+ 7 - 8 | § ¶Duran Duran - Live From London
Duran Duran - Live From London (deluxe edition)
Back together again and sounding better than ever! Duran Duran recorded the tracks on this DVD / CD set at their Wembley concerts in 2004. The DVD kicks off with (Reach Up For The Sunrise) and then proceeds at a cracking pace through twenty songs including all their greatest hits such as Planet Earth, Wild Boys, Girls on Film and Rio. If you are kitted out with a decent Home Cinema system, you’ll be glad to know that the DVD is recorded in DTS and SRS for 5.1 surround sound.
While you can buy the DVD on its own, the ‘deluxe edition’ which includes a CD of live recordings is probably a better choice. This contains 10 tracks - all the big hits but none of the less famous songs. The sound is crisp and full but with all the atmosphere of a live event.
There are a few decent extras on the DVD including a documentary and some ‘3D’ concert footage. The 3D footage appears in the form of overlapping green and red images which - when you put on the green-and-red filtered glasses provided with the set - is supposed to add the effect of depth. All I can say is, for me, this didn’t work very well at all. Maybe that’s because I already wear normal glasses so balancing the 3D specs on my nose as well was less effective than intended….?
Anyway, with or without the 3D, this is undoubtedly a must-have set for all Duran fans.
DVD Song List
(Reach Up For The) Sunrise
Hungry Like the Wolf
Is There Something I Should Know
Union Of The Snake
Come Undone
A View to a Kill
What Happens Tomorrow
The Chauffeur
Planet Earth
I Don't Want Your Love
New Religion
Ordinary World
Night Boat
Save a Prayer
Notorious
The Reflex
Careless Memories
Wild Boys
Girls On Film
Rio
CD Song List
(Reach Up For The) Sunrise
Hungry Like The Wolf
Planet Earth
Ordinary World
Save A Prayer
Notorious
Careless Memories
Wild Boys
Girls On Film
Rio
+ 5 - 7 | § ¶Mike Read's New DVD
In Shops Now
+ 8 - 2 | § ¶Blitzed Again
The way some people talk about The Blitz Club these days, anyone would think that it must have been a really glamorous place. It wasn’t. Believe me. I went there and I remember it well. It was a poky little club with a small dance floor at ground level and an eating and drinking area with tables upstairs. There was nothing special about the venue though I guess some of the clientele were a bit on the unusual side - certainly in their dress sense (or lack thereof) . The Blitz was one of the places where the New Romantic movement first began to take hold. ‘Movement’, did I say? To be honest, I’m not really sure if the wearing of too much makeup and odd-looking clothes really justifies the name of ‘movement’ but let’s be generous…
Steve Strange, who was one of the characters most closely associated with The Blitz, later went upmarket by ‘hosting’ nights at The Camden Palace. This was a much, much bigger venue than The Blitz; it dominated the Mornington Crescent end of The Camden High Street in North London. The Camden Palace was an old cinema that had been converted into a night spot by turning the downstairs area into a dance floor and putting tables into the balcony areas up above. By this time, the ‘New Romantic’ movement was no longer a minority interest, a ‘cult without a name’. It had gone mainstream and it was commonplace to see long lines of people (all dressed to the nines) queuing up to be let into the Palace. If you weren’t wearing the right gear (“Is that a Top Shop suit, sir? Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear…”) then you would be turned away.
In the early days, it wasn’t uncommon to see a few of the Spandaus, a Modern Romance or two, Steve Strange of course, and a few other fashionable chart toppers all mingling with the hoi polloi in The Camden Palace. In spite of that, I don’t think there was anything particularly glamorous about The Camden Palace. It had all the atmosphere of a Bingo Hall (which, is, I believe, precisely what it was in the intervening period between its career as a cinema and a disco).
I was re-reading Christopher Isherwood’s memoirs, ‘Mr Norris Changes Train’, ‘Goodbye To Berlin’ and ‘Christopher and His Kind’ recently. These are, to varying degrees, fictional/autobiographical accounts of Isherwood’s life in Berlin during the 1930s. Goodbye To Berlin includes some stories about an English woman named Sally Bowles who was later translated into an American woman, played by Liza Minnelli, in the film Cabaret.
Somewhere between real life and Hollywood, Bowles becomes a brassy cabaret singer in The Kit Kat Club. This club doesn’t exist in the books. The closest thing to it is a seedy little bar called Lady Windermere’s Fan. In all probability, there never was a club anything remotely like The Kit Kat Club in pre-war Berlin. But, having seen it in Cabaret, an awful lot of people want to believe that The Kit Kat Club, or something very like it, really did exist.
The same kind of mythologizing is happening with The Blitz. Maybe we should leave it that way. Forget the fact that it was a very ordinary, poky little club. Let’s just remember it as it should have been - divine decadence, darling…
