Archive for Vintage Video

For our latest installment of Vintage Video, we flash back to March 1984 to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers — long before they became sensitive alt-rock balladeers — make their television debut on the ‘Thicke of the Night’ talk show’s one and only season.

On Aug. 24, 1980, the members of XTC set up at Richard Branson’s Manor Studio to record another version of ‘Towers of London,’ a track destined to be the second single off the band’s just-completed, but not-yet-released album ‘Black Sea’— a weekend session captured for posterity in the hour-long documentary ‘XTC at the Manor.’

Superb pro-shot video has emerged for the first time of the 1995 joint David Bowie/Nine Inch Nails tour. Watch Bowie and NIN perform ‘Hurt’ and ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ together, and ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ and ‘Wish’ apart.

Twenty-two years ago, Robert Smith sat for a half-hour BBC2 documentary about The Cure that aired Aug. 8, 1988, as one of 10 installments of the series ‘That Was Then… This Is Now.’

Given that today is Jim Kerr’s 51st birthday, we dedicate this installment of Vintage Video to the Simple Minds frontman. Here’s a performance of one of the band’s most rousing anthems, ‘Waterfront,’ filmed Sept. 15, 1989, at L’Arena in Verona, Italy, during the band’s ‘Street Fighting Years’ tour.

For our latest Vintage Video installment, we present this pro-shot footage of Dinosaur Jr’s original lineup — J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph — rehearsing at the University of Massachusetts in 1986.

For $200,000, New Order re-recorded ‘Blue Monday’ — allegedly the best-selling 12-inch of all time — for a Sunkist TV commercial (which also uses footage from the band’s Kathryn Bigelow-directed video for ‘Touched By the Hand of God’).

Could it be? Is that Ministry’s Al Jourgensen singing ‘don’t give me that so-so soda/that same old cola’ in this 1983 commercial for Shasta? And here’s a purported 1982 7UP jingle sung by Gary Numan, too.

In this late-’70s news footage from a Kansas City TV station, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe is among the fans interviewed about the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ phenomenon — in full Frank-N-Furter regalia.

In honor of Dave Gahan’s birthday today — he’s 48 — we present this clip: Depeche Mode performing its combo of ‘Behind the Wheel’ and B-side ‘Route 66′ during a World Violation Tour stop in Frankfurt, Germany, in October 1990.

The Cure’s Robert Smith turns 51 today, and to mark the occasion, we’ve assembled this playlist of the band’s long-out-of-print 1987 concert film ‘The Cure in Orange,’ which is finally due for a belated DVD release later this year.

While it’s an album hardly in need of commemoration given last year’s high-profile tour and a looming reissue, the Pixies’ beloved Doolittle — from which this site gets its name, of course — was released 21 years ago today.