ESSENTIAL VIEWING TO GET YOU THROUGH THE LOCKDOWN!!!
So, here we are again. Four months into the Covid-19 enforced UK lockdown and - even though restrictions have been eased somewhat in recent weeks - many of us are still stuck at home working, looking after families or just keeping away from the great unwashed. Things are improving day by day for sure, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch for me to suggest that the world will never really be the same again. Certainly, when it comes to going out for a night and losing yourselves in a few hours of storming live music, it all seems a very long way off. So, in the spirit of keeping you - dear reader - entertained during these weird old times, it's time for me once again to raid the televisual archives for some favourite clips of mine that may brighten the corners of your world.
Enjoy yourselves, why don't you?
LIVING COLOR: PRIDE
First up, one of the great lost bands of the last 30 years. New York based crew Living Color appeared almost fully formed at the end of the 80's with their tremendous debut album 'Vivid'. A fantastic collection of blazing rockers and thumping funk grooves, the album saw the quartet - vocalist Corey Glover, guitar wizard Vernon Reid, drummer Will Calhoun and bass maestro Muzz Skillings - make huge inroads into the charts as well as bagging a couple of Grammy awards and huge support tours with the likes of The Rolling Stones. Regarded as an anomaly at the time by less forward thinking types - "A black group? Playing hard rock music???" - the band were lumped in with the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More as part of a new 'funk-rock' scene but, if anything, were a far more interesting prospect. Political, outspoken and socially aware, Living Color were a real breath of fresh air during the overtly sexist and misogynistic hair metal era. 1990's follow-up album - the incendiary state of the nation address 'Time's Up' - was an absolute tour de force and seemed to set the stage for the group to be huge players throughout the 90's. Unfortunately for them the grunge scene of the following few years threw them off course and, after a darker third opus in 'Stain' the band split in 1995. There have been sporadic reunions over the last 15 years or so and the odd album too - 2017's 'Shade' was a decent return to form - but their moment passed a long time ago. A real shame. This clip shows Living Color at the absolute peak of their powers, performing the extraordinary social commentary of 'Pride' at the famed Harlem Apollo in 1990. What a band they were.
ERIC CLAPTON & ROBERT CRAY: OLD LOVE
Also from 1990, the following clip finds legendary blues guitarist Eric Clapton - sporting an absolute BARNSTORMER of a suit - making an appearance on famed jazz musician David Sanborn's short-lived US music show 'Sunday Night'. Checking the credits for this show online has blown my mind somewhat with the cast of characters who performed across the two seasons a veritable who's who of the great and good of the music scene at the turn of the 90's. Dr. John, Marianne Faithfull, Leonard Cohen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Al Green, Donald Fagen, Curtis Mayfield, Carlos Santana, Lou Reed, Willie Dixon, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Todd Rundgren, LL Cool J, Taj Mahal, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nick Cave, Warren Zevon, Screaming Jay Hawkins. Seriously, this was one hell of a show! Incredibly, Sanborn's co-host for this endeavour was our very own Jools Holland who obviously nicked all the best ideas from it before launching his Later.. series a couple of years down the line on British TV. Amazing. This particular performance from the show's second run sees Clapton - at the absolute apex of his commercial fortunes after the release of the previous year's multi-million selling 'Journeyman' opus - joined by new blues kid on the block Robert Cray, himself fresh from the massive critical success of his recent 'Strong Persuader' and 'Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark' albums. The duo had co-written a brace of tracks together and this laid-back and languid soulful blues was the pick of the bunch. Easy on the ear and smooth as silk, this was Clapton and Cray firing on all cylinders. Lovely stuff.
DAVID GILMOUR & DAVID BOWIE: COMFORTABLY NUMB
A real treat here, with an astonishing hook-up of British music legends. In 2006, fresh from the huge success of his first post-Pink Floyd solo album 'On An Island', David Gilmour - he of the dulcet vocals and spine-tingling guitar solos of Floyd's finest songs - toured the world and ended up at the Royal Albert Hall in London for three extraordinary nights of gigs. Joining him onstage were not only ex-Floyd keyboard wizard Richard Wright, but also Roxy Music guitar legend Phil Manzanera. However, if that wasn't enough to wow the gathered throng, when Gilmour introduced special guest David Bowie to perform a couple of tracks with him, it's fair to say the audience went batshit-crazy. Bowie had been a bit quiet over the previous few years, decamping to New York City to enjoy family life with his wife and young daughter, and hadn't made a record in over five years. Tragically, the reasons for his departure from the public eye became common knowledge after his death in 2016, but on this particular evening the great man looked hale and hearty. Bowie and Gilmour performed early Floyd single 'Arnold Layne' together before launching into this astounding version of the perennial set-closer from 1979's 'The Wall'. Bowie's deference to Gilmour after he sings each line - stepping back, head bowed, as Gilmour bends his strings magnificently - is a glorious sight to behold. With the rest of the band on tremendous form - including another fallen hero in Wright - this is just superb. (As a postscript, I was actually offered a ticket for this gig by an acquaintance that I was working with at the time. The guy in question never came through with the ticket so I missed out. It still burns...)
