The Observer, Classic Concert DVD Givaways

kinaldo

For the next two weeks, The Observer will give away classic live DVDs by Prince and Talking Heads, two of the greatest ever concert movies . What else made our musical top 10?

Caspar Llewellyn Smith
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer

Ever since the arrival of the camera phone, the experience of gig-going has changed. It's not simply that fans will insist on waving them above their heads in preference to the distinctly more rock'n'roll cigarette lighter; it's that after the event, there will inevitably be grainy footage immediately available on YouTube.

For something better than the shaky view from Row Z, the live concert film remains a box office draw. Next weekend and the one after, this newspaper is giving away two classics: Prince dazzling in concert in 1987 in Sign O' The Times; and Talking Heads' 1984 masterpiece Stop Making Sense, which still deserves to top any list of the genre's best-ever. It almost sounds heretical, but both show off the artists' brilliance to better effect than any of their studio albums.

From Elvis and the Beatles to Eminem in 8 Mile, there has long been a tradition of pop stars acting in movies built around their stage personas; and there have been celebrated music biopics, such as Milos Forman's multi-Oscar winning Amadeus, Taylor Hackford's recent Ray and Anton Corbijn's forthcoming film about Joy Division's Ian Curtis, Control. At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month,Todd Haynes won acclaim for I'm Not There, in which six actors play Bob Dylan. One of the 'Dylans', Cate Blanchett, was named best actress. But while that approach might take us closer to the real Dylan than any other, surely nothing brings us nearer to his music than footage of the singer in performance.

When a publicist told me that a forthcoming film of Sigur Ros in concert lasted two hours, there were certainly doubts: would anyone be prepared to stand in line with a bucket of popcorn to catch a documentary about four Icelandic post-rockers staging a series of quirky gigs in their homeland? But rather than proving to be the cinematic equivalent of watching a glacier melt, time flew by.

Likewise with Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light, originally scheduled for a cinema release this month but now pushed back to next year. Other than a brief segment, in which the harassed director is hilariously given the run-around by Mick Jagger, the film simply details a Rolling Stones gig at the Beacon Theatre in New York last September. What results is quite the equal, in my experience, of catching the band in the flesh; and from the back at Twickenham Stadium, you certainly don't get to see that flesh in all its weathered glory. Unless, of course, you're just staring at the giant video screens; in which case, you might as well have stayed at home.

Scorsese told the Observer Music Monthly last month: 'I was trying to figure out a narrative structure, then I abandoned that... it's really about performance.'

The Stones have form in this area. In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard took film of a group of counterculture warriors discussing the imminent revolution and yoked it to footage of the band in the studio slowly working up 'Sympathy for the Devil' for his movie that later took that name. In 1970, the Maysles brothers documented the band's ill-starred concert at Altamont for their compelling Gimme Shelter.

Albert and David Maysles were serious documentary-makers, interested in the significance of teen hysteria, and in 1964 the pair had captured the Beatles' first trip across the Atlantic in What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA. Working in the same vein was DA Pennebaker, whose Don't Look Back, filmed in 1965 and released two years later, remains the definitive portrait of Bob Dylan at that time. Neither of those films makes our list of 10 classic concert films, if only because their merit is derived in large part from what you see offstage; likewise Scorsese's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, but not his timeless Last Waltz.

The film-makers' approaches vary; what makes each film great is, ultimately, the greatness of the performers in question. There's nothing wrong per se with Michael Winterbottom's 2004 film 9 Songs, in which live footage of contemporary indie acts is interspersed with graphic scenes of sexual intercourse; it's simply that you expect a bit more spunk from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and co. Likewise The Cramps: Live at Napa State Mental Hospital - an extraordinary record of the psychobilly band's gig at one of California's biggest mental institutions in 1978, but something which pales on repeated viewing.

Not the Led Zep flick The Song Remains The Same? Or Girls Aloud Live? Ah, but then some choices must remain deeply personal.

· Caspar Llewellyn Smith is editor of Observer Music Monthly

Best concert films (in no particular order)

Jazz on a Summer's Day

Bert Stern's 1960 documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival features performances from the Thelonious Monk Trio, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and more, but it left its mark because of its impressionistic approach to proceedings. Stern (a fashion photographer later celebrated for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe) mixed shots of the musicians with images of Newport Harbour and Narragansett Bay, and white-sailed yachts taking part in trials for the America's Cup. Some crowd scenes were faked, being added subsequently; there was no narration; and fans have been left frustrated - the cameras skip Chuck Berry duck-walking through 'Sweet Little 16', for instance. But what resulted was a visual poem truer than any more conventional film.

Woodstock

Eleven years after that Newport date, the great unwashed converged on Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York for a very different kind of festival. An incredible 120 miles of film footage were shot to document the event but director Michael Wadleigh still missed performances from luminaries such as the Grateful Dead, the Incredible String Band and Ravi Shankar. Never mind: there are hair-raising contributions from Country Joe and the Fish, Sly and the Family Stone, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Jimi Hendrix, whose reconstruction of 'The Star Spangled Banner' remains arguably the hippie era's most powerful artistic statement. Even without any brown acid, the film remains a trip, the inspiration for last year's excellent Glastonbury directed by Julien Temple.

