwest London. The energy of the band on stage was like nothing he had ever seen before.
From then on, their careers would be intertwined. Letts was the DJ at the Roxy in Covent Garden, where The Clash played on New Year’s Day 1977, and was an early chronicler of the band on Super-8. He shot the videos for “White Riot”, “Tommy Gun” and, in 1979, the famous promo for the “London Calling” single (which went to No 11 in the UK).
The album, Letts notes, was a rejection of what other people thought the band should play or sound like, and signalled they were just going to play what they liked, whether that was rock or reggae, pop or blues. This was no three-chord wonder. There was piano, acoustic guitar, many different drum signatures. “They couldn’t have made that album without [drummer] Topper Headon,” says Letts. “He could play anything.”
White shirt and leather jacket worn by The Clash, on display at the Museum of London (The Clash)
In some ways, London Calling was not even the most radical UK album of 1979. The Slits released Cut, PiL’s experimental Metal Box ,The Pop Group set off a post-punk chain reaction with Y, while Joy Division subtly tilted rock on its axis with Unknown Pleasures. London Calling only just made the top 10 albums of the year, at number eight. Meanwhile, in Coventry, the 2-Tone movement was producing multiracial bands that did more than just pay homage to Jamaican music like the punks.
But London Calling had something unique. It was lightning in a bottle. All the shades of The Clash’s music – anger, passion, swagger, political fury, romantic heroism, anguish, dread, hope, innocence, humour and exhilaration – had been caught by producer Guy Stevens. It had street smarts and grandeur. In The Last Testament, Clash guitarist Mick Jones was at pains to point out that the songs had already been written, the arrangements already worked out, during a sustained period of intense writing and rehearsing at Vanilla Studios, behind a garage in Pimlico, before Stevens arrived on the scene. But the producer, a famously erratic alcoholic, whose techniques, as Letts’ film shows, were unconventional to say the least, wanted something more. Smashing chairs, pouring wine over a piano as Strummer played, swinging a ladder violently around his head, Stevens captured the spirit of The Clash. As the band’s former manager Kosmo Vinyl puts it in a quote from the Museum of London exhibition: “Guy Stevens wanted to make a record that sounded like scoring a goal at a Wembley Cup Final.”
The curator of The Clash: London Calling exhibition, Robert Gordon McHarg III, remembers hearing the album as a teenager growing up in Canada. The track that spoke loudest to him then was “Clampdown”, with its anti-establishment, anti-nine-to-five ethos, although these days, he says, he is drawn to “The Card Cheat” from side three. McHarg moved to London in 1983, met Simonon at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1989, and Strummer shortly after. He now looks after the 20,000 items in the Joe Strummer archive, from which treasures such as the original lyrics written for “Ice Age” before it became “London Calling” will be on display, alongside items such as Simonon’s smashed bass from the album cover shot by Pennie Smith. The cover’s graphic design, incidentally, based on Elvis’s debut album from 1956 was the last straw for some punks, who had taken the “no Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones” line from the B-side of “White Riot” to heart.
The photos chosen by designer Ray Lowry for the sheet inside the original sleeve have been blown up so they can be viewed properly for the first time – they were sourced, says McHarg, from the negatives of nearly 40 rolls of film. “Those alone, I think, would make it worth coming to the exhibition,” agrees senior curator Beatrice Behlen. There are 150 artefacts, she tells me, confiding that it was a stipulation that none of the labelling could be construed as bragging, as “The Clash don’t brag”.
A 1979 preliminary sketch by Ray Lowry for the ‘London Calling’ album art, on display at the Museum of London (Samuel Lowry)
The exhibition, McHarg adds, “is a pretty fun experience”, and includes a mixing desk where you can listen to the individual guitar, bass, drum and vocal tracks that make up the songs.
Does he feel that punk became restrictive for the band – and Strummer in particular, who adopted its speech mannerisms and attitude in a way that completely belied his son-of-a-diplomat, boarding-school upbringing, and even his years as a hippie squatter? “I’ve worked so much with Joe’s archives,” he says, “that [I can tell] there was never a change in attitude within his spirit. His sense of integrity was [the same] throughout, whatever music he was into. If you listen to his lyrics throughout his lifetime, he was always a passionate rebel.
I ask Letts if he thinks Strummer, who died in 2002 at the age of 50, had a sense of his own musical legacy and whether he had a favourite album. “Joe was very hard on himself,” he says, softly. “I don’t think he was ever satisfied with anything he’d done.”
The Clash: London Calling, Museum of London, 15th November – 19th April 2020, admission free. The London Calling Scrapbook, released to mark the 40th Anniversary of the album, is available now
Don Walker is one of the greatest chroniclers of the Australian music experience. His vast catalogue of lyrics was recently set out in book form like the poetry it always was, while his tales of complicated love and downtrodden battlers still ring out from every RSL jukebox and bad covers act. But every few laps of the sun, Walker decides he just wants to write a fun song, tongue firmly in cheek, metaphors left on the shelf. Getting the Band Back Together is one such song. With a chugging rhythm section, plonking bar piano, and Mossy and Barnesy trading lead vocals, this is vintage Cold Chisel, just without the urban decay or wide expanse of the country. Walker has promised a lot more depth on the forthcoming album – dark songs and ballads aplenty. With Cold Chisel recently announcing a huge run of 2020 dates, this playful slab of rock is a perfect first single, and marks a very welcome return.
Touring nationally in 2020. Cold Chisel Blood Moon Tour ‘Getting The Band Back Together’ is the first single from Cold Chisel’s new album Blood Moon.
On Friday a new Milk! Records compilation called “Milk On Milk”. It features my version of “Keep On” (written by my friends Loose Tooth) n playing with me on that recording is Jen Sholakis (drums), Dave Mudie (bass) and some extra vocals by Anika (Hachiku).
This is the third compilation we have made as a label (the first two featured my tracks ‘Pickles From The Jar’ and ‘Three Packs A Day’). Barnett and Jen Cloher asked every artist to pick their favourite song by a label-mate and record their own version of it.
It includes some truly amazing tracks from Tiny Ruins, Jade Imagine, Jen Cloher (ft. The Letter String Quartet), Hachiku, Evelyn Ida Morris, East Brunswick All Girls Choir, The Finks, and Loose Tooth. It was (mostly) produced, engineered & mixed by Anna Laverty at (mostly) Audrey Studios in Coburg!
It’s getting harder to draw a common thread through the music coming from Jack River, with chugging indie tunes, bubblegum pop and crunching grunge all receiving even billing on her debut album, “Sugar Mountain”. But while that record was fixated on the past and dreaming of the future, Later Flight steps into the present, marrying bright, dance-pop production from Styalz Fuego with lyrics that espouse the giddy rush of falling in love. The drums seem to be shamelessly nicked from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs indie classic Gold Lion, but that only makes Later Flight all that much better.
Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack of Wye Oak have spent most of their lives in Baltimore, MD. But after two years of constanttouring with Civilian, they landed on opposite sides of the country with an unforeseeable future ahead. Despite this newfound uncertainty, the two bandmates embraced their physical distance, passing ideas back and forth, allowing new work to evolve in their respective solitudes, Harsh jagged guitar & synths that then melt into a lovely lilting chorus. Energy & subtlety, wonderfully arranged & produced.
The single, “Fortune,” is out now on Merge Records
