Howard Devoto’s Magazine Live Performance Back In 1978

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No sex, no drugs, just rock, mid-tempo and symphonic, singer Howard Devoto’s band Magazine in a sober yet hypnotic live performance of “Motorcade”.

Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley decided to start a band, the Buzzcocks, after seeing the Sex Pistols in 1976, their collaboration ending, after the Buzzcocks’ first EP, “Spiral Scratch”. Devoto displayed a chilling psychological perspective in songs such as “Boredom”, “Shot By Both sides”, “Motorcade”, “The Light Pours Out Of Me” and “Permafrost”.

In the highly dramatic “Motorcade” a high ranking official lives in splendid isolation from the crowd as he passes through the crowd, the motorcade that escorts the limousine he sits in continuing his journey for reasons of security in spite of injured onlookers at the boulevard.

I have always imagined this scene as taking place in the capital of some latin american dictatorship:

In the back of his car

In the null and void he sees

The man at the center of the motorcade

Can choose between coffee and tea

In the boulevard

The motorcade holds sway

At the end of the seventies there were a number of art student bands such as Wire, Gang Of Four, and 999. Magazine easily stood out from those. Highly influential and highly recommended.