I am 99% sure that I was in attendance at this Big Black show at CBGB’s on July 13, 1986.

I saw them play around this time at CB’s and this must be that very same gig. I recall it being hot as fuck that night and that the set was a scorcher, too.

1. Clear Out!
2. Fists of Love
3. Big Money
4. Passing Complexion
5. Cables
6. Pigeon Kill
7. The Ugly American
8. Kerosene (stopped)
9. Kerosene (with Mission of Burma/Volcano Suns’ Peter Prescott on drums)
10 Rema-Rema (with Peter Prescott)

There have been versions of this video on YouTube before, but this one, uploaded by Greg Fasolino, the guy who shot it is the best quality, by far. You can practically smell the stale beer and the BO.
 

 
The low-fi black & white video quality of this 1980 Clash concert doesn’t detract from the enjoyment and in fact may even enhance it (the soundboard audio is top notch).

Complete Clash shows are rare enough, but this also happens to be an especially great (and super energetic) Clash gig with one of the best set lists of any of their tours. Plus Blockhead Mick Gallagher on keyboards. PLUS dub legend Mikey Dread (how much footage exists of The Clash together with Michael Campbell?) and two encores. What more could you ask for? Listen LOUD.

Shot (with at least three cameras) at the legendary Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ on March 8th, 1980.

Clash City Rockers
Brand New Cadillac
Safe European Home
Jimmy Jazz
London Calling
Guns of Brixton
Train in Vain
White Man in Hammersmith Palais
Koka Kola
I Fought The Law
Spanish Bombs
Police and Thieves
Stay Free
Julie’s Been Working on the Drug Squad
Wrong’em Boyo
Clampdown
Janie Jones
Complete Control
————————————-
Armagideon Time (ft. Mikey Dread)
English Civil War
Garageland
————————————-
Bankrobber (ft. Mikey Dread)
Tommy Gun
 

 
Part II is here.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Paris Calling: Ferocious Live Clash show from 1980

Keith Levene of PiL on why he quit The Clash

 
A year on from the release of The Sex Pistols first single “Anarchy in the U.K.” and their infamous appearance on the Today show, Steve Jones and Paul Cook gave their first interview to Australian television.

Lest we forget, it was Jones, more than Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, who launched the Pistols into the headlines with his stream of abuse at TV presenter Bill Grundy, and certainly without Cook’s disciplined drums and Jones’ era-defining guitar (together with Glen Matlock‘s bass) and their song-writing talents Never Mind the Bollocks would have been a much lesser album.

In this interview from 1977, Jones and Cook talk about the Pistols’ back history, records, and their appearance on the Today show:

Jones: If someone wants an argument, you give them an argument back, don’t ya? He started it. He said, “Go on, you got another 5 seconds.”

Cook: What did you say, Steve?

Jones: I fucking gave him a load of abuse. He asked for, didn’t he? It was pretty funny. It’s like, you know, they put all that on the front-fucking-page for all that. Just for swearing on television. Stupid.

Cook: We forgot about the whole thing, a couple of hours after, we didn’t expect nothing to happen from it.

After The Pistols split, Jones and Cook formed The Professionals, and released the rather neglected album I Didn’t See It Coming.

Check more info at Kick Down The Doors: The Cook ‘n’ Jones site.
 

 
Bonus: Full Version sadly not available in US, after the jump…
 

 
Talking Heads perform a previously unheard version of “Psycho Killer” featuring Arthur Russell on cello. Superb.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Pseeco Keeler: Awkward Talking Heads performance on French TV, 1978

 
H/T Dazed & Confused and Chris Frantz!
 

 
As punk rock was throbbing in the clubs downtown, Manhattan cable TV was experiencing its own kind of anarchy. D.I.Y programs from cats like Efrom Allen were offering some demented and surreal stuff to get us energized before hitting the clubs or to soften the crash as we wound down from a night on the Bowery. The coaxial pipeline was sending signals into our decrepit little apartments that were raw, spontaneous and often exhilarating, punk rock’s cathode equivalent.

In this episode of The Efrom Allen Show (1978?), a 12-year-old Brooke Shields does a fashion shoot with Stiv Bators while discussing her career with the wisdom of an ancient soul. Stiv seems to enjoy just going along for the ride.

Efrom, a Realtor these days, should try to clean this video up and release it, along with his footage of The Ramones and Marilyn Chambers, on DVD. This is pop culture history and there’s so little of Manhattan cable programming available for viewing. Someone should do a book on this wild era when the TV eye was bloodshot and beautiful.
 

 
Part two after the jump….

 
Brazilian designer Butcher Billy re-imagines Siouxsie Sioux, Mark Mothersbaugh, Ian Curtis, John Lydon, Morrissey, Robert Smith and Billy Idol as comic book superheroes. His series is called The Post-Punk / New Wave Super Friends.

