Watch all the far out episodes of New Wave Theater from the 1980s

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Originally published at: Watch all the far out episodes of New Wave Theater from the 1980s | Boing Boing

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Hah! My band NEEF was on this show. I don’t see us on the synopses of the individual shows. We may have been cut out since we were objectively terrible and did not do very well that night. We were an early proponent of noise and “improvised” everything. Even punks hated us. (not that surprising, really.) It was very much a “scene” show and if the audience wasn’t behind you you didn’t get much attention. You got one song and one chance to perform it. Then Ivers came out and interviewed you. We were unprepared for that (imagine!) Listening now to these performances makes me realize just how conservative the punks were musically and totally driven by an adolescent desire to be accepted by the outsider insiders. An alternative mainstream. Boring. (Sorry.) Thanks for the memories!

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That is awesome! As someone who was coming of age around that time, the whole punk schtick of hating everything really cheesed me off.
I liked The Clash, but as soon as they sold more than 4 records they weren’t cool anymore. Also, refusing to accept UB40 as being anything more than formulaic reggae covers band got me into several quite heated arguments, because there was a time when they were the absolute darlings of the punks.

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I mean, Present Arms is legit, dude.

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That was basically Joe Pop-o-pie’s rational for focusing his early live act on doing a 30 minute punk version of Truckin’!

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Some portions (reruns) of it were still on Night Flight in the summer of '86 – which is why I knew about it at all. I recall it was sort of an anthology episode, i.e. “tonight we look back at New Wave Theater…” I think there may have been one or two “Best of” collections on VHS. This is actually the bit that stuck with me:

I believe this (summer of '86) was within a few weeks of 120 Minutes starting on MTV, and IRS’s The Cutting Edge would’ve still been airing.

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