My Seventies Music

Tag: Video Quality

  • The Scavengers – “Mysterex” And “True Love”

    New Zealand punk band The Scavengers

    The Scavengers were one of the first New Zealand punk bands in the late Seventies (along with The Suburban Reptiles), most well known locally for their songs “Mysterex” and “True Love”.

    The band was actually formed pre-punk in the mid Seventies by graphic design students at the Auckland Technical Institute and renamed The Scavengers in 1977 when the punk movement started.

    They contributed the two tracks mentioned to a compilation album called “AK79”.
    At first the only video of “True Love” played by The Scavengers I could find was from an “AK79 Show” in 2008 where the sound quality was so bad I didn’t want to inflict it on you. Meanwhile I just found another, shorter one that is bearable (just!) and gives an idea of the original energy.

    In 1979 The Scavengers moved to Melbourne, Australia and again renamed themselves The Marching Girls in 1980.

    I was thinking The Scavengers were the punk trio I engaged for a free rock festival at the Massey University Student Orientation in Palmerston North in March 1980, but unless they came back to New Zealand before renaming themselves, I guess it wasn’t them. Have to do some digging to find the answer to that one.

    Anyway, here is “Mysterex” from 1978:

    In this clip band member at the time Brendan Perry (who now does VERY different things) describes the background to “Mysterex”:

    As mentioned, here is “True Love” at “AK79 Revisited” in 2008 (the other video of the same performance says The Scavengers…):

    Actually, I will give you the option of watching the other video if you like, which includes two girls jumping on the stage and has better video quality (but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the sound!):

    And here is The Scavengers song “True Love” played by the band’s reincarnation Marching Girls some years later, when it was used in the soundtrack of a film called “Dogs In Space”:

    Tamed down a bit by this time… think I prefer the Scavengers version.

    Paul

  • Puhdys -“Ikarus”, “Ikarus II” and “Mephisto”

    I first came across the East German band Puhdys back in either 1978 or 1979 on a trip to Germany (before I lived there) and bought their album “Pudhys 5”, with tracks like “Ikarus II”, “Mephisto” and “Wilde Jahre” (Wild Years).

    Pudhys, who were heavily influenced by artists like Deep Purple and Uriah Heep, were the first “Ostrock” or East German rock band allowed to visit West Germany.

    As you can imagine, there is not a lot of video footage from back then, so I have mainly only been able to find film of them playing in more recent times – it appears they are still going strong.

    This is “Ikarus”, live in 2006, I’m not sure if it’s the same song as “Ikarus II” on the album I have, it’s a bit hard to tell (this is just music without lyrics):

    Here is a live version of “Ikarus II” from 1993 (takes a while to get going and the video quality is not that great):

    This version of “Mephisto”, also on “Puhdys 5”, is the studio version:

    Actually I did turn up a couple of videos from the Seventies after all, but I found them a bit boring so I’ll leave it at that and play the record again some time to find the ones I do like.

    Paul

    P.S. On coming back to this page some time later and playing the first Ikarus video, I have now actually found a live version of “Ikarus” from 1979 (audio only sorry) that brings across the feeling of hard rock behind the Iron Curtain when this music first came out:

1770118074