Now only if there was a Mark E. Smith one. He’d probably have to be a supervillain, tho…
 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
When The Damned’s guitarist Captain Sensible hit with his whimsical solo cover of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Happy Talk” and “Wot?” it looked to me like one of the original punks wanted to host a kid’s program. He could have been the Pee-wee Herman of Britain (Oh, come on, you know what I mean! How dare you disrespect the good Captain with your filthy minds!!!).

At the very least they could have given The Damned their own Young Ones-type sitcom. That would have been classic, what a tragically missed opportunity.

I’m obsessed by “Wot?” with its fantastically “chic” bassline and “straight out of Croyden” rap. Nine times out of ten, when I was actively DJing, I’d put this sucker on. People would always go nuts for this record.

If “Wot?” isn’t one of the greatest, glorious and most underrated singles of the early 1980s, I’ll eat a red beret…
 

 
Bonus: “(What D’Ya Give) The Man Who’s Gotten Everything?” from 1981’s “This is Your Captain Speaking” EP on Crass Records:
 

Siouxsie Sioux (Feb 1979) This is certainly a young woman who knew exactly who she was, wouldn’t you say?

Nevermind those sterile museum retrospectives, First Third Books has just published Punk+, a gorgeous new coffee table monograph featuring Sheila Rock’s documentation of the formative London punk scene. Although many of the faces are familiar, the emphasis on punk as a youth culture, as a tribe, makes this a welcome departure from many other books of punk era photography. These shots are from when the participants were still really young and Rock’s intimate images haven’t lost any of their power from being overused (85 to 90% of the photographs are unseen according to her estimate).

I get sent books like this, well, frequently, and Punk+ is far and away one of the best. Speaking as a former publisher myself, this is a high quality piece to be really proud of.

With a brief introduction by Nick Logan and commentary from some of the participants, Punk+ wisely lets Sheila Rock’s portraits do the talking. I especially loved the pics of a young John Lydon in what appears to be his own flat.
 

Jordan outside of Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique
 

Girl (Leather Jacket)
 

Subey (June 1977)
 

The Subway Sect, Chalk Farm (Dec 1976)

Rob Symmons: “They’re the only public photographs of us that exist from that time because we wouldn’t have any photographs taken. When you (Sheila Rock) rang the door bell, (that little black door at the side Rehearsal Rehearsals) you asked for The Clash and were disappointed they were not there, didn’t believe us and came in to see. To save a wasted trip, you reluctantly photographed us. After we told Bernie [Rhodes] you had come to the studio one evening and taken our pictures, he was cross. I remember his exact words: “When the cat’s away. the mice will play”

 

Generation X (1977)
 

The Buzzcocks (Nov 1977)

Paul Simonon: “We did a couple of shows with The Buzzcocks and we used to go on stage with Jackson Pollack Shirts. One time they did a show with us and came on with Mondrian shorts. It was great!”

 

The Damned (Nov 1976)
 

Paul Weller of The Jam (1979)
 
Sheila Rock’s Punk+ is available as a signed limited edition and standard edition directly through First Third Books.

 
The Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” exhibition includes a re-creation of the legendary bathroom at CBGB’s, the Mecca of merde. But, as we see in the above photo of the museum’s replication of the tortured toilet, duplicating mayhem is impossible. Like most forms of wildlife, if you remove it from its habitat you kill it.

As someone who waded into that hellhole with the regularity of a bottom-feeding crustacean with a bad beer habit, this feeble installation doesn’t come close to evoking the dank horror of the place. The shithole at CBGB’s was punk rock’s Petri dish, spawning a virus that would radiate outward and forward into the future changing pop culture forever. Rock ‘n’ roll’s DNA was re-tooled in this stool garden.  Oh, how I miss it.

For the sake of historical accuracy, the bathroom’s floor should be soaking wet, the toilets overflowing with shit and piss and shards of broken beer bottles everywhere.

This was one of the few bathrooms in Manhattan where it was impossible to snort a line of coke discreetly and every bowel movement was performance art. The toilet truly lived up to the appellation of “throne.” You had to ascend a small staircase to reach it. You defecated from on high while below drunken rockers staggered around the urinals trying to hit their mark in an appallingly comical version of Sin City’s dancing fountains. This was Las Vegas for cockroaches.

Here’s a photo of the real deal. Lean into the monitor and smell the stomach-churning aroma of punk rock.
 

 
Via The Gothamist.

 
On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972 is an interesting short film by Branka Bogdanov primarily documenting the work of ultra-leftist French philosopher Guy Debord, author of the influential post Marxist study of 20th capitalism Society of the Spectacle. The film explores Debord’s influence on the Paris riots of May 1968 and the nihilistic aesthetics of the punk rock era.

Interviewees include Greil Marcus, Malcolm McLaren and Sex Pistols graphic designer Jamie Reid.