Sign O' The Times

The great rock writer Nik Cohn was unequivocal: he'd seen Jimi Hendrix and James Brown play, but for him the greatest live performer of all time was Prince. Thanks to his run of 21 nights at the O2 Arena, half the country has had the chance to make their own assessment of the purple genius's merits this summer. But few could claim that these shows have touched the heights of his Sign O' the Times tour 20 years ago. The film of those gigs was purportedly taken over four nights in Rotterdam and Antwerp but the quality of the footage meant that reshoots were necessary at Prince's Paisley Park Studios, when a spurious narrative was created through a sequence of inter-song dramatic devices. The viewer couldn't care less when the results were this exhilarating.

Elvis (1968) Comeback Special

This is when the artist who more than any other had created such freedom for the Woodstock generation returned to the fray. The irony was that for the past eight years Elvis had been wasting his talents in Hollywood, and seemed entirely to have lost touch with contemporary rock'n'roll. Colonel Parker, his manager, planned an NBC TV special for Christmas 1968 in which his charge would sing seasonal songs. Instead Elvis and young producer Steve Binder hijacked the concept, and for the key segment in the show placed the King in the company of his favourite old henchmen- musicians such as drummer DJ Fontana. Seated around a small square stage - the performance later proved the inspiration for the MTV Unplugged series - the group tore into old standards such as 'Tiger Man'. Elvis, dressed in black leathers, recovered his mojo; the show proved a huge hit. It remains the quintessential rock'n'roll experience.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

On 3 July 1973, from the stage of London's Hammersmith Odeon, David Bowie announced: 'Not only is this the last show of the tour but it's the last show we'll ever do.' Cue pandemonium, although it was only the Ziggy Stardust character that Bowie was retiring. Director DA Pennebaker had made the seminal Dylan film Dont Look Back in 1965 (released in 1967), its unreleased companion piece Eat the Document, which followed the singer's next UK tour, and also Monterey Pop a chronicle of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Both festival and film proved highly influential when Woodstock rolled around. The Bowie film contained fascinating glimpses of rock's greatest chameleon off-stage, but for most part, Pennebaker, a master of cinema verite, played it straight.

The Last Waltz

Martin Scorsese helped edit the Woodstock film. On Thanksgiving Day 1976 he filmed his old buddies the Band at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, playing their last ever gig after 16 years on the road. Joining them were friends including Ronnie Hawkins, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters and inevitably Bob Dylan. It remains a moving document, with wonderful performances, but also seems to mark the end of a possibly more innocent, certainly more self-indulgent era. Famously, a huge lump of cocaine had to be painstakingly removed, frame by frame, from Neil Young's nostril in the editing. Little wonder that punk was just around the corner.

Stop Making Sense

David Byrne walks on to an empty stage with an acoustic guitar and a portable cassette player and starts playing 'Psycho Killer'. Slowly, the rest of Talking Heads join him - a new member for each new song. There were few audience shots, and the crowd's applause is heard only low in the mix. Director Jonathan Demme's 1984 film - shot over three nights in December 1983 - was like no concert movie ever seen before. The New York band helped define the new-wave era, and seemed like hoary rock apostates. But the beauty of Stop Making Sense is that, unusually, the camera lingered on the musicians in the act of performance, with no close-ups of guitar solos or other such fripperies. Rather than being lost as an artefact of its time, the film remains as fresh as ever, even if that famous suit has long since gone out of fashion.

Buena Vista Social Club

In 1996 American guitarist Ry Cooder found himself in Havana, Cuba, with the producer Nick Gold to make an album with two musicians from Mali and a group of Cubans. Visa problems meant the Malians were a no-show but Cooder pushed ahead anyway, and in six days made a record with veterans who'd once played together at the old Buena Vista Social Club. The rest is history - but history documented in no-frills fashion by Paris, Texas director Wim Wenders, who filmed the full group subsequently playing together in Amsterdam and at New York's Carnegie Hall for his documentary. Suddenly, 'Chan Chan' was a worldwide hit.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Confusingly, this 2005 film by Lian Lunson doesn't feature Leonard Cohen in performance until its very end. Rather, it sees a dozen of his famous fans singing his songs at a 2005 tribute show at the Sydney Opera House: including Beth Orton essaying 'Sisters of Mercy', Jarvis Cocker measuring himself against 'I Can't Forget', and Rufus Wainwright taking up residency of 'Chelsea Hotel No 2'. Meanwhile, there are scenes of Cohen in interview at home in Los Angeles, as gnomic in his utterances as ever: it's through their songwriting that the great artists really reveal themselves.

Heima

In the summer of 2006 Sigur Ros returned to Iceland from a gruelling world tour to play on home soil (much of it volcanic). There were two big open-air shows but otherwise the band travelled to remote locations, often performing in front of only a handful of local people. The resulting film, which will be screened at the BBC Electric Proms next month and also released on DVD, is much like the band: relentlessly quirky, but often staggeringly beautiful.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2174821,00.html

kinaldo

Just a reminder, the classic Sign o the Times today!

Free on DVD this Sunday with The Observer, Prince: Sign 'O' The Times. Widely considered to be one of the best concert movies ever made, Sign 'O' The Times is an explosive mix of the stunning music and exuberant theatrics that have made Prince one of the most exciting stars in the history of pop. Filmed on location during Prince's legendary 1987 tour and at his own studio in Minnesota, and written and directed by Prince himself, the film features 15 classic tracks including Little Red Corvette, Housequake, and Sign 'O' The Times. UK and ROI only.
changeyoursunday.co.uk/prince

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/observermail/0,,1677206,00.html

http://www.changeyoursunday.co.uk/prince/

radiospan

The Talking Heads DVD, Stop Making Sense, is free tomorrow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense