Just got back from a Holiday in Leicester???????....yes, when one lives in a beautiful sunny climate like here in the southern French countryside, you go to a shithole to regain perspective.
I'm from Leicester, and I love it in the same kind of way a hostage loves his/her captor.....'the Stockholm Syndrome' I believe its called.
I'm being harsh on the town of my birth, it is fact quite a good place these days,lots of fancy new buildings, plenty of entertainment, and a football team that will now go down as the achievers of the single greatest footballing triumph over greed and capitalist oppression in the history of sport!
So, naturally, in this Pub Rock trip we're having, here's Elvis Costello and the boys rocking it up on the 'Live Stiffs' tour of 1977 in this very same city.
He's on top form, its a soundboard recording, the first album tunes are better with the Attractions, and Richard Hell was in the audience. Can't get too much better than that?
Track Listing:
Love Comes In Spurts
No Action
(The Angels Wanna To Wear My) Red Shoes
Blame It On Cain
The Beat
Dr. Luther's Assistant
This Year's Girl
(I Don't Want to Go) Chelsea
Less Than Zero
Whole Wide World
Roadette Song
Neat Neat Neat
Little Triggers
Radio Radio
You Belong To Me
Miracle Man
No Action
(The Angels Wanna To Wear My) Red Shoes
Blame It On Cain
The Beat
Dr. Luther's Assistant
This Year's Girl
(I Don't Want to Go) Chelsea
Less Than Zero
Whole Wide World
Roadette Song
Neat Neat Neat
Little Triggers
Radio Radio
You Belong To Me
Miracle Man
24 comments:
Ill be in Montbrun soon :) 15 Minutes from Carcasonne....
Only about two and a half hours away from my village abode north of montpellier.....what you doing there?
My family owns this (making me a part owner :) )
http://www.chateaudelhorte.com/uk/index.htm
Usually go there once a year or so, for a week or so....
Mmmmm very nice....I had no idea you were bourgeois?
hahahahaha!!!!!
my dad grew up in a shack, no water, no electricity, no gas, you wouldn't believe how poor, they were farmers who came to rotterdam after selling their little plot of land, bought a small piece of land and started growing vegetables and selling them with a handcart on the streets..... after a few years of doing that (and working part time in the harbour) they managed to start a small vegetable store.... That's where he met my mom, she was working for them, she came out of a militairy family, my grandfather was a marinier and one of the "black devils of rotterdam", no money there either, he spend the whole second world war in prison camps in Germany.... When I was a kid we were dirt-poor, and I mean dirt-poor, once a week if we were lucky there might be a bit of meat or maybe chicken.... I'm a Rotterdam street kid, true to dat.... My dad worked his ass off, we almost never saw him as kids and he managed to make the little vegetable store a bit bigger. And bigger. And then he managed to get a loan from a bank and started a very small super market. After years of that he went under, up till his neck in debt, but somehow he managed to get another loan and started a small supermarket in a huge empty building in Rotterdam, they all said he was crazy... Well... He wasn't... It took more years and years of back breaking work but he succeeded where everybody was calling him crazy and ended up with a huge very succesfull supermarket. He was the first one in Europe to combine the American style with the European style, the style they almost all use nowadays, meaning baking your own bread etc.... Thinking about his own father who died quiet young after working like a slave his whole life he retired early, sold everything and started what we now have in France..... If you would hear us talk, in our thick, low-class Rotterdam accent you would know where we come from and what we stand for :) Marx didn't even have a name for our kind, we were below your average proletarian when we started out :)
shit jonny, you bring up a lot of memories :) i'm 51 now, 20 years in indonesia... when i was 8 years old we moved from our rat-infested shit hole in a shitty area of rotterdam called Hondertienmorgen (now an area for immigrants i hear they're tearing it down now) we moved to a small town just outside Rotterdam called Krimpen a/d Ijssel. We moved into a real house smack in the middle of super hard-core protestant Christians, the types that walk to church a few times on sundays all dressed in black, they're called "black socks" in Holland. My youth was fighting them, every day, anywhere, in school, outside playing 'cause we city folks were not accepted there and I can't explain how happy I was when we moved again, again to a bit better house.... I ran away from home when I was 15, living in squadhouses in Rotterdam with all the other punx, this is '79, '80 and when everybody around me started dying from either heroine or violence, usually knife fights I said fuck this and moved back to my parents where I spend 4 wonderful years, just working, buying records and smoking weed.... At 20 I moved back to Rotterdam, quit my job, started selling weed and hash and did very well till my partner ripped me off... Then worked for some 5 years as a graphic designer and in '91 after breaking up with my longtime girlfriend I said fuck it! again and started working in greenhouses all over Holland growing weed, crazy adventures, heavy shit, carrying a 9 milimeter Baretta, I was working mostly with Feyenoord hooligans back then, crazy crazy crazy shit, if I was not working there I was working as a bouncer in cafe The Rhythm in Rotterdam, I had years and years of jiu jitsu training behind me then... In '95 I burned down my house, had a small weed garden upstairs, 800 plants, and one of the lamps short-circuited, got me 2,5 on probation, any kind of problem and I would get 5 years inside, so that's how I wounded up in Indonesia (there was more craziness but I'm not going into that).... So... I left a lot out, but being called bourgeoise really made my day today, very very funny :)
Blimey! I didn't expect a Thesis lol!...ok ok, you're not bourgeois......just Nouveau Riche maybe.....under the definition of 'Bourgeois', if you own property you are in fact 'Bourgeois', but you're only accidentally categorised that way, so we can ignore that.
