‘New band, new mistakes,’ said Siouxsie Sioux in an after-show interview from this concert of The Banshees at De Meervaart Theater, Amsterdam in 1982.

Siouxsie was describing changes to The Banshees line-up over the previous 4 years, which had seen the arrival of drummer Budgie, and guitarist John McGeoch, joining Siouxsie and 1st Banshee Steven Severin.

As McGeoch explained it was the core dynamic of Severin and Siouxsie that made The Banshees work.

The Banshees were one of the most important and influential bands of the past 30 years, and while so many other bands from the sixties, seventies and eighties are getting back together and taking to the road again, it would be good to see The Banshees regroup, to take their rightful place at the top of the tree.

Sadly, any reunion would be without McGeoch, who died in 2004. McGeoch was classed as a Punk Jimmy Page, and had successful career with Magazine, Visage, The Banshees, and Public Image Ltd. I’ll leave it to McGeoch to describe performing with The Banshees in concert at De Meervaart:

‘It was great, because I felt like I was a teenager again, which was at least 20 years ago - and it’s nice to have memories like that.’

And o, what memories.

Track Listing

01. “Israel”
02. “Painted Bird”
03. “Arabian Knights”
04. “Spellbound”
05. Interview with band
06. “Switch”
07. “Happy House”
08. “Head Cut”
09. Interview Steven & Siouxsie
10. “Voodoo Dolly”
11. “But Not Them”
12. “Sin in My Heart”
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Happy Birthday Siouxsie

 
Hip hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa is the subject of this loosey goosey documentary featuring interviews and some classic videos made between 1982 and ‘89. With Jazzy Jay, James Brown, Johnny Rotten and the Afrika Bambaataa Family.

Songs:

Planet Rock
Looking For The Perfect Beat
Renegades Of Funk
Street Happyness
Unity
World Destruction
Free South Africa

Well, a lot of people within government and big business are nervous of Hip Hop and Hip Hop artists, because they speak their minds. They talk about what they see and what they feel and what they know. They reflect what’s around them.” ~ Afrika Bambaataa

Update: For those of our readers that were having problems viewing the video, problem solved!
 

 
Known simply as “iiGethii”·on YouTube, here’s her summary of the timelapse video:

This video is of me going through a 3 year transition (Roughly one thousand pictures). I have had FFS during the process. I started roughly around when I was 20 - 21 years of age.

I use to have my own channel a while ago where I’d post videos, but removed it. Here I am again making a return.

BTW, FFS stands for facial feminization surgeries.
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
Frank Zappa: New York & Elsewhere is an Austrian produced TV documentary directed in 1980 by Rudolph Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, aka DoRo productions, who are best known for their work with Freddie Mercury and Queen.

Frank Zappa: New York & Elsewhere consists of interviews with Zappa intercut with performances at New York’s Mudd Club and at Upper Darby’s Tower Theater, in Pennsylvania, from May 1980.

The picture quality is poor but the sound is okay, and is not covered with German voice-over. Tracks include “Mudd Club,” “Beauty Feels No Pain,” “Chunga’s Revenge.”
 

 
Here are some outtakes from The Richard Simmons Show—which aired from 1980-1984—where Simmons loses his shit on his mom, Shirley, because she keeps flubbing her lines.

As a result of watching this, I now shall go to bed tonight with the line “MY name is Shirley Simmons and I’M Richard’s mother” burned into my brain…
 

 
Day Comes Apart is a stunning song cycle, consisting 9 songs written by Mikael Karlsson and Rob Stephenson, and performed by the superb Abby Fischer (mezzo soprano) and Yegor Shevtsov (piano) at the Klavierhaus, New York, in May 2012. The video was shot by T. M. Rives and J. P. Bernbach, with audio by Patrick Lo.

Karlsson and Stephenson previously worked together on the wonderful diverse experimental album Dog, and Karlsson is currently on an opera and an orchestral score for the Norwegian National Ballet with Alexander Ekman.

The 2010 recording of Day Comes Apart is available on i-tunes.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

From Opera and the Avant-Garde to Pop: Introducing the Musical World of Mikael Karlsson

 
Jean Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers while in prison in 1942. It was published anonymously the following year, and sold around 30 copies. It wasn’t until after the Allied Forces liberated France in 1944 that the bulk of the copies were bound and sold.

