ANOTW outtakes, Vol. I: 1980’s Heatwave Festival

On this day 40 years ago... August 23, 1980: the Heatwave Festival melted down at Mosport. Meant to be the Woodstock of the new wave generation, Heatwave was a massively ambitious undertaking by promoter John Brower, who a decade earlier had brought the city John Lennon’s Rock’n’Roll Revival and the Toronto Pop Festival at Varsity Stadium - as well as the controversial Strawberry Fields fest at Mosport Park outside Bowmanville, an hour east of the city.

But with the genre still so, well, new, Brower had trouble securing a household name to headline: Blondie passed on a $250K guarantee. The Clash were booked, or maybe they weren’t – they made it onto an early poster, but then cancelled. Elvis Costello ended up getting top billing, with the rest of the day’s line-up including Talking Heads, The B-52’s, and the Pretenders.

Teenage Head - one of only two local/Canadian acts of the day, alongside The Kings (of “This Beat Goes On / Switchin’ to Glide” fame) - were last minute additions, unannounced as the authorities were concerned they might inspire more hooliganism after their infamous Ontario Place riot earlier that summer.

Heatwave was only attended by about 50,000 – still a very respectable number – but in the end the fest posted losses of around $1 million. A financial disaster, but an artistic triumph, and a professionally run production; no riots or anything set on fire. The biggest disappointment, in hindsight, is that the punk generation’s Woodstock wasn’t captured on film. There would be no D.A. Pennebaker style doc to mythologize it for future generations. A hastily assembled camera crew was unable to get permission to shoot sets by any of the international guests, meaning that history was robbed of what was by all accounts an incredible, festival-stealing set by Talking Heads, debuting their expanded nine-piece line-up and performing material off their Afrobeat-influenced, Eno-produced masterpiece, Remain in Light, for the first time, two months before its release.

Some footage (above) recently surfaced of Talking Heads and Elvis Costello’s sets, and The Perlich Post also shared that the footage shot of Teenage Head’s set will be seen in the forthcoming doc on the “Gods of the Hammer,” entitled Picture My Face…