Me, after declaring property as theft for decades, i now own a property,basically because its cheaper.....i must have lost my mind. I blame those television programmes on living in France...i was brainwashed. But at least i'm not Nouveau Riche!(LOL)
Hey my father was in Nazi Prison camps too! The soviets saved his life....but we didn't live in a shack, just a standard proletariat's dwelling in the UK. He hated the French,now here I am, and i've still got his ashes in a cupboard downstairs. He wanted 'em scattered in northern england in the River Tees....maybe one day?
I fancy running away to Indonesia, whats life like there?
Well... you certainly should scatter those ashes in the River Tees! Maybe turn it into some sort of pilgrimage....
When Proudhon wrote his Property Is Theft most of were still serfs, if not we were toiling in some factory, dying before we were 25. Always liked Proudhon and even more so Mikhail Bakunin even though I was with the communist punks for quiet a while there :)
Oh those days!!!
Shit, the only time I ever had some decent money (if you can call it that) was after a good harvest in the greenhouse. Me and my buddy S. were working there, around Apeldoorn, '93, and my friend had to go so I was there all by myself, and of course that's when at around 3 or 4 in the morning a van drove up and a bunch of guys wearing ski masks came out, so I ran to them, screaming, in my underwear and one sneaker armed only with a torch, and they took off... The guys I worked for were so happy about that that they gave me a nice bonus. So later, back home in Rotterdam I'm sitting there looking at all that money. I don't really remember, around 6000 euro's (guilders back then, and I'm thinking, what can I do with this? I had a drum kit, I had a good 4 track cassette recorder and I just couldn't come up with anything, so it was all spend on partying and cd's and vinyl, Up In Smoke and Up My Nose to use a Cheech & Chongism....
Life in Indonesia... Well... It's not for the faint hearted I guess, I love it here but then I'm a total music freak and the music here is astonishing, it really is. I live in a small village in the mountains outside Bandung and all you hear here all day long are the marvelous sounds of gamelan, jaipongan, ketuk tilu, tarawangsa... Not to mention the incredibly huge punk/underground/diy scene... In some ways you're very, very free here, the eternal outsider and it's really the Wild West here, cops are just uniformed robbers really, in other ways, so much is forbidden here, no Dutch coffeeshops here and that's one of the first things I tell backpackers who stay at the guesthouse me and my wife are running in downtown Bandung, don't do drugs in Indonesia, specially not in Bali, I won't make this too long but I've got plenty of horror stories when it comes to that, unfortunately from personal experience too.... I do voluntary work every now and then, for handicapped kids, I sometimes make field trips, to some of the poorest areas here in West-Java and elsewhere, I sometimes see things.... can't even describe it.....
But if you're ever coming for a holiday here, you've got yourself a guide :)
River Tees here I come!.....personally I was more from the Nihilistic/misanthropic end of the Punk Pie. Once i started earning lots of money under Thatcher did i start to become a lefty.....now that unpleasant episode has died, I once again have returned to my Nihilistic/misanthropic roots....and its very comfortable there.
Was also very straight-edged,loved to preach against drugs,alcohol, and free love from my righteous pedestal....still do, except i drink alcohol and am a male slag now.
May well pass by Indonesia wayin a year or so,and fear not, I won't do any drugs.
Will unleash volume three of Prutsers onto an unsuspecting public very soon by the way.
Cheers,
JZ
Hah :) I tried contacting Jan, he still has one Prutsers tape that got lost on my side with some amazing songs. Alas, there was a very small bit of contact but.... that was months ago and I haven't heard from him since, asked him if he was ok 'cause I heard from quiet a few people he wasn't, might have ticked him off a bit, I don't know, too bad because I would love, love, love to hear those songs again, songs like "The Time-machine Without Benzine"....