Due to its sexual content Our Lady of the Flowers was sold as high class erotica, but Genet never intended it as such. It would take until the book had been revised and reprinted by Gallimard in 1951 that Our Lady of the Flowers received the critical accolades it richly deserved - even if Jean-Paul Sartre described it as “the epic of masturbation.”

It was an over-the-wall conversation with a neighbor that led Lindsay Kemp to create and produce his now legendary dance production of Flowers in 1974. As Lindsay recounted to Dangerous Minds last year:

‘I’d just rented a little cottage, a country retreat, in Hungerford in Berkshire, and my next door neighbor - it was one Sunday morning and we were listening to Round the Horne, we all did on those Sunday mornings - and my neighbor across the fence leaned over and said.

“Oh hi, I think this book might interest you.”

And it was Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. And I began to read it, and as soon as I began to read it I could already see it on the stage, and I could see myself as Divine, the central character. And two weeks later, we opened it.

Only someone of Kemp’s incredible talents and vision could have produced Flowers, and the production put Kemp and his dance company literally “on the map.” Since then, Kemp and Co. have performed Flowers all across the world to incredible acclaim.

In 1982, a video was made of the Lindsay Kemp Dance Company performing Flowers at the Teatro Parioli, Roma. It is rarely been seen since, and the video is a incredible treat for anyone interested in dance, performance and theater.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Lindsay Kemp is on the ‘phone: Scenes from his life from Genet to Bowie

Lindsay Kemp: Seldom seen interview about his production of ‘Salome’ from 1977

David Bowie and Lindsay Kemp’s rarely seen production ‘Pierrot in Turquoise’ from 1968

 
With thanks to Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance
 

 
There are some folks who like to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and then there are some folks who really fuckin’ like to celebrate New Year’s Eve. This video captures some of those latter types in action.

Remind me to never be caught in Berlin on December 31st.
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
Feverishly prolific New York graf-based expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 52 today. That fact jars us because of the inevitable Peter Pan myth that accompanies the premature death of any young artist in any discipline.

Though I hate to pursue it, does it depress us to imagine a middle-aged JMB? Would he be still cocooned and slickly dressed, and now entrenched and heavily sponsored downtown, or maybe bugged-out HR-from-Bad-Brains style, redolent in gray dreads, pursued often and obtained for the occasional commission in order to keep up his paranoid existence in who-knows-where?

Of course, Basquiat’s influence dwarfs the downtown New York art scene in the way that he embodied the New York mix of hip-hop, post-punk, and fashion. But our culture also tends to rely on him in an unspoken way as a kind of purified representation of redundant cliches like doomed youth, avant-garde blackness, and the price of fame. We do best to remember each of those features as part of him—and separately, we do best to remember Basquiat as Basquiat.

In that spirit, we draw your attention to Tamra Davis’s excellent documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child, kindly uploaded to YouTube for the budget-minded…
 

 
Thanks to the excellent musician Aybee Deepblak...

 
What’s that you say? You’d like a crusty random Beatles obscurity? Well I’ve returned to the fold just in the nick of time then, eh? Apparently sometime in the mid-60’s then ad-man and future director of The Lords Of Flatbush, Stephen Verona collaborated with John Lennon on a clever and somewhat risque (for the time) animated clip for the innovative, guitar feedback-usage pioneering “I Feel Fine.”

Artnet had this to say about it:

A chance meeting in a London nightclub in London in 1966 between artist and film maker Stephen Verona and the man of the hour John Lennon led to a friendship and artistic collaboration which resulted in this, the world’s first music video. John gave Stephen a new and soon to be hit record, which arrived on an unlabeled disc. It sounded like the title of the song was going to be ‘She Said So’ not the next line in the song, ‘I Feel Fine’ hence the title of the song became ‘She Said So’.
Verona set to work in New York drawing the pop-art cartoon images to fit the lyrics and flow of the music. Lennon flew to New York and the two got together to measure the progress. Stephen remembers the night that Lennon came over to his apartment and the two wiled away the hours by sitting in the kitchen table, smoking and coloring in the images with markers – the Music Video was born.

OK, obviously it’s not the world’s first music video (why must everybody who made a music clip before the advent of MTV make that claim ?), but it’s a nifty find, doncha think ?
 

 
Thanks to the great music historian Domenic Priore for the tip ! Go buy his book !