A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
Video: Galaxie 500 at Subterania - 27th June 1990
OK this is a follow up to the Substack post I made last week… and hopefully this is all correct and accurate but it has all become a bit of a muddle.
About nine months into the my record collection series I decided that I should be including the DVDs and VHSs I have in my collection - the one issue with this is that since the move to Whitley Bay we haven’t had a VHS machine. That was thankfully resolved at the weekend when I picked up a very fancy Hitachi player from a charity shop for a fiver!
This was, I hope, going to clear up some confusions and uncertainties caused by problematic or illegible labels - specifically around Galaxie 500’s live videos of shows in the UK that has become very muddled.
- The Manchester show (26th June 1990) had been shared incorrectly as the Subterania show from the following night.
- I knew the Subterania had been videoed because I had failed to by a copy at Camden Market the following weekend!
- The Subterania show had been shared on YouTube but incorrectly claimed it was from the Camden Falcon in February - this was obviously wrong for three reasons:
- It contained songs from This Is Our Music that I don’t believe were being played by the band as early as February,
- It was filmed from a balcony which the Falcon (to my memory) didn’t have - being a pub back room!
- It’s virtually, or exactly, the same setlist as the Manchester show from June.
- This video then went AWOL.
So, with my shiny new Hitachi I started going through the VHSs - I had one that was labelled “Galaxie 500 - Live in London” and I wrote about it in the series back in September of last year - this was one of the tapes I’d sent to Damon when they were looking for material for the DVD release. It was returned with the words “Same as Rough Trade tape” scrawled on the label. This led me to believe that it was the ULU show that eventually turned up on the DVD. But it wasn’t.
This seems to be the AWOL live at The Subterania show - I guess it was decided to include just one London show on the DVD set, so opted for the ULU - perhaps for reasons of quality - or maybe just because it was from later in the band’s life than most of the other included live sets.
Either way - this video rather surprisingly doesn’t currently seem to be online (unless I just can’t find it), so I’ve digitised it and made it available, It isn’t the complete show, it’s missing the beginning, and the end… you can hear them just about to go into Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste when it cuts out. The angle is great because you get a much better view of Damon than is usual!
I can’t categorically prove that it’s the Subterania show, although I’m pretty confident that it’s not any of their other London shows, but I guess it may not be London at all? If anyone has any insights I’d love to hear them.
Obviously if I had a better memory I’d know since, if this is that show, I was in the room!
The quality is not that great, particularly the sound, although I’ve done the best I can with my very limited skills. But, as a record of what is (despite my poor memory of it) the best show I was ever at it’s not that bad,,, if it even is that show :-),
Read the Substack post that explains just how much of an impact this show had on my life!