The Way They Were - Punk & The New Wave 1976-1978

I was out of town but now I'm back and more unfocused than ever. But all that's gonna change because school starts tomorrow and except for the fact that I have to get up at the ungodly hour of...I don't even want to get into that here—I'll be home alone for a few hours every day, just me and my thoughts. Alone, here with no one to share space with. Only the slowly moving molecules of the Indian Summer, flowing steadily alongside my inert form as I blog away.

On vacation, I thought of writing about how I had reached an epiphany and would no longer be online in order to get in touch with the real world in a meditative and contemplative fashion. But then I would write: JUST KIDDING! I'll blog to the death! And then you, the mysterious and perhaps nonexistent reader would chuckle and off we'd go into some YouTube world of 1976, featuring young Elvis Costello singing "Watching The Detectives" in the Granada TV documentary "The Way They Were - Punk & The New Wave" featuring Tony Wilson, everyone's favorite new-music pioneering promoter/producer, back in the Manchester day.

Oh, speaking of which: my former pen-pal-of-the-80s-now-Facebook-friend, David Nichols, steered me toward this Dangerous Minds' remembrance of Tony Wilson and this fine documentary of the British music scene, pre-80s. There's so much goodness here. Check out Tony's picks of the day:

Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Iggy Pop, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Penetration, Blondie, Fall, Jam, Jordan, Devo, Tom Robinson Band, Johnny Thunder, Elvis Costello, XTC, Jonathan Richman, Nick Lowe, Siouxie & the Banshees, Cherry Vanilla & Magazine... (tape runs out—remember tape?)

You'll no doubt want to check out the interview and performance of Iggy Pop starting at 13:20, Blondie's first TV performance at 32:00, and that very fine rendition of Watching the Detectives by a very youthful Elvis Costello and The Attractions at 45:55. But it's all good; it's all evocative—the scene and the capturing of it on television and now online. NEVER FORGET. What was I talking about? Here you go.