Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 1: Teenage Head

I'm still waiting on help to post the Tom P. for the No Nukes concerts. (See my previous post about that). But I might as well press on and post something else. I have a whole other rock festival ready to go. This time, it's the 1980 Heatwave Festival, held near Toronto, Canada. At the time, it was called "The New Wave Woodstock," although that turned out to be an exaggeration.

According to Wikipedia, "The festival was noteworthy because of the importance of the headliner bands that played, the timing in the evolution of new wave music, and the size of the crowd." It wasn't as big as planned, and the musical act that was supposed to headline the festival, the Clash, didn't show up, although it's not clear why. Theories included that there was visa trouble getting into Canada in time, or they weren't paid enough, or they simply decided it wasn't cool for them to headline a rock festival. Regardless, some other great musical acts did play, including Rockpile, the Pretenders, the Talking Heads, the B-52's, and Elvis Costello. About 100,000 people attended. This was less than expected, and the organizers apparently lost about a million dollars. As a result, it wasn't repeated.

Here's the Wikipedia article on it, if you want to know more:

Heatwave (festival) - Wikipedia

Here are all the acts that performed at the festival, in likely order of their sets:

Vladymir Rogov
Teenage Head
BB Gabor
Holly and the Italians
Rockpile
The Rumour
The Pretenders
The B-52's
Talking Heads
Elvis Costello and the Attractions
The Kings

Out of these, I have the sets for Teenage Head, Rockpile, Pretenders, B-52's, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and most of the set of the Kings. That's all I could find. But the good news is that everything I have is very nice soundboard quality, even though it all is unreleased. 

It's not much loss not to have the Rumour's set, because this concert took place shortly after Graham Parker and his backing band the Rumour parted ways. So the concert was just the backing band, without Parker. They did some concerts like this for about a year, but soon decided it wasn't working, and broke up.

Now, let me focus here on this specific set, which is of the band Teenage Head. I must confess that I'd never heard of them before putting this together, but they're a pleasant surprise for me. They were a Canadian band, and were bigger in Canada than any other country. Wikipedia calls them a punk rock group, but I don't think that's really right. I think it's closer to say they mixed the energy and attitude of punk rock with 1950s rockabilly and 1960s garage rock. The result is much like a high energy pub rock band. (And actually note that many punk rock bands, such as the Clash, originally evolved from being pub rock bands.) The fact that their band name is taken from a song by the Flamin' Groovies is telling, because they also sound a lot like them, complete with heavy influences from the 1950s and 60s. (Note that while most of the songs they played in this festival were originals, they did at least four covers from the 1950s.)

In 1979, they released their first studio album, "Teenage Head." Then in 1980, their second album came out, "Frantic City." I don't know if that came out before or after this concert. Perhaps after, because it contained two hits singles in Canada, "Let's Shake" and "Somethin' on My Mind." The latter one was the bigger hit, but it wasn't played at this festival, so I'm guessing it hadn't been released yet. The "Frantic City" album eventually went platinum in Canada, but was barely noticed everywhere else. They had another hit in 1982, but their popularity went downhill and they broke up a few years after that. 

Here's their Wikipedia entry, if you want to know more:

Teenage Head (band) - Wikipedia

We have Teenage Head to thank for all these recordings, apparently. It seems they brought all the equipment needed to professionally record their set for a possible live album. That live album never happened, but while they were at it, the recording crew recorded all the major acts from the festival too.

It's ironic then that the Teenage Head sounded the worst out of all the sets from this festival, from the recordings I found. There was a curious amount of crowd noise through all the songs. I read an account from someone who attended the festival and heard that bootleg. They said there was no way the crowd was cheering that much. So what probably happened was the cheering was added after the fact from the proposed live album. Luckily, we now live in a time when this kind of mistake can be undone. I used the MVSEP audio editing program to cut the cheering to just during the banter (but at a lower level) and at the ends of songs. I did that to all of the songs, so this set basically sounds about as good as the other ones from the festival.

If you've never heard of Teenage Head but you're into music like Rockpile and the Flamin' Groovies, you should check them out. They were better than I'd expected.

This album is 54 minutes long.

001 talk (Teenage Head)
002 Top Down (Teenage Head)
003 Wild One [Real Wild Child] (Teenage Head)
004 talk (Teenage Head)
005 Picture My Face (Teenage Head)
006 talk (Teenage Head)
007 Some Kinda Fun (Teenage Head)
008 Alimony (Teenage Head)
009 Everybody's Growin' Old (Teenage Head)
010 Let's Shake (Teenage Head)
011 Lucy Potato (Teenage Head)
012 talk (Teenage Head)
013 Brand New Cadillac (Teenage Head)
014 talk (Teenage Head)
015 You're Tearing Me Apart (Teenage Head)
016 talk (Teenage Head)
017 Somethin' Else (Teenage Head)
018 talk (Teenage Head)
019 Kissin' the Carpet (Teenage Head)
020 Disgusteen (Teenage Head)
021 talk (Teenage Head)
022 C'mon Everybody (Teenage Head)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315602/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_01TengeHed.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5ft1yAUd

I couldn't find any photos of the band from this concert. So I decided to use one of the crowd instead. As far as the top section goes, I took that from the official art from the festival, but I adjusted some of the background colors for better contrast. The red lettering of the word "Heatwave" is also exactly the same as the original. Then I found a very similar font for the rest of the text on the cover.