Intermission 2: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Ah, Johnny Rotten's famous words at the end of the last ever Sex Pistols concert in January 1978, if memory serves...

But they're coming back yet again, playing to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the album Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. A classic album if ever there was one.

Now I love the Pistols, but I'm not going to see them. I prefer to remember them as spotty, angry, arguably misguided teenagers, rather than the more-than-middle-aged comeback queens they've become.

Still, at least they're charging a reasonable amount for their tickets for the gig at Brixton Academy, which went on sale this morning at about £30 and have already sold out for all three nights. Not like those dinosaur cunts Led Zeppelin. What are they charging? £150 a ticket! To watch people even older than the Sex Pistols playing dodgy old prog rock. Wankers.

The cult of the ever-youthful dead pop star

One of my earliest childhood memories -- and certainly my first real brush with popular culture -- is the death of Elvis. Of course, I knew not who he was really, although I do recall telling my mum that her boyfriend was dead. Seems I was wrong, though, and it was Alvin Stardust who she had a thing for.

Regardless, the notion of dead pop star as icon and cult was born, for me, there and then, and I lapped up Elvis's music via my dad's record collection. Sadly, my brother and I probably ruined many highly collectable discs in the process.

Other dead icons preceded Elvis of course: Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix to name but a few. I have nothing much to add. I despise The Doors and Morrison. Joplin, whatever. Hendrix, yeah he's all right...

A couple of years later I discovered Buddy Holly. This one had been in his grave a while longer, of course. But so devoted was I, that I soon acquired everything I could. The great thing about picking up on a dead artist was that the output was finite. (Or so it seemed in those days.)

It wasn't long before I turned to punk and the Sex Pistols. Oh, look, one of them's dead. I'm sensing a disturbing pattern here... Although it goes without saying that, as this list progresses, Sid Vicious will be seen as the odd one out, being as he was an untalented loser and all.

The 1980s passed without a real notable pop-star death for me, with the exception early on in that decade of John Lennon, and so we move on to the '90s.

In 1991, the Manic Street Preachers landed in my lap with a bang. It felt good to get in at ground level with a new band. Good look, good music (although I thought my band was better at first).

And then came Nirvana. And within a couple of years here was my first first-hand taste of rock martyr, suicide, or whatever you want to call it. Here was an artist who had meant something to me while he was alive, only to have him do himself in. I was used to having dead heroes, but this was my first dead hero that I knew when he was alive.

And then, about a year after Cobain's death, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers disappears. He'd been clinically depressed for ages. Is he dead? We still don't know. Officially, though, he is, as a result of being missing for so long -- 11 years and counting. So he's kind of my own second dead idol.

I guess Tupac doesn't really count, since my interest in his music really began with his death in 1996. Going to back to my roots, picking up the pieces after the fact. Despite my voracious appetite for his material, the supply soon outstripped my demand, and I had to stop buying his records once it became clear that substandard work was being released. Shame to do that to his memory.

And then, most recently, Elliott Smith, just a few short years ago, who took his own life with several knife wounds to the chest. Umm, yeah, that sounds feasible. He was more Wife's guy than mine, but we did see him perform live and he was undoubtedly a major talent, desperately underapprecieted in his US homeland.

Invariably these deaths all occurred at a young age, too. Of those cited, Elvis made it to 42 -- hardly a ripe old age; Elliott got to 34. Nobody else even made it to 30. Live fast, die young, leave a good-lookin' corpse.

Where does all that leave us?

Beyond a doubt, I am, on a certain level, a victim of the cult of the dead pop star. A performer's passing makes me want to at least check out their oeuvre and see what all the fuss is about.

But it's also true, as evidenced above, that I am drawn to the music of these lost, suicidal souls way before they go the way of all things.

What does that mean?

Is it inevitable that those artists -- poets, performers, men of the people, who put themsleves out there, stripped bare for all to see -- are ultimately doomed to an early grave? Is too much passion a short cut to the hereafter? And is there any truth in my belief that the first of these tortured storytellers -- indeed, the reason for our obsession with the dead pop star -- was Jesus Christ himself?

“Well, there’s Technicolor and Cinemascope / A cast out of Hollywood”, part 3

You can find part 1 of this post here, and part 2 is here.

In this third post, I'm going to talk a little about the pirate and bootleg "industries".

