God, I love YouTube.
As a kid who lived too far from town to have cable, much less MTV, YouTube has become my go-to web portal for living the teenage life I wished I'd had the first time around. Oh, sure, there's something to be said for spending those MTV-free hours exploring the countryside or playing sports, but when you see a clip like this raw footage of a road-crisp Martin (with his arm in a sling) and Pete, you just know that, for all of their out-of-the-box greatness, this was a band not long for this world.
Of course, nobody in the world knew the first casualty would be guitarist James Honeyman-Scott. Sure, Chrissie was the voice, the LOOK, but his was the glue that held the band together. That a meeting had been held just two days before his death to sack Farndon from the band for his out-of-control heroin habit is the ultimate irony. Had Honeyman-Scott not been called back to London from Austin, where he was enjoying a break from touring to spend time with his wife, maybe he'd still be alive.
Of course, Farndon would join him in Rock & Roll Heaven a mere eight months later, sending Chrissie and Martin off the rails. That they made another album together at all is actually quite miraculous when you consider how hard it must've been to process not just one death in the band, but two.
Knowing how things turned out, there's a real "live fast, die young" quality to this clip.