The recent post of The Damned's covers gig in Manchester, promoting their tribute to Brian James, 'Not Like Everybody Else', put me in mind of 'Naz Nomad and the Nightmares', which in turn got me thinking about the Purple Helmets. To be honest, I don't think about the Helmets a great deal. It's not that I don't like them at all, for sure, they introduced me to some sixties material that I have always considered to be brilliant and perhaps if it were not for this side-project of JJ and Dave's I may not have been exposed to, certainly not as the 19 year old as I was at the time. The timing of their emergence was perfect since The Stranglers were taking it slow at the time in the run up to extensive '10' activity. The great thing for a number of us who met at the time was that this was our first opportunity to see these musical heroes (i.e. JJ and Dave) at close quarters, as opposed to in cavernous venues such as the Hammersmith Odeon and Brighton Centre in my case.
The band were active between 1986 and 1989 but most of their activity was concentrated in 1988. This short career was kicked off in France, down Brittany way with a gig in the city of Rennes. By 1988 they had nailed down their set which was aligned with the track list of the debut album 'Rise Again', but this late 1986 set contains some songs that didn't get recorded (to the best of my knowledge). In there are 'Fire', 'The Beat Goes On', 'Never Knew' and 'Worried About You'. 'Fire' is the Crazy World of Arthur Brown classic and 'The Beat Goes On' is a Sonny Bono composition recorded by Sonny and Cher. As to 'Never Knew' and 'Worried About You' in a brief hunt I have not been able to pin them down. Any ideas?
For some reason there are a couple of tracks of a second or two and I have not edited them out but they do not impact on the recording, just the track numbering.
FLAC: https://we.tl/t-nGWpI2VoPj
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-lpYHs3VlsE
No comments:
Post a Comment