"live at the Vortex"
Year: 1977
Country: UK
City: London
Label: Nems
Format: CD, LP
Tracks: 12
Time: 30 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Punk Rock
In October, bands had been recorded at the Vortex Club for a proposed live album along the lines of the first ‘Live At the Roxy WC2’ record. The record featured the Maniacs, Suspects, Wasps, Neo, Art Attacks, Bernie Torme and Mean Street who were all regular players at the Vortex and Roxy. Paying the bands virtually nothing and holding them to ludicrously disadvantaged contracts, Miller and Draper raked in even more from Punk and its naive bands.
John Miller (Vortex Manager) I even made more money out of a privately produced album ‘Live At The Vortex’, featuring the most tuneless bands of our time. It must have been one of the worst records ever made, but it was hailed as a breakthrough in ‘New Wave Punk’. It was all.
The record was universally panned by the music weeklies smelling a cheap cash in. Comparisons with the Roxy album did it no favours either. Where one was a vibrant affair featuring crowd noise and conversation, heaps of photos of bands and clubgoers alike and a fairly detailed run down of the bands the Vortex album had nothing.
There was also the curiously sterile atmosphere of the recording and some controversy over whether the 'Live' tag was actually justified. Following a review by Jon Savage an irate Jesse Lynn Dean from the Wasps replied to sounds in a letter.
...that these live recordings were made with plastic glasses and other objects being thrown through the air while some of the audience were trying to take a singer's microphone from him.
This letter prompted another letter from an attendee at the gigs... continue to reading HERE
