Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 7: The Kings

Here is the seventh and final album from the 1980 Heatwave Festival. This time, it's a set by the Canadian band the Kings.

I must admit that, prior to making this album, I only knew about the Kings for one reason, and that was their song "This Beat Goes On - Switchin' to Glide." This medley was a minor hit in the U.S. in 1980, just missing the Top Forty. It came from their debut album, "The Kings Are Here," which was released in 1980 prior to this concert. Unfortunately, their next album, released in 1981, didn't do so well, and their record company dropped them. They continued on for a long time after that, but their peak of popularity had to be 1980, right around the time of this concert.

That said, they definitely were not popular enough to be the headliners for the festival. True, they were the last act, but some festivals has lesser known musical acts be the last act, allowing some people to leave early instead of having everyone try to leave all at once, right after the biggest name finished their set.

This unreleased recording comes from a very different source than all the other albums I've posted so far. Those were all recorded by professionals who went to the festival to record the Teenage Head set for a possible live set and stayed to record all the other sets by the biggest acts. This instead comes from video footage. Apparently, a separate crew was there to film the acts, but the only acts that gave permission were Teenage Head and the Kings. The video was later posted on YouTube by the Kings' official channel. I converted that to mp3 format. 

The good news is the sound quality is just about as good as the other sets. The bad news is only part of the set was filmed. Apparently, their full set was 55 minutes long. That makes sense, because all the other acts I've posted from this festival had sets of about 55 minutes to an hour, other than Elvis Costello, who was the headliner and played longer. This is only the last 29 minutes. 

But at least that's better than nothing. The Kings don't have an official album from this time period, although they do have one from a few years later, called "Party Live '85."

Another problem is that much of the recording of their hit medley "This Beat Goes On - Switchin' to Glide" was missing. All of "Switchin' to Glide" was there, but the vast majority of "This Beat Goes On" was lost. So, using the version from the "Party Live '85" album, I replaced what was missing. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in the title.

Most of the songs are originals. However, the last one, "California Girls," is a cover of the Beach Boys classic.

This album is 29 minutes long.

124 Borrowing Time (Kings)
125 Don't Let Me Know (Kings)
126 Run Shoes Running (Kings)
127 My Habit (Kings)
128 This Beat Goes On - Switchin' to Glide [Edit] (Kings)
129 Partyitis (Kings)
130 talk (Kings)
131 California Girls (Kings)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315597/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_07_TKngs.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/vC4MKKcz

The cover image comes from this exact concert. It's a screenshot from the video footage. I used the Krea AI to improve the clarity of the image.

Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 6: Elvis Costello

The sixth album from the 1980 Heatwave Festival features Elvis Costello with his backing band at the time, the Attractions.

As I mentioned in my write-up to the first album from this rock festival (the Teenage Head set), the Clash were billed as the headline act, but they cancelled at the last minute for some reason. Elvis Costello became the headliner instead. (However, one more act did come after, as I will explain in the next post.) Costello must have been aware of the problem with the Clash, because after playing the first song he jokingly introduced himself by saying, "Hello, we're the Clash!"

At the time of this concert, Costello's most recent album was "Get Happy!!," released in early 1980. It was his fourth. His next album would be "Trust," released in 1981. Not surprisingly, most of the songs here are from his first four albums. But he did four songs from his still to be released "Trust" album: "Shot with His Own Gun," "You'll Never Be a Man," "Lovers Walk," and "Clubland."

Like the other sets from this rock festival, this is professionally recorded, though still unreleased. However, the others generally had no problems. This one did have a few. For one thing, I couldn't find a single complete version, so I put this together from two different versions. But luckily both sources are soundboards (and probably ultimately different parts of the same recording). Additionally, there were some glitches. I didn't mark them with "[Edit]" as I usually do, so I don't remember the details. But I do remember there was a bad section of a chorus of "Alison" that I patched up by using another portion from a different chorus. And there was another problem like that with at least one other song.

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long.

