Blog: The Same Mistakes

Hello, Mutants of the mud! A quick update for all you enjoying the Faith Global post. Here's Ultravox!, with the exclamation point intact, playing before the sodden crowd at the Reading Festival on August 27, 1977. The sound quality is better than most from this period, and it offers a rare snap shot of the Foxx-era line up at about the time of Ha! Ha! Ha!. Shears' guitar stands out from the get-go, and the band really hits its groove with a blistering take of "Young Savage." Stay tuned [...]

It's always the best That seem to crack and break So it always seems right To make The Same Mistakes Stevie Shears must have known that his time with Ultravox! was coming to an end when he first heard a copy of the band's second album. Released at the very height of the punk explosion in November of 1977, Ha! Ha! Ha! was a raucous rejoinder to those critics who had dismissed Ultravox! as pretentious art rockers, hopelessly out of sync with the times--all rampaging guitars and sheets of wailing feedback it [...]

Welcome to "The Same Mistakes," a blog about the most vital period in popular music of the post-capitalist era, a time from about 1978 to 1982 when social conventions and accepted truths were called into question and there remained the possibility of imagining the world as other than it was. We have been delaying for years starting this blog, and in the meantime have seen a renaissance of interest in the post-punk period. This has largely been spurred by a boat-load of bands claiming inspiration in this period. Thus, for example, Franz Ferdinand have tipped their hat to [...]