Bloody hell, what a fantastic night on Saturday night at ATOMIC – thanks to all who came down, I hear the floor was seriously bouncing! Apologies to all of you whose requests I never got around to playing (or had stupidly left at home – I can only carry so many at a time you know, but I will do better next time! Promise.) I should have the photos sorted & up within a day or so.

Cheers, Bill

In more Atomic anticipation, some kind soul has uploaded the following live footage of Talking Heads to Youtube:

Talking Heads w/ Adrian Belew
December 1980
“Live in Rome”

Pro-shot live performance of Talking Heads. Another great show from the Adrian Belew era of the Talking Heads. The filming is much different than the Germany show from the same tour, this is much more in your face and the Italians use many different and interesting camera angles.

Setlist (click titles for youtube link):

* Psycho Killer
* Stay Hungry
* Cities
* I Zimbra
* Drugs
* Take Me to the River
* Crosseyed and Painless
* Life During Wartime
* Houses in Motion
* Born under Punches
* The Great Curve

Definitely worth your time watching if you’re a fan, or even if you’re not – fantastic stuff.

B

In other news, former bassist with The Smiths Andy Rourke has quashed hopes for a future Smiths reunion, insisting Morrissey is impossible to even contact, let alone coax into reforming, so says the NME here anyway.

Best quote of the story must be this (if you don’t want to read the whole thing!):

…when asked if Morrissey ever had any groupies, quipping, “He had a delivery once and the boy was in there with him for a good ten minutes, but apart from that, I don’t think so.”

Ho ho!

All this from the launch of the new DVD Inside the Smiths:

Speaking with candour, honesty and humour, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke offer
a unique insight into the private life of the groundbreaking band: “The DVD
is a very real account of what happened when we were in The Smiths,” says
Joyce. “We wanted people to know what it was really like. It is more
truthful than anything we have revealed in interviews before because we
were relaxed with how it was done and who was doing it”

Amazon link, if you’re interested is here

B

There is an excellent early electronica/new wave/synth mix available for download here: http://acuterecords.com/blog/?p=12

This is a fantastic sampler of late 70′s/early 80′s electronic, minimal synth, synth-pop music. Includes The Associates, OMD, Paul Haig, Thomas Leer, Cabaret Voltaire, Severed Heads, John Foxx and much more. It was put together by New York DJ & Acute Records supremo Dan Selzer for DFA member Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space radio show on WNYU in New York.

Tim Sweeney then gets in on the act in part 2

Well worth the download! This is a lot of stuff that gets played early on at Atomic, so if you’re into it, turn up a bit earlier next time!

And, if you’re looking for more of this stuff, and much more, ahem, ‘obscure’ post punk type music, the LTM label is a great place to start – their reissue programme is phenomenal

Nice site hardformat.org set up to celebrate our love of brilliant music-related design.

Hard Format isn’t intended to become a dusty museum devoted exclusively to past glories, though there’ll certainly be some of that, we also want to highlight the brilliant new design work being produced right now. In fact, we’re not setting ourselves up to supply a canon of classic design – this is a place where we record stuff we like, if you want yet another reproduction of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band there are enough ‘Greatest album covers of all time’ books out there already.

As more and more there seems to be a shift of focus onto the digital format, this is a great place to browse vinyl, CDs etc as objects.