Take a trip back to the 1983 installment of the US Festival — a four-day event over Memorial Day Weekend that year that drew an alleged 670,000 music fans into the middle of nowhere in California — with this 90-minute collection of footage from the fest’s “New Wave Day,” featuring performances by The Clash, INXS, Oingo Boingo, The English Beat and more.
The footage, recently uploaded to YouTube by hiroakin wild, also includes portions of the festival sets by Divinyls, Wall of Voodoo, A Flock of Seagulls, Stray Cats and Men at Work. It apparently comes from VHS tapes sold shortly after the event.
Among other reasons, the massive concert was notable for marking both the last performances of Mick Jones with The Clash and Stan Ridgway with Wall of Voodoo.
Check it out below:
US Festival’s “New Wave Day,” May 28, 1983
Includes performances by:
INXS
Divinyls
Wall of Voodoo
Oingo Boingo
The English Beat
A Flock of Seagulls
Stray Cats
Men at Work
The Clash
Someone please invent a time machine!
I think it is in a hot tub at the Kodiak Valley Ski Resort
KO-DI-AK!!!! Part 2 on the way..!
WOW, this would cost a fortune today!
Each festival lost $12M
I was there for those concerts we the best time ever!! I was so young then 😩
Aw man, no Triumph? (Might as well milk it some more!)
Ha!
Man it warms the heart to see Wall of Voodoo up there. I’ve been listening to “Call of the West” the album a lot lately, and laughing myself silly every time I hear “Call of the West” the song. Great storytelling by Stan Ridgway, as always.
Excuse my ignorance, but who was on drums for the Clash?
Pete Howard. Terry Chimes got sick of the bickering between Mick and Joe and departed before this. His last show was in Jamaica 1982.
I was there for that day tripping my brains out. We drove out west from New Orleans. Me, Gloss and enslaved freeman. They Sprayed the crowd with firehoses to cool off. Hot as shit that day. I still have the ticket stub and program. The ticket was $25.
Didn’t know Divinyls went back to 83.
Oh yeah. Places them probably between their first full-length and their second (first bothering of the US charts), which was What a Life! with “Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain,” unavoidable on MTV in the mid-1980s.
Man, it was 105 degrees here yesterday, and I gotta hand it to those folks who braved at least that, with little to no shade for the tunes. I love those bands (loved ? was only 12 when this event occurred) and I couldn’t have done it, then or now.
Wakeling’s shirt is classic. Boingo looked like they killed the place (Wall of Voodoo close second). The Clash were pissed that Van Halen got paid twice as much. Kind of showed in their performance. But still the greatest band that ever was or will be.