093 Shot with His Own Gun (Elvis Costello)
094 talk (Elvis Costello)
095 Accidents Will Happen (Elvis Costello)
096 The Beat (Elvis Costello)
097 talk (Elvis Costello)
098 Temptation (Elvis Costello)
099 Green Shirt (Elvis Costello)
100 talk (Elvis Costello)
101 You'll Never Be a Man (Elvis Costello)
102 [I Don't Want to Go To] Chelsea (Elvis Costello)
103 Secondary Modern (Elvis Costello)
104 Lovers Walk (Elvis Costello)
105 Less than Zero (Elvis Costello)
106 Big Tears (Elvis Costello)
107 talk (Elvis Costello)
108 High Fidelity (Elvis Costello)
109 talk (Elvis Costello)
110 Alison (Elvis Costello)
111 Lipstick Vogue (Elvis Costello)
112 talk (Elvis Costello)
113 Clubland (Elvis Costello)
114 Oliver's Army (Elvis Costello)
115 Watching the Detectives (Elvis Costello)
116 You Belong to Me (Elvis Costello)
117 talk (Elvis Costello)
118 Radio Radio (Elvis Costello)
119 Pump It Up (Elvis Costello)
120 [What's So Funny 'Bout] Peace, Love and Understanding (Elvis Costello)
121 Mystery Dance (Elvis Costello)
122 talk (Elvis Costello)
123 I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down (Elvis Costello)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315606/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_06_ElvsCstllo.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/wi2TdgWd

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 5: Talking Heads

This is the fifth part of the 1980 Heatwave Festival.

The Talking Heads released their third album, "Fear of Music," in 1979. Their next album, the classic "Remain in Light," would come out in October 1980, two months after this concert. At the time of this concert, the band was finishing up the recording of the album. Their tour to support the album wouldn't start until mid-October, but this concert was an exception. 

The band started with five songs from previous albums, and finished with two more such songs. But between that, they did four songs from the upcoming "Remain in Light" album: "Once in a Lifetime," "Houses in Motion," "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)," and "Crosseyed and Painless." It turns out this concert was the very first time these four songs were ever played in public. Furthermore, this was the first time the band performed on stage with the many additional musicians who would be part of the "Remain in Light" tour, so even the older songs sounded quite different. The band was radically transformed, and this concert was the public debut of their new sound.

Like the other albums from this festival, the sound quality is excellent, even though this remains unreleased. And this set didn't have any sound problems.

As an aside, you can see from the covers I've posted that the earlier sets took place during the daytime, but by the time this band finished, it had grown dark.

This album is an hour and six minutes long.

077 talk (Talking Heads)
078 Psycho Killer (Talking Heads)
079 Warning Sign (Talking Heads)
080 Stay Hungry (Talking Heads)
081 Cities (Talking Heads)
082 talk (Talking Heads)
083 I Zimbra (Talking Heads)
084 talk (Talking Heads)
085 Once in a Lifetime (Talking Heads)
086 Houses in Motion (Talking Heads)
087 Born Under Punches [The Heat Goes On] (Talking Heads)
088 Crosseyed and Painless (Talking Heads)
089 talk (Talking Heads)
090 Life During Wartime (Talking Heads)
091 talk (Talking Heads)
092 Take Me to the River (Talking Heads)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315603/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_05TlkngHds.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CoZTd52E

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 4: The B-52's

Part 4 of the 1980 Heatwave Festival is a set by the B-52's.

The B-52's made a big splash with their 1979 debut album, "The B-52's." They followed that in 1980 with the album "Wild Planet." That was released at the end of August, a month after this concert. But in fact the band had been playing most of the songs from "Wild Planet" in concert even before the release of their debut album. So this is a mix of songs from both albums.

There is one official album that is from a similar time period, "Live! 8.24.1979." It wasn't released until 2015, but as you can guess, it's from 1979. That's a pretty short album though, less than 40 minutes long. This sounds just as good and has five more songs.

Although unreleased, this was professionally recorded and sounds great. There were no problems.

This album is 58 minutes long.

061 talk (B-52's)
062 Planet Claire (B-52's)
063 6060-842 (B-52's)
064 Devil in My Car (B-52's)
065 52 Girls (B-52's)
066 talk (B-52's)
067 Quiche Lorraine (B-52's)
068 Dirty Back Road (B-52's)
069 Lava (B-52's)
070 Give Me Back My Man (B-52's)
071 Strobe Light (B-52's)
072 Private Idaho (B-52's)
073 Runnin' Around (B-52's)
074 Rock Lobster (B-52's)
075 Dance This Mess Around (B-52's)
076 Party Out of Bounds (B-52's)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315598/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_04B52s.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/TVEMn4kG

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 3: The Pretenders

Next up for the 1980 Heatwave Festival is a set by the Pretenders.

