Dead or Alive: Rip It Up Live

I remember going to see this same tour when I was 17. It was one of the first real rock concerts I had ever attended, and I remember the band made us wait for an hour and a half before they took the stage. I later found out it was because Pete Burns got drunk before the show and had to wait until he sobered up to go on. In the meantime, he and the rest of the band abused the promoters by demanding water and other things, under the constant threat that they would not perform. Say what you will about Dead or Alive, but if that isn't rock and roll, then what is?

The show verged on a riot by the time it was over. After the first few numbers, it was obvious that everything was on tape and that Pete Burns was not really singing. As far as I could tell, nobody was really playing any instruments either. I didn't really care, but the rest of the audience seemed downright hostile about it. The show ran a little over half an hour, after which the band promptly left the stage and never reappeared for an encore. A bunch of people threw some folding chairs around, some people stormed the box office demanding their money back, and needless to say Dead or Alive never played my town again.

So that brings us to this video, a document of the same tour I saw way back when. The footage in the video is actually taken from two different concerts on two different nights of the Japanese tour, but the set list is a non-stop megamix of Dead or Alive's biggest hits, and amusingly, the footage sometimes changes WITHIN THE SAME SONG. You can tell because in a couple of numbers the costumes change drastically between shots, so it becomes quite clear that the shows had to have been identical for them to have pieced the footage together like that.

I thought it was exciting just the same when I saw it in person, and it's never boring to look at on the screen. The show suffers from some silly choreography, but I always look at it as tongue-in-cheek, and I'm willing to overlook that because I've always found Pete Burns to be a fascinating performer. He was often compared to Boy George in the 80s, which wasn't exactly fair. Unlike Boy George, Pete's voice is unmistakably masculine and aggressive, and his image goes way beyond a drag act. Much like Marilyn Manson today, Burns' look is often shocking and dark, although his image in this particular video reminds me a lot of a goth Brooke Shields.

No matter what look he's showing you, Pete has a very strong stage presence, and the spacious set does nothing to dwarf his persona, which is often a shocking mixture of male and female attributes. At one point he even achieves the illusion of having breasts with a carefully-cut spandex tank top. In reality, Pete is actually a quite capable live performer, so the use of tapes in this show really mystifies me, since it would have been exciting to have some live vocals and instrumentation.

But then we have the question of Dead or Alive's content. Hits like "You Spin Me Round" and "Brand New Lover" were not really meant to be rock and roll opuses, they were created for the dance floor. While Dead or Alive's earlier material (from 1980 until 1984) was based on live musicianship and had more of a Gothic flavor, the shift to full-on disco bombast is what made the band popular, and what would be the point of going to see Dead or Alive in concert to hear them do an acoustic version of "You Spin Me Round"? It wouldn't be the same, and you'd wonder why the concert didn't sound more like their records. It must be said that there are actual moments in the show when you can hear some live vocals and instruments...although their infrequent appearance is sort of funny in itself.

Another notable thing about the show is the two dancers they have onstage with them. At the concert I saw, they never really took any of their clothes off, and since the show was on tape I couldn't figure out why on Earth they would have paid to take along two backup singers who weren't really singing (they also pretend to play the guitar). Then I saw this video and realized that the "backup singers" are really male strippers. Apparently they didn't feel comfortable stripping down to g-strings in the cramped club-like room that I saw them in, but in this full-stage production they are down to the bare minimum by the end of the show. One of the dancers is James Hyde, who later went on to be on daytime soaps.

While their commercial viability has all but disappeared, Dead or Alive's fan base is still going strong, and it's probable that anybody who is interested already has a copy of this tape. For the curious, however, the show captures the band at the time where they'd reached their commercial peak in most parts of the world (Japan excluded, as they would eventually achieve even greater success in that country), and I'm sure fans of James Hyde will want to track down this video to see James jiggling himself around in a silver spangled g-string.