Reissue CDs Weekly: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Destiny Street Complete | reviews, news & interviews Reissue CDs Weekly: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Destiny Street Complete
Reissue CDs Weekly: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Destiny Street Complete
Thought-provoking revisitation of the New York punk pioneer’s second album
by Kieron TylerSunday, 24 January 2021
Richard Hell ponders being lauded as comparable with Rimbaud and LautremontRoberta Bayley Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying
Destiny Street Complete lays it out. There are, indeed, three versions of his and his band The Voidoids’s July 1982 album
Destiny Street must have seemed like a dead end to Richard Hell & The Voidoids in 1982. Unsatisfied with the art punk originators’ second and final album, perhaps troubled by its rather thin, muffled sound or its flailing chaos, Hell wanted desperately to remix the wild and woolly successor to 1977’s seminal
Blank Generation debut. Unfortunately, the original 24-track masters went missing, preventing Hell from performing the necessary operation.
As luck would have it, in the early 2000s, Hell stumbled upon a cassette from 1981 with all the LP’s rhythm tacks, which allowed him to install thrilling new guitar forays and urgent vocals in 2009’s