Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

There is now an official website for the Distractions, a late-‘70’s, early-‘80’s quintet from Manchester who sadly disappeared after recording only one overlooked album in 1980. That album was Nobody’s Perfect , one of rock’s lost treasures. (My review of the album is here ). The official site is still under construction as of this writing, but it already contains a welcome wealth of information about this little-known band. The site is located at this address: http://www.thedistractions.co.uk The most amazing feature of the site is the inclusion of sound clips of five demo recordings from 1995. According to the site, original Distractions singer Mike Finney and guitarist Steve Perrin formed a new quintet with the same name at that time, and “played half a dozen gigs in and around Manchester and Liverpool”. They also recorded studio demos, and five of them can be heard on this page: http://www.thedistractions.co.uk/Media/Audio/1995demos.html Surprisingly, these songs sound very much l...

I recently viewed the debut feature by the late, great film director Stanley Kubrick. That film is Fear and Desire from 1953, which is little-seen because Kubrick pulled it from circulation shortly after it was first released and often prevented public screenings many years later. To this day, it has never been (legitimately) available on home video. The longest known print runs 72 minutes, and can be viewed at Google Video . The film is also viewable on YouTube in eight parts, but that version runs approximately 61 minutes. The grainy low-budget movie is about four soldiers fighting in a fictional war in an unnamed country, who find themselves trapped six miles behind enemy lines after their plane crashes. One of the soldiers is played by Paul Mazursky, who has also become a renowned film director. Another is played by Frank Silvera, who also starred in Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss . Kubrick was in his mid-20’s when he made this film, which he directed, produced, photographed, a...

Sometimes terrible movies have good soundtrack albums. One of the most obvious examples I can think of is Porky’s Revenge . You’re reading that right. The third and worst movie of the ‘80’s Porky’s teen-sex trilogy actually had a respectable soundtrack album. It was masterminded by Dave Edmunds, who was able to enlist the aid of many big-name friends. The soundtrack generally consisted of pseudo-1950’s music, mixing covers and originals. Edmunds’ tracks, however, owed more to the early-‘60’s Beach Boys. One of them, in fact, is a rendition of “Do You Want To Dance” that is faithful to the Beach Boys version. “Queen of the Hop” and “High School Nights” are equally fine examples of pre-Beatles-style party rock. On the other hand, Edmunds’ title instrumental “Porky’s Revenge” sounds totally 1985 to me. The amazing thing about the soundtrack is the number of big names who participated. George Harrison contributed a tender song called “I Don’t Want To Do It”, a Bob Dylan composition that D...

If anyone thought that no more deluxe editions of the Cure's albums were forthcoming: a 3-CD edition of the 1989 album Disintegration is being released on June 8th. ( Amazon.com calls it the "20th Anniversary Edition", although the album is 21 years old this year). The first disc will consist of the 12 proper tracks. The second disc will consist of 20 previously unreleased rarities recorded in 1988 and 1989. The third disc will contain all twelve songs in sequence from the concert utilized for the live Entreat album from 1990, which originally contained only eight of the songs. A remastered version of the original 8-song Entreat is intended to be made available online. A full track listing for this edition can be found at the Cure's official site . And that's not all the Cure reissue news that the site reports. Robert Smith also promises "a lot more remastered Cure stuff in 2010". This would include DVD reissues of the long-deleted concert videos In ...