Review of Slaughter And The Dogs: Cranked Up Really High In Blackpool

Introduction

Slaughter & the Dogs were one of the defining groups of the punk movement. They began life supporting the Sex Pistols until they were signed by Decca and went off on one.......

The band split up in the early eighties as the punk thing faded away but were brought back together for a performance at the 1996 Holidays in the Sun festival in Blackpool.

This is the DVD of that performance.

Video

Video is full-frame 4:3 and is generally poor. Fast moving sections show obvious break-up and jagged edges and colour is overall muddy and muted.

Bit-rate is very low throughout.

The interviews which follow on from each song are as bad as the performances with lots of digital noise and a generally washed-out appearance.

Audio

Audio quality has fared about as badly as the video. The soundtrack is a simple PCM 48KHz 16-bit affair with no obvious effort made to clean up the original recordings.

Sound is, in general, very flat with no real "feel" or energy to the performance despite the on-stage antics of the Dogs themselves.

Bass is fairly tight though and cranked up really high (as the box says), the energy starts to come through and things liven up. This needs to be played loud to be entertaining and then it sounds like real punk - raw, unloved and basic.

Features

The disc is region 0, so it`ll work anywhere. The DVD menu is silent and static and the only features are a list of other DVDs with some example excerpts and an interview with Slaughter`s lead vocalist Wayne Barratt which is split up into bits which follow each song.

The songs can be accessed individually, but the chapter breaks aren`t always in the best place.

Conclusion

Punk needs energy to get you going, good punk has energy in spadefulls and Slaughter & the Dogs had that when they were around in the late seventies.

They may have had energy when they performed in 1996 - I would hope they did, the crowd seemed to be happy.

Unfortunately none of that comes over on this disc. The VHS would be better as the relatively poor picture quality of the medium would hide the deficiencies of the picture here.

If you like punk, go see some live.