TOM PETTY/STEVE WINWOOD/JEFF LYNNE/DHANI HARRISON/PRINCE:
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
Another incredible collaboration here, this time from the 2004 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Ceremony in the US, as a bunch of absolute legends pay tribute to The Quiet One himself - George Harrison. Everyone's favourite Beatle - go on, fight me - had recently succumbed to cancer and this event saw a group of his closest friends - Petty, Lynne and Winwood - club together to perform his most well-known addition to the Beatles canon. Also in the band was Harrison's son Dhani who, far from overwhelmed, acquits himself splendidly. Petty and Lynne - not only friends of Harrison but also fellow members of the late 80's super-group The Traveling Wilburys - do most of the heavy lifting vocally, as Winwood holds down the groove on his Hammond organ behind them. The whole shebang is stolen though by the magnificently suited and booted Prince who - bedecked in one of the coolest hats ever seen on a man - strides onstage as if he owns the place and promptly tears the roof off with a guitar solo from the heavens. Answers on a postcard please if you've ever witnessed a more extraordinary slice of six-stringed showmanship. With his louche swagger and impish grin, Prince is on absolute fire here and Dhani Harrison's face as Prince leans back off the stage and launches into another astounding set of licks is one for the ages. He then finishes up and strolls off as if it was the easiest thing in the world. What a genius he was. Sadly, Prince and Petty are no longer with us either but here's hoping they've both hooked up with Harrison in the Great Gig In The Sky and are waxing lyrical about this performance.
GUNS 'N' ROSES/LENNY KRAVITZ: ALWAYS ON THE RUN
Back to 1992 here and a huge outdoor show in Paris during the early stages of Guns 'N' Roses' 'Use Your Illusion' tour. Having broken through monumentally a few years earlier with their still brilliant debut album 'Appetite For Destruction', the scuzzy L.A. rockers had followed it up in 1991 with not one, but two albums of thunderous rockers, barrelling punk and huge, windswept power ballads. Not all of the 'Illusion' albums worked but most of the songs on both records were worthy of classic status. The band themselves were still at this stage rightly regarded as the most dangerous band in the world and tales of their touring exploits were head-spinning. In truth, by the time of the summer of 92, principal members Axl Rose and Slash were barely on speaking terms - I saw the band a year later at Milton Keynes and the atmosphere on stage was beyond frosty - and founding member and second guitarist Izzy Stradlin had already quit by the time the tour begun. Rose, in particular, was increasingly frustrated with the extra-curricular musical activities that Slash was indulging in which included his work on 60's fixated show-pony Lenny Kravitz's second album from 1991 - 'Mama Said'. Kravitz and Slash were old friends from high school so Slash was never going to say no when it came to adding his thumping guitar to the tracks 'Always On The Run' and 'Fields Of Joy' but Rose's nose was put out of joint to such an extent that at the few performances across this summer tour where Kravitz appeared, the notoriously prickly vocalist never even stayed onstage. A shame, as this performance is so tremendously exciting that it would have been great fun to see Rose up there on the gantry dancing along with the backing singers as Kravitz, Slash and uber-cool bassist Duff did their thing down on stage. Guns carried on with the tour for another two years before imploding in drugs, acrimony and law-suits. They have, of course, reformed in recent years and - Covid permitting - will be back playing live very soon. Kravitz meanwhile - who, despite my barbs, I'm a big fan of - went on to release the multi-milion selling 'Are You Gonna Go My Way' album the following year before settling into a routine of releasing an album every few years that always have their moments but that never quite match up to his first two albums from 30 odd years ago. But both he and Slash are at the peak of their powers here.
THE STONE ROSES: WATERFALL
A hugely exciting - and massively important - clip next as we go all the way back to February 1989 and the debut TV performance from Manchester's magnificent The Stone Roses, who - a few months away from the release of their seminal debut album - were finally allowed on to legendary Manc taste-maker Anthony H Wilson's arts magazine show 'The Other Side Of Midnight'. Wilson - journalist, presenter, boss of Factory Records and all-round good egg - is big enough to admit in his intro here that he made a mistake and missed the boat with the Roses first time round and was later quoted as wishing he'd signed them to Factory himself. Considering what happened to his label later on down the line it's probably for the best that it didn't happen. (Although, when you consider the difficulties that the Roses had with their label Silvertone then who knows?) Either way, this particular performance from the band is absolutely stellar and proves that they were pretty much brilliant from day one. The groove, the swagger, the beat, the gloriousness. It's all there. Ian Brown's notoriously dodgy voice is on point this time around, and either side of him, John Squire on guitar and Mani on bass are dovetailing perfectly. It's drummer Reni though who is the star of the show - unless you count the exemplary moves of unofficial fifth member Cressa, who is giving it some serious Madchester vibes on the mixing desk. Reni, long regarded as the most mysterious member of the group, is sometimes forgotten about when it comes to great modern drummers but really - just watch him here. Absolutely incredible stickmanship. 'Waterfall' itself as a song is perhaps a little overplayed these days on modern rock radio stations, but when you see the band perform it together like this - before the drugs, before the acrimony, before the ill-advised legal tussle with Silvertone that led to the 5 year silence - you can see, hear and feel why The Stone Roses were, for the following year or so at least, the most important band in the country for British youth. In fact, I remember watching this very broadcast one late Saturday night in my bedsit and immediately thinking that everything else I was listening to at that time paled into insignificance in comparison. My Joe Bloggs flares and floppy-fringed curtains haircut quickly followed....
