Returning to the blog to share a small, but (to my mind) significant discovery.
In September 1995, Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung played at the Crossing Border Festival in Den Haag, alongside Mark E. Smith, Blixa Bargeld and Henry Rollins. It was quite an impressive line-up of artists to be a part of, so early in their career.
There was a half-hour documentary film made about the festival, called “A Leisure Society of Severe Preponderance”, by Aryan Kaganof (aka Kerkhof). As these things sometimes take time, the film was only released in 2011, and it is available online. It contains quite a bit of footage of Mark E. Smith and Henry Rollins on-stage, which is interesting by itself. But around the 3-minute mark, and completely uncredited, you can see DAAU playing for about a minute — the earliest footage I’ve been able to find so far! It shows the band running through a few bars of “Doorloop” standing in a backstage room, probably warming up before going on stage.
You can see the whole movie here:
Thanks to fellow Fall collector dannyno for some excellent research and coming up with a link to the full film.