DEAD KENNEDYS – DMPO’s on Broadway

Through my teenage years I’ve been exploring quite so many different musical styles in rock music and of course I came across one of the best punk bands ever: the Dead Kennedys. I had a compilation tape of their best songs and they really impressed me back at the time.

So, I was really eager to watch and check out their DVD release called DMPO’s On Broadway, which was filmed in 1984 in the United States. This DK appearance marked the final show at the infamous San Francisco theatre and nightclub before its closing down. The show itself matched my expectations as Jello Biafra really had a great time on stage that night with doing his usual crazy, “out of control” performance with the other guys supporting him the same way. There are no boring moments performance-wise on the DVD, but the overall quality of the material shows that the whole thing was done in an era when most directors and producers didn’t even think about a format like DVD. Especially the quality of the picture is poor, it lacks any resolution. I guess it was recorded with the help of the best available equipment of the time, but let me remind you again, it was back in ‘84. The audio setting is way better and some places you can hear a really good stereo sound, but other times it ends up like if the band would play in a closed box or something.

The guys are playing some of the greatest songs in the history of Dead Kennedys like Police Truck, Hop with the Jet Set and Life Sentence (Where is Holiday in Cambodia, Too Drunk to Fuck and California Uber Alles Jello?). The DVD was put out by the British company Cherry Red Films that specialise on releasing punk music and as extra feature you can check out their impressive CD/DVD/video catalogue with some interesting titles. Also bonus on the DVD is the extended Dead Kennedys discography with listing (probably) all their cassette, vinyl and CD releases.
Although DMPO’s on Broadway has some really nice moments I would only recommend this one to die hard DK fans.