My last live show of the 1970s was an even smaller and more intimate gig than The Jam’s Toronto concert seven months earlier, featuring a trio of the city’s then most-prominent punk bands: NFG, The Regulators, and Sinners.
I’ll be discussing how important our local scene—but also local music scenes in general—were and are, especially to and for marginalized people and communities.
1979 was the year I started seeing local live music in bars such as The Cedar Lounge and The York, something that would become akin to “breathing” in my life during the 80s and early 90s. These counterpoints to a local conservative milieu were an inspiration and creative oxygen for many outsiders within and around the municipality, not to mention providing an essential social service and network.
These nights out and this show pointed to where things in my life were going to be going.
Stay tuned for underage drinking, musical lifelines, and escaping before the police turned up.
NEXT PODCAST: Dublin’s Boomtown Rats surfaced at the London Gardens in March of 1980: my first live show of the new decade.
They had been an obsession of mine over the previous 2.5 years since I had picked up their debut 45, the charging and furious “Lookin’ After No. 1,” on a trip to the UK in ’77. At this point, they were three albums in, superstars in the UK, and just coming off an international smash (except in the US), “I Don’t Like Mondays,” which went Top 10 here in Canada.
I kicked off a boatload of ‘80s gig-going in this freezing arena on a bitterly cold night (the bolt opposite of the Bob Seger steambath at this venue in 1978… so much for insulation), warmed up by an engaged and energetic Rats fronted by an animated Bob Geldof (the “Sir” and Live Aid were years in the future).
My pal “Special Guests”—then of London, Ontario, now of Leeds, UK—who you first met in Episode 3 on The Ramones, returns with his recollections and reflections on the evening.
Stay tuned for onstage pyjamas, photo awkwardness, and how our present shapes the memories of our past.
(EP 14, no.6) The Fine Art of Surfacing: The Boomtown Rats with B.B. Gabor, London Gardens, London, Ontario, Canada, Wednesday March 19, 1980 + A Meditation on the Amorphous Nature of Memory & Why the Present Is Always in the Past
(Get a sneak preview by reading the original 2010 blog entry here.)
Coming in December