Cabaret Voltaire - Live At The Hacienda 83/86 DVD

Advantages: Well, the live show's quite good
Disadvantages: But music DVDs are only really for devoted fans, right?

...The product: Just to clarify (though it should be clear from the category) Depeche Mode originally released 101 both as a live CD and video back in the 1980s. This review refers to the re-release of the video (and some extra material) on DVD in November 2003. For all their detractors, Depeche Mode have not only lasted out over twenty years in the music business, but done a lot better at cracking America than most British artists since (with notable exceptions perhaps only of Bush and the Spice Girls). Not as experimental as earlier synth pioneers like Gary Numan or Cabaret Voltaire, yet always retaining a touch more sophistication than more pop-oriented contemporaries such as Duran Duran and (post-Dare) Human League, the ‘Mode somehow found a magic formula between the two. In their early days of Vince ‘Erasure’ Clarke inspired synth... Read review

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Advantages: A concise snapshot of the enigmatic mancunian pioneers
Disadvantages: Was made during a low point in their career

...Gretton, the heart and soul of the band, Factory, and The Hacienda. The music & promo clips, edited down in the broadcast version are mostly extended to full length. This has the effect of breaking up the documentary and rather ruining the continuity and pace. It would have been better to leave the full clips as DVD extras. Oh, and of course, the clips you want to see in full (Early live TV appearances on Granada TV etc) are cut short. The amazing clip of Joy Division playing Transmission on BBC2 Something Else is given a cheesy monochrome tint (it would have looked much more effective in its stark, Colour Videotape version), and is cut short by an annoying intrusion by Bono of all people, just as Ian Curtis is about to let rip...how ironic. The film trades on the myths surrounding the band, and masks and obscures as much as it reveals... Read review

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Advantages: Great singing and dancing
Disadvantages: Bonus footage is a little tedious

...of technology at a knockdown price. I ended up in the DVD section, to be more precise the DVD 'we are desperately trying to get rid of this' bin. There I found Cabaret. My reasoning for buying this was Andrew is German, Cabaret is set in Berlin, its only £1.50. Cabaret was originally a collection of short stories by Christopher Isherwood. It was then produced as a play called 'I am Camera' then turned into a broadway musical where it was renamed 'Cabaret' and finally Bob Fosse brought it to the screen where it won eight Acadamy Awards. A very young Liza Minelli stars as 'Sally Bowles', an American who has moved to 1930s Berlin and is performing as a singer in the Kit Kat Klub. Michael York plays the male lead of a gay Englishman 'Brian Roberts' who moves to Germany in search of fun. Liza and Michael share rooms together and live a hedonistic... Read review

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