I posted Julien Temple's entrancing film The Clash: New Year's Day 1977, in the discussion for last week's music post, but I think it deserves highlighting here, not only for its musical elements, but for the political and social context in which Temple places them.
Centred on his previously-unseen black and white video of The Clash's gig at The Roxy in London on New Year's Day 1977, it's the kind of impish collage that Temple has been making since The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, but he has so much to work with here.
The result is an impressionistic snapshot of pre-Thatcher Britain: lost, impatient, anxious, absurd, entering the year of the Rasta prophecy. As Temple notes in this BBC interview, some of the BBC and ITV footage "is so twee and old-fashioned it feels like it's the 1950s rather than the 1970s." So much is odd, teetering, a message from a world that changed -- including even the early video medium on which he shot at the time.
Yet I get what he means when he says "I think it's about the future, not the past". And I really cannot recommend this film highly enough.
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Late-breaking: this murky, monochrome but compelling 1980 Talking Heads live video recently emerged from some vault:
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Part 3 of Yadana Saw's A History of Student Radio airs at 2.10pm tomorrow afternoon on Radio New Zealand's Music 101. This one seems to cover the 90s: and hence the bNet, the ratings and, by golly, Hard News.
The first two eps are here:
Also, a couple of interviews from last Saturday on the way the music business is evolving. The Atlantic's Derek Thompson on 'The Shazam Effect':
And following on that, me on ways of consuming music and their implications:
You never had the best night of your life with an algorithim, did you?
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It's good to see indie music festivals in apparent rude health. Chronophonium, today and tomorrow in Tapu in the Coromandel, has sold out.
On February 14, some wags in Tauranga stage Woodcock 2015. Even if you're not able to make it, I think reading The Top 10 Bands to Avoid at Woodcock 2015 is a good use of your time.
In Auckland tonight? Hamish Kilgour and Hollie Fulbrooke play at Golden Dawn this evening, with Andrew Tidball DJing out in the yard.
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Via a recommendation from High Hoops, this local producer has some seriously sweet groove going on.
More Music 101. Andre Upston's live recording of Jakob making thunder at Galatos in Auckland late last year:
A DJ called Scumfrog did some further tweaking of The Relfex's excellent re-edit of Talking Heads' 'Once in a Lifetime' and played it to great joy and excitement at this year's Burning Man. He has now made it available for download and it is indeed pretty sweet:
A sweet, sad song, all of a minute long, posted this week by Lontalius:
Plastic People, the small, famous basement club in Shoreditch, London, closed down last week, after more than 20 years. Floating Points and Four Tet played the final night and have posted the recording of the whole evening (just shy of six hours of it) to Soundcloud:
The Guardian's story helps explain why the place was special.
Making some holiday-season waves at TheAudience, the jazz exotica of Emily Rice:
She's playing this month at the Christian music festival Festival One, at Mystery Creek.
And, finally, I've been listening to Lennart Nout's Laneway 2015 playlist on Spotify to get myself schooled in advance:
Any further contributions to Laneway prep are welcomed in the comments below. If you want to embed a YouTube or Vimeo clip, just paste in the bare URL and the site will automagically embed it for you.
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