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Bloodied But Unbowed on SuperChannel - world broadcast premiere of the feature-length, uncut version!

When I was asked if I would consider checking out a documentary on the Vancouver punk scene from 1978 to 1983, my immediate answer was, “Yes, I’d love to”. Even though I started listening to this music in 1984, a year after the Vancouver scene fell apart in the eyes of the artists involved, bands like D.O.A. and The Subhumans ranked as highly with me as their US compatriots, Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, and The Bad Brains. Getting to a see a documentary on the early days of these bands featuring new interviews with Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins, discussing the Vancouver scene, was something of great interest to me.

Bloodied but Unbowed, a documentary about the Vancouver punk scene in the late 70’s, is a film for the second group of punks, and more broadly for anyone who associates punk rock with sweat, spit, blood, and beer. Appropriately enough, when I sat down to talk about the film with director Susanne Tabata and musicians Randy Rampage and Keith Morris, it was over pints of lager at Toronto’s infamous Horseshoe Tavern.

Booking punk bands under false names into legion halls and suburban youth centres in Vancouver in the late 1970s isn’t much different from what Gerry Barad does now: organizing massive tours for U2 and the Kings of Leon and Peter Gabriel. “The only thing that’s different are the numbers--they’re bigger now,” Barad, the Vancouver-raised chief operating office of the world’s largest concert promotions outfit, Live Nation, told the Star in a recent phone interview from his home in Chicago.