Yet, as Alan Vega explained to me in a recent interview, just a little while later everything changed. The ugliness of the crowd seeps from the speakers, the angry booing and the football chants doing battle with Vega and Rev as they struggle valiantly on against the room of furious Belgians. Yet at the end of the gig, amidst the angry shouts, applause can be heard.Īt the heart of the box set is the recording of Suicide’s gig in Brussels on June 16th, 1978 that first saw light of day on the infamous 23 Minutes Over Brussels bootleg.

'This is awful', another mutters within recording distance of the microphone. 'Get off' shouts one punter before the show has even begun. You can see how the chirpy drum beats and distracted melody of 'Cheree' (introduced as 'a love song from New York City') really got up the noses of the crowd at London MusicMachine on July 24th, 1978. Sometimes the songs are entirely unrecognisable. The drum mechanicals crackle and fizz as sodium scattered into water. The organ is played as if by a demented geriatric during a blitz, stained glass and icons falling about him. These are discordant, terrifying pieces of confrontational music and performance art – Vega’s presence, as a psychotic, motorbike chain-wielding skid row Elvis, is as tangible as if this were an HD DVD. It was built, largely, from the fragmented sets of cheap drum machine and organ noise with which Martin Rev and Alan Vega antagonised New Yorkers from their earliest shows back in 1971.īut in these recordings of 13 concerts between 19 there’s no sign of an act slipping into a comfort zone of playing the album after finally achieving some degree of recognition. But it took years for that stunning record to see the light of day. Suicide's debut album is, in studio form, a concise attack, seven vicious tracks of streamlined and hissing electronic malevolence, the moment rock & roll was reinvented for a cold, hard, computer age. They remain a warts and all artefact of Suicide's struggle against at best indifference, at worst, outright hostility. These recordings, made on a simple hand-held device, have not been tinkered with in any way. What's so thrilling about Suicide's ambitious five disc box set, then, is the purity of the presentation. A release of the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, for instance, would surely be accompanied with the five hundred screaming voices of those who weren't there but claim to be edited in on top, and a chattering clockwork toy of Paul Morley.

It's rare to find live albums from canonical acts that don’t come swathed in mythology or creaking under the weight of their own self importance.

Suicide 23 minutes over brussels