Tag Archives: brixtonacademy

Level 42: Rockpalast 40 Years On

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It’s not surprising that a lot of Level 42 fans cite 1983 as the peak of the band’s career.

Messrs. King, Lindup, Gould and Gould had just released their first UK top 10 album Standing In The Light (and arguably their greatest single ‘The Sun Goes Down’) but were still very much holding on to their jazz/funk/rock roots, despite Polydor Records wanting more hits and less instrumentals.

The band were also still very much an in-your-face live act in 1983, a year off adding sequencers, drum machines and a much more commercial sheen to their sound. They toured Standing extensively during the autumn, including a dynamite show filmed 40 years ago today in Bochum, Germany, recently released on DVD.

It’s Exhibit A for those who love the early days of the band. And, for Level fans like movingtheriver who only came onboard around 1985, discovering the broadcast was gold dust. Also it’s not every day you see a bass player laying down deliciously funky lines while dancing like Max Wall (at around 4:30 below) and telling the fans to ‘Clap, you sods!’.

It’s interesting though that Mark King himself to this day strongly questions the live potency of the band during this era. In the March 1992 issue of Bass Player magazine, he came out with all guns blazing, discussing their November 1983 ‘Whistle Test On The Road’ appearance at the Brixton Ace (now the Academy):

‘I dug up an old one of us doing a live BBC programme… I thought, “Oh yeah, they were the good old days”. So I put on the video – and it was crap. The audience were fine, the lights were fine, the sound was fine. The band was crap. It was just so unsure, so uncertain…’

So which Level do you prefer? The choice is yours… In any case, it’s exciting to report that they’re currently in the middle of a UK tour celebrating 40 years of ‘The Sun Goes Down’.

Further reading: ‘Level 42: Every Album, Every Song’.

Run DMC & Beastie Boys @ Brixton Academy: 30 Years Ago Today

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1987 was the year hip-hop went mainstream in the UK. Or at least it felt like that at my school.

A few of the ‘cool’ kids were nicking the VW signs popularised by Mike D of the Beastie Boys (a major tabloid cause célèbre) and friends’ parents were even playing Licensed To Ill at parties.

Public Enemy, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Eric B & Rakim and Salt-N-Pepa were the dog’s b****cks, graffiti culture was getting big and DJ Tim Westwood was fast becoming a household name, thanks to his progression from Kiss FM to Capital.

This excellent, recently-unearthed BBC documentary handily incorporates all of the above:

Two legendary gigs seem to epitomise London’s love affair with classic hip-hop in ’87: Run DMC & Beastie Boys’ notorious double-header at the Brixton Academy – the first night of which happened 30 years ago today – and also the Def Jam package tour which checked into the Hammersmith Odeon later in the year.

As the late great Shaw Taylor used to say on ‘Police 5’, were you there? If you were (I wasn’t), let me know your memories of these seminal London gigs.