Newsletter June 2000

Here's one from history. Five QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) panoramas were created experimentally by Apple at CBGB’s in 1995, when the application was in beta testing. With the elimination of Apple’s multimedia division in 1997, they might have been lost. But, having assisted in the original sessions, we had them in our archives.

The band on stage is Fossil. Only a couple more photo shoots would have been needed for complete club documentation, but the horror of the bathrooms possibly deterred the otherwise valiant photographer. Much worse than Hilly Kristal’s Mud. The little wiggly pig would have been appalled.

We offer individual panoramas (instead of an integrated file like the QTVR of our studio) for more convenient download. Play them by opening in the QuickTime player, (Windows or Macintosh). All files are about 500K, or about 5 minutes’ download with a typical 56K dial-up modem connection.

Wire were on tour and (shock, horror) were playing their old songs from the late seventies. They started in 1976 as a drums/bass/guitar/vocal lineup, but later lost Robert the drummer and dropped the ‘e’ to become Wir. Jump-started by the offer of a gig at London’s Royal Festival Hall, they returned to their beat combo lineup and embarked on a short revival tour of the US. We enjoyed them at New York’s Irving Plaza and are glad that the grand old New York Times appreciated the gig too.

It would have been easy to interview Wire’s voluble/volatile Colin Newman or Graham Lewis, but they seemed too easy a catch. We snared Bruce Gilbert last year in the Golden Heart, his favorite East London pub. The only honorable option was to catch the quiet man of Wire, drummer Robert Gotobed (his real original surname, which he changed to Grey in a recently hip moment). Words were forthcoming.

Téléphone were innovative French proto-punks in 1977. The making of their first album, now called Anna and one of only three available on import from amazon.com in the US, highlight interesting differences in punk attitudes as the ideas spread outwards from New York and then Britain in the summer of ’76. Mike Thorne adds to his archive of production commentaries, with brazen French misspellings. Since you probably don’t know this CD, we provide streaming audio versions of a couple of tracks. Mp3 or other downloads cannot be offered, but the still-fresh CD is well worth checking out. From 1977, it’s a full generation before BETTY’s Millennium Man, which does spell correctly and is still available in free mp3 format (single and remix versions both).

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