Mudhoney

amazing live videos of Soundgarden, Spiritualized, Fleet Foxes & more to watch while every show is cancelled

Basically no shows are happening due to the coronavirus outbreak (though some artists are doing livestreams instead), but if you’re already jonesing to see a show, or just need a brief distraction from the insanity of the world right now, thankfully there’s YouTube which has an amazing array of live footage from throughout the history of pop music, from clips from concert films, TV performances and other pro-shot footage, to tons of fan-shot video from shows. If you’re looking for a place to start, we’ve been picking some of our favorites. Here are five more:

Spiritualized @ World’s Greatest Bar (World Trade Center) 4/16/1998

Jason Pierce was flying high — and we mean that altitude-wise — at this Spiritualized’s show at The World’s Greatest Bar which was on the 107th Floor of the World Trade Center and a day off from their tour opening for Radiohead. (They’d play Radio City Music Hall the next night.) There wasn’t much of a view, as April showers had all heads in the clouds that night, but the band would’ve kept eyes from looking at the skyline anyway. Spiritualized were mesmerizing as usual. [Bill Pearis]

Super Furry Animals @ Prairie des Filtres 7/18/2016

Welsh greats Super Furry Animals came out of hibernation to tour in 2016 and here they are in Toulouse, France playing the Prairie des Filtres celtic music festival to big, adoring crowd. The setlist is killer, including “Rings Around the World,” “Hello Sunshine,” Juxtapozed With U,” “Hometown Unicorn,” and the always rousing “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck,” complete with furry animal garb. [Bill Pearis]

Mudhoney @ Berlin Independence Days Music Festival – 10/10/1988

Mudhoney are true lifers who still release good music and put on good shows today, but there’s still nothing like 1988, the year their debut EP Superfuzz Bigmuff and the “Touch Me I’m Sick” single came out. Not only did those highly influential recordings have a clear impact on the sound and style of a lot of the grunge that would get popular a few years later, but as this pro-shot footage (which was released on DVD) helps immortalize, Mudhoney were beasts on stage too. Mark Arm rocks out like a madman, is dripping with confidence, and has all the grit in his voice that he needs, and the band’s Stoogey, fuzz-drenched guitars sound as loud and fucked-up as ever. [Andrew Sacher]

Soundgarden @ Club Lingerie in Los Angeles, CA – 02/11/1988

Keeping with the 1988 Seattle grunge theme, here’s Soundgarden in LA just a few months after they released their 1987 debut EP Screaming Life. The late Chris Cornell is still a few years away from becoming the star that we’ll always remember him as, but he’s clearly a star in the making, and it’s prety amazing to see this footage of him and the rest of the band in this primitive, hungry form. They played not just stuff from Screaming Life but also the Fopp EP and their debut album Ultramega OK which would come out later that year, and they also did three awesomely grungy classic rock covers – Rush’s “Working Man,” Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” and Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” It’s pretty incredible to watch Chris Cornell nailing Robert Plant’s wail back to back with Alice Cooper’s gravelly sneer, and it’s no surprise that he’s so good at both — he had already been fusing those two things on his own songs. [Andrew Sacher]

Fleet Foxes @ Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA – 2/28/2008

Fast forward 20 years from Mudhoney/Soundgarden and Sub Pop was about to release the instant-classic Sun Giant EP and self-titled debut album by Fleet Foxes, who played a nice selection of those now-widely-loved songs at this show. After a sublime rendition of “Sun Giant,” Fleet Foxes introduce themselves at this intimate San Francisco show as being from Seattle and never having played out of town. Their indie scene success is still in the future, but when the roar of the crowd drops away in their lush harmonies, you can hear that the seeds of that success have definitely been planted and are about to bear fruit. [Amanda Hatfield]

Check out this gallery of Spiritualized’s 2018 show at Kings Theatre:

For more of our favorite live videos, head here.