Rock fans with an insatiable appetite for minutiae and detritus will find a visit to MVD Entertainment Group’s website as exhilarating as discovering a kick-ass used record store right by their new apartment. The company’s most recent crop of DVD releases is particularly eclectic. Longtime devotees of Tim Buckley’s almost impossibly ethereal voice and deeply poetic imagery will be enchanted by the rarely seen performances collected in My Fleeting House, as well as the revelatory interviews with musical collaborators, critics and friends.
Even those who knew Buckley only as the estranged parent of the similarly gifted singer-guitarist Jeff—who died in a swimming accident 22 years after his father’s fatal overdose in 1975—will find much to enjoy here.
The influential British glam-rock ensemble Mott the Hoople is the latest iconic group to be put under the critical microscope in MVD’s often quite stimulating Under Review series. The producers of the “unauthorized” documentaries The Killers: Leaving Las Vegas and U2: The DVD Collector’s Box were forced to rely on interviews with friends, associates and critics, as well as second-source concert footage, photos and videos.
Leaving Las Vegas is a bit of an oddity, even for MVD, in that The Killers—once categorized as the “best British rock group from America”—may still have a lot of tread left on their tires.
In addition to being unsupported by the musicians themselves, their hits are represented only in cover versions and personal video clips of former bandmates and club owners. Otherwise, conversations are taken from MTV and other television shows, while clips from live performances came from a Canadian outlet. What will be of primary interest to hometown fans are the first-person accounts of the Las Vegas music scene from DJs, writers and academics, who also speculate on how The Killers evolved from a quirky local phenomenon to chart-topping international superstars.