Music Video Documentaries # 3
With my Music Video Documentaries posts my aim is to highlight certain scenes, music genres or just in general music history that in my opinion matters and the world should know more about. In today’s installment you get three documentaries that I picked for your viewing, and this time I insist on not including anything straight up punk rock, albeit one doesn’t really get totally away from it. Rockabilly, New Romantic and New Wave Of British Heavy Metal couldn’t be any different from each other, yet back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s they were just three out of many more music genres that created tribes of young people dedicated to their sound and individual scenes. Here we go…
The first documentary focuses on Matchbox, a rockabilly revival band that started out as early as 1971 in Middlesex in the greater London area. It’s an interesting look at a scene I never got close with - for somewhat obvious reasons - but often liked the music. My father dug quite a bit of rockabilly in his younger years and I suppose I must have picked up a bit of love for it at a young age. The footage is as it goes with these old documentaries for the most part really fascinating and brings to light the passion people had for one particular genre. Rockabilly grew much bigger as the ‘80s rolled on and keeps going strong to this day. I reviewed a copy of my Crazy Cavan "Rockability” LP some time ago so if you want to dig a bit deeper, here you go.
Second installment couldn’t come as a bigger contrast to the first one, but the purpose of this post is to bring out the different tribes that sprung up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s across Britain with the New Romantics being one of them. When I reviewed my copy of the first Visage LP I went into a little bit of detail as to how important the punk rock explosion was to the development of the New Romantics. The documentary focuses mainly on the fashion aspect and the Kings Road in London where Westwood’s and McLaren’s SEX and Raynor’s Boy shop were located. Again what strikes me instantly is the passion the people had not just for the music, but in this case fashion as well. So much of what is considered hip today seems to always lead us back to developments that took place decades ago, and New Romantic is no different there. Interestingly enough the Blitz club in Covent Garden wasn’t mentioned in the documentary which is surprising considering it was THE night-club for the Romantics back in the day. More about the Blitz kids to come though, for sure.
Alright, I left the most exciting documentary to the end and I always thoroughly enjoy watching this one. Say what you want, but early Iron Maiden with Paul Di’Anno on vocals, and at his best, were just a force of nature. Their music was powerful, honest and simply put just fantastic. The documentary focuses on the rise of NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal), Neal Kay’s Heavy Metal Disco and the Bandwagon in North London, as well as some entertaining and somewhat silly statements by certain headbangers (I wonder what became of them…). One thing that I often got to hear from Metal Heads is that punk rock bands couldn’t play, but as rightfully highlighted in the documentary bands such as Iron Maiden fed off of the energy of the punk sound and made it into something of their own. In hindsight we are all a bit smarter and are able to connect the dots and see how intertwined certain genres and scenes were, even though back in the day they regarded themselves as enemies so to speak. I’ll post a Ten-Part NWOBHM documentary one of these days, and no worries I’ll split it into parts. With that, enjoy the music that makes you happy and rock on!