When I was in my mid-teens, so we're talking 1985/86, I loved bootleg audio tapes. I would buy concert and demo tapes of bands I liked (Adam & The Ants, Bauhaus, The Cure, Sex Pistols) and discover songs that were almost legendary among fans but that had never been officially released.


Before long, I found that a similar market existed for film, and I began looking into it. It's funny... I said in a previous post that The Wicker Man being aired on BBC2 in late 1986, I think, was the film that sparked my interest in cinema, but I have just realized, now that I put my mind to it, that I must have already been interested in "video nasties" and the like, since I was still at school when I ordered my bootleg video tape of A Clockwork Orange.

This Kubrick classic was not officially available in the UK, for either cinema or home video, for some 30 years. Kubrick himself withdrew it from circulation shortly after its original release in the early '70s due to bad press blaming it for some street violence of the time. It was not until after his death that the self-imposed "ban" was lifted. So getting a copy on tape was a hugely significant moment in my film collecting. It was probably the most bootlegged movie in the UK at the time, I'd guess.

I paid £12 for this tape out of the classified ads in the back pages of the NME. It would have been a tenner, but for an extra £2 I could have a second film on the four-hour tape, too, so I chose another banned classic: Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. I hadn't seen either movie when I ordered the tape. I watched A Clockwork Orange many times, though, once it arrived. I don't think I watched LHOTL more than once. Bit grim, I thought.

I wish I still had that tape. Not least because the recently released-for-the-first-time-in-the-UK DVD of LHOTL is still missing footage that was probably on my tape version. And those old habits -- of wanting unreleased goodies -- die hard. Even though it's not a film I've returned to since, I still bought it cheap on DVD. Y'know, for the collection.

You see, for years, we in the UK have been treated like babies when it comes to the cinematic arts. Violent films and pornography have long been subject to cuts or outright bans. Ostensibly these bans are to protect the young, into whose hands they might fall. No thought was ever given to the possibility that an adult might not let his or her kids have sight of them. Or that a couple might not have kids, so why shouldn't they be able to watch what they want. No; the kids come first, even at the cost of the rest of the nation's civil liberties. Grrr. (By the way, Melon Farmers is a great source of information regarding cuts made to UK film releases.)

But it's not just "extreme cinema" that suffers. The UK releases of the Indiana Jones and Rambo trilogies are both cut, for example. I never knowingly purchase a cut copy of a film or TV show,* unless it's at a bargain price. As such, websites like Rewind are totally invaluable.

At this point, I'd like to make a distinction between bootlegs and pirates. Some people argue that they are one and the same. Those who are interested in collecting bootlegs feel otherwise. A bootleg offers something to the collector that is not available officially (or legally, if you want), while a pirate is a straight rip-off of an official release.

If something I want is available officially and legally, I will buy it. If it is not, then I resort to bootlegs. Simple as.

So, with that in mind, there is something I just don't understand. Back in the '80s and most of the '90s, we had video tape. It was a bit shit and it wore out before too long, but it was better than nothing, right? The advent, though, of the DVD in the late 90s (via the clunky and inconvenient LaserDisc format), coupled with the Internet's global marketplace, has led to a wealth of films being available to us all in pristine quality.

If I want to buy Ichi The Killer, I don't have to buy the UK version, which is cut by more than 3 minutes; I can import an uncut copy from the US, Australia, or Holland. And yet, with all that is available to us, and with release dates of discs getting closer and closer to the cinema release dates (indeed, we can often buy US discs of films before they hit UK cinemas), why do people still buy pirate copies of films from car-boot sales or Islington street corners?

The quality is shite. Someone I know -- in fact, a couple of different people -- constantly say to me that they have this film or that on DVD and do I want to borrow it. It is always a film that has yet to come out at the cinema, and it is always a pirate copy.

Do these people not realize that the point of DVD is the great picture and sound quality. That is the reason we have switched to DVD from tape. So to get a DVD with a shit picture on it and crappy sound -- not to mention no extra features or subtitles -- and to pay £10 for it is ridiculous! If I wait four months I can pick up a legit copy with fuckloads of extras for the same money.

If we wanted bollocks quality, we'd've stuck to the old ways, you buffoons!


* On the subject of cuts, but of a different kind, the US releases of the second, third, and fourth seasons of Quantum Leap, one of my all-time fave TV shows, have all had their music altered. Y'know, the period music that helped set the scene. It's been replaced with generic music cues. We in the UK were spared this abortion ... up until season four, and now the cunts have done it to us too.