SCREAMING TREES: DOLLAR BILL
My most recent reading material has been the utterly astonishing memoir from former Screaming Trees vocalist and grizzled grunge godfather Mark Lanegan. 'Sing Backwards And Weep' is gritty, grime-encrusted, dirt-sodden, harrowing, edgy, tense, hypnotic, emotionally crushing, brutally honest and fucked up beyond belief. A no-holds-barred account of a rock and roll life that should have ended many, many times. Full to bursting with hilarious and heartbreaking tales of drug addiction, near-death experiences, lost loves, fallen companions and fractious inter-band relationships, it's possibly the greatest music memoir I've ever read. The fact that Lanegan himself is not only still standing - clean and sober for two decades now - but can also remember such dark, dank and devious escapades is mind-bending. (It's extremely possible that Lanegan's seriously scarring account of his desperate search for a heroin fix in King's Cross in 1996 would have felled lesser men ten times over). But, with us he still is, and I for one am truly glad about that as the music Lanegan has made over the past 15 years or so ranks up there with the best songwriters of all time. Before going solo though, Lanegan and his fellow Trees came very close to being very successful indeed - although the self-sabotage that Lanegan indulged in in the mid-90's put paid to that - and during 1992 in particular, when everything went long-haired and plaid-covered, the album 'Sweet Oblivion' was swept up in the post-'Nevermind' grunge slipstream to such an extent that great things were expected by their record label. A couple of minor hits - the thrusting 'Nearly Lost You' and the pain-wracked dustbowl ballad 'Dollar Bill' - were as good as it got though and once the drugs took over, all was lost. There was somehow time between Lanegan's overwhelming heroin addiction and the horrendously violent clashes between the warring Conner brothers - guitarist Gary Lee and bass player Van - for the group to produce the stupendous 'Dust' album in 1996, but by then the wheels had fallen off spectacularly. Lanegan writes in his book about how he hated his time in the Trees vehemently but it was his only possible escape from his horrific life back in Seattle. They did make some brilliant music though and this performance - from the BBC archives in 1992 - is a case in point. Check out Lanegan's coat too - it gets it's own chapter in his book and no doubt had some tales to tell.
RE-FLEX: THE POLITICS OF DANCING
Finally, in this rather hefty archive selection, some absolutely fantastic 80's cheese - ripe and ready for your ridicule. Re-Flex - a more 80's band name would be hard to imagine - were a synth-pop combo from Birmingham who, in an earlier incarnation, featured Mark King and Phil Gould who quickly jumped ship to form the far more successful Level 42. Finally settling on the four-piece lineup of vocalist John Baxter, keyboard maestro Paul Fishman, the tremendously monikered Roland Vaughan Kerridge on drums and bass player Nigel Ross-Scott, the band knuckled down and started work on their first album. Released in 1983, 'The Politics Of Dancing' was a straightforward collection of clunky pop and guitar-drenched funk-rock which never really grabbed anybody's attention. The title track - and first single - though, is still to this day a wonderful slab of school disco pop. Popping up year on year on eighties compilations and film soundtracks - most recently the Charlize Theron action flick 'Atomic Blonde' - the song must have made the band a pretty penny. Only a minor hit over here at the time - number 28 in the UK chart - it was far more popular across Europe, as well as Australia, Canada and the USA where the band supported The Police on tour. That was as good as things got for the group though with a second album being shelved by their record company for being too political - ironic considering the title of this first hit - and the foursome disbanding quietly soon after. There's been the odd reformation since as well as some reissued recordings but after the sad death of Kerridge from a brain tumour in 2012, the band are no more. This performance of their signature tune is from an Italian TV show called DiscoRing - well, indeed - and features everything you want from an 80's pop show. Garish colours, eye-straining lighting, spinning neon stage, syn-drums, horrific stage-wear, astounding haircuts. Fabulous song, though. Extra credit here too for the extraordinary look of bassist Nigel. Bald and pony-tailed, obviously a fair few years older than the rest of the band, and looking like an insurance salesman on a crazed acid-induced karaoke weekend, he deserves all the kudos you wish to bestow upon him. Awesome.