At the time of this concert, the Pretenders had released their first album in 1979, simply titled "Pretenders," but were still a year away from releasing their second album, "Pretenders II." So most of the songs were from their first album, but two of the songs, "The Adultress" and "Louie Louie," were from the coming second album. Additionally, "Porcelain" only came out as a B-side and on an EP.

There has never been an officially released live album from the early years of the Pretenders, although a full 1981 concert has been released as bonus tracks for the deluxe edition of "Pretenders II."

The sound quality is excellent, since the festival was professionally recorded, even though it's all officially unreleased. There were no problems.

This album is 56 minutes long.

044 talk (Pretenders)
045 Precious (Pretenders)
046 The Adultress (Pretenders)
047 Kid (Pretenders)
048 Space Invader [Instrumental] (Pretenders)
049 talk (Pretenders)
050 Private Life (Pretenders)
051 talk (Pretenders)
052 Brass in Pocket (Pretenders)
053 Stop Your Sobbing (Pretenders)
054 talk (Pretenders)
055 The Wait (Pretenders)
056 Louie Louie (Pretenders)
057 Porcelain (Pretenders)
058 Tattooed Love Boys (Pretenders)
059 Up the Neck (Pretenders)
060 Mystery Achievement (Pretenders)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315601/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_03Prtndrs.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CQwgZcVc

The cover photo of Chrissie Hynde is from this exact concert.

Heatwave Festival, Mosport Park, Bowmanville, Canada, 8-23-1980, Part 2: Rockpile

The second set I have from the 1980 Heatwave Festival was performed by Rockpile, a rocking foursome led by both Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds.

Rockpile played many concerts from 1977 to 1981, but Lowe and Edmunds were on different record labels, so they were only able to release one studio album, "Seconds of Pleasure," in 1980. That album actually came out two months after this concert, so none of the songs here are from it. But there are some songs from the most recent solo albums by Edmunds ("Repeat When Necessary") and Lowe ("Labour of Lust").

This album perhaps is a bit redundant, because two official Rockpile live albums were eventually released that are from 1980 concerts, "Live at Montreux 1980" and "Live at Rockpalast." But in my opinion, it's hard to have too much live Rockpile, at least when it has this level of sound quality, since this unreleased concert is from a soundboard source. 

There was a problem with one song, "Sweet Little Lisa." The sound balance was really off for most of the song, with the overall volume fluctuating and different instruments out of whack. But I was able to fix that in Audacity, so it should sound pretty normal now. This kind of thing sometimes happens with the first songs of concerts, while the sound mix was being adjusted on the fly.

This album is 55 minutes long.

Note that the song numbering continues from where the last album in the festival left off, in case one wants to hear all the songs from it in a row. Also, I have zeroes at the start of the track numbers because there were over a 100 songs in the festival.

023 talk (Rockpile)
024 Sweet Little Lisa [Edit] (Rockpile)
025 So It Goes (Rockpile)
026 I Knew the Bride [When She Used to Rock and Roll] (Rockpile)
027 talk (Rockpile)
028 Queen of Hearts (Rockpile)
029 Switchboard Susan (Rockpile)
030 Trouble Boys (Rockpile)
031 Girls Talk (Rockpile)
032 Three Time Loser (Rockpile)
033 talk (Rockpile)
034 You Ain't Nothing but Fine (Rockpile)
035 Crawling from the Wreckage (Rockpile)
036 talk (Rockpile)
037 Let It Rock (Rockpile)
038 Singing the Blues (Rockpile)
039 I Hear You Knocking (Rockpile)
040 They Called It Rock (Rockpile)
041 Ju Ju Man (Rockpile)
042 Down Down Down (Rockpile)
043 Let's Talk about Us (Rockpile)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17315605/VA-HtwveFstivlMsprtPrkBwmnvlleCnda__8-23-1980_02Rckple.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/imXeAsYt

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. That's Edmunds on the left and Lowe on the right.

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.