The record company who has signed the most of the talented CBGB's bands is Sire - Seymour Stein is some kind of genius - he signed Talking Heads and The Ramones and Richard Hell and The VoidOids, as well as the Undertones and The Rezillos

And Madonna (hey, someone has to pay the bills)

But all of a sudden Punk is a dirty word, so they are billed by the record company (now in cahoots with Warners) as New Wave bands (which oddly enough is what Malcolm MacLaren wanted to call the 'movement' in the first place as a homage to the french cinema style)

This confuses everyone, but the Ramones are riding on the crest of their surf influenced new wave Rocket to Russia and its associated hit singles in Europe (yup, they had genuine hits over here, unlike in the USA) and its time to do what record companies do to hot live bands - record a live album

With Ed Stasium engineering and T.Erdelyi (Tommy Ramone) producing it with him you knew it was going to sound good

Where better to record it than London at the Rainbow theatre on New Years Eve ?

Who better to get the audience going than Generation X and the Rezillos ?

This Album became It's Alive

It’s the greatest live album of all time, if you don’t believe me, take a listen and let me know what's better

Sadly mainstream USA just wasn’t ready for it - It was so far ahead of its time that it wasn’t even released in the USA for years until it finally came out on cd

Rumours abound that it wasn’t all recorded at the Rainbow, some of it was recorded at Friars Aylesbury a couple of nights earlier (maybe they recorded that show as a trial run - did it make it to the album ?), some of the vocals were redone in the studio (there's definitely a difference in some of the vocals, but was that simply because of a change in mic's midshow ? or was it down to different shows ?)

It sounds like such a great show - what a shame they didn’t film it as well

Well, they did - here's a still from it

A couple of songs have shown up through the years (there's a really poor quality clip in the "We're outta here" video) but now the original footage is out of the wardrobe and its looking amazing and maybe if we all cross our fingers, someday we'll all get a chance to see it

I'm one of the very few lucky ones, I have seen it - here's a few pictures from it - quality is pretty bad as I've just taken cheap digicam pictures from the TV, but hopefully it gives you a flavour

To Be Continued …. ?