Ah well....
Never really understood the whole straight-edge thingie, the ones I knew who were into that were either rather busy with ehrrr, Christianity or deeply involved in rubber-fetishes and the penetration of non-living things :)
Straight edge....mmmm....well from my angle Christianity was akin to Hippie,lots of sexual abuse, banging on about love and full of hypocrisy so no thanks.... rubber was too pro-fashion.... necrophilia was a nod towards satanism, which is another form of Christianity, so thats a no no.
Basically it was all about being a pure Punk....i'm more punk than you sort of thing...old style elitism. Rejecting everything that went before,fashion,drug abuse, promiscuous sexual behaviour, and basically not being ROCK...Subway Sect and Josef K seemed to embody it for me rather than Minor Threat...too rocky and aggressive.
I'm ok now.
Hope you get to recover the lost recordings of Prutsers.....my fav track is still 'Nice'n'Sleazy'.
A former girlfriend way back got me into reiki for a while. Wasn't for me, full moon parties in the forest and people giving reiki to trees isn't really my thing. Neither were those Baghwan/Osho parties she took me too, the dancing was ok but listening to cassettes from "The Master" and laughing out loud on cue didn't do it for me either....
Fighting the former Brazilian Capoeira champion was a trip though, he kicked my ass, broke my nose, I was bleeding all over the place and grinning, my most beautiful fight ever :)
I send my former Prutsers mate another email but I'm not holding my breath... Recording a few records for my blog, when that's done I'll jump into this box full of old tapes and cd's, maybe I'll find some more Prutsers, If I do I'll send 'em to you pronto ok!
I went to a Bunga Bunga party, 'nuf said about that, then a Zenga Zenga, which was frightening, then I broke my nose(among many other things) in a car crash.....i wasn't grinning, but strangely enjoyed Hospital.Especially disturbing was the part when the nurse grabbed my penis and shoved it into a piss bottle, and ordered me to have a piss,...or else! (the threat of further x-rays and tests)....eventually i provided a litre of urine for her. If that isn't love I dunno what is?
I eagerly await any possible discoveries you may find in your box.
Cheers
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Got an email from Jan and here it is, the lost Prutsers cassette!!!!
I really think this was one of our better cassettes, laughing my ass off listening to it, hope you can download it, if not I'll upload it again ok:
https://www.wetransfer.com/downloads/37bcc13e529183ee1714c9fc7742334720160903042810/39194a39726618effe8f7625ca1f740420160903042810/d98085
Hello,
Downloaded sucessfully.....listening now,...this is entertainment.
The only version of 'Love is the Drug' i ever listened to in its entirety.
Truly unique stuff.
This is Prutsers Volume 3 i reckon?
jep, volume 3, i think we were at "our best" at that time :)
songs like nice and sleazy and mijn naam is hector the computer were all made by Jan by himself, back then he was really good with the old commodor 64 (were they called that?)....
ontevereden met het heden was composeed by robo, most of the songs is me singing.... einstuck von mir was all me, recorded at home, i'm having loads of fun listening to all this, most of these songs i had forgotten about :)
wow... this is great....
I also found a whole bunch of crazy pictures from us, i will send those too ok, maybe some of them are useful for your prutsers post....
here ya go, pictures from zeh prutzas:
http://www34.zippyshare.com/v/J38ZW85q/file.html
oh... and a new video by english rapper one10% who is living in kuala lumpur, malaysia, music made by me.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D-gRn_8v5k
Well, I also found this, this was all recorded at Jan's house before the Prutsers, I might've send you some of these songs before, the sound quality is pretty bad, coming from a very, very old tape... I wasn't involved with any of this, this is all Jan and Robo, when Robo was living for a while in Jan's house... I started living in that area maybe a year later or so and that's when we started the whole Prutsers thing.... Hope you'll enjoy some of this total madness :)
http://www90.zippyshare.com/v/k6lstvzV/file.html
enjoy!
Thanks Jonny. I was looking for something else (Wilko Johnson's Solid Senders) and decided to have a browse. I was at this gig and most of the other Costello gigs in Leicester during this period. Great memories.
Cheers
Andy
Hey mr. wonderful, do yous gots this un? Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Rockpalast 6-15-78? You are a hero, of course.
rockpalast 78:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/9kfnhfcygmllg58/Rockpalast_%252778.rar/file
Thanks. This is a really excellent listen.
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