Promo and interview clips collection from the Swedish rock band.

Sweden’s Bad Habit have returned to form with their recently released ‘Above & Beyond’ CD, which was a marked improvement on 1995’s ‘Hear-Say’. Now a few months later comes their first DVD released on the YesterRock label. The package starts off with 9 promo videoclips including ‘Need Somebody’ from their 1987 ‘Young & Innocent’ mini album, and 3 songs from their full debut ‘After Hours’ (Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’, ‘Never Find Another You’ & ‘Rainbow’). The quality of these clips is not the greatest - they are quite grainy but fun to watch when the boys were a hair band. Next up is ‘Another Night’ from the ‘Revolution’ album and the video quality is improving. ‘Alive’ and ‘Walk Of Life’ from ‘Hear-Say’ follow and we come full circle with ‘I Don’t Want You’ and ‘Above And Beyond’ from the new album, with these videos looking much more professional. A fundamental issue though is that you cannot watch the clips continuously, you have to return to the main menu after each video which becomes quite irritating after a while.

Next up are biographies of the band which includes a few interesting bits such as original keyboard player Doc Pat Shannon gave up playing in the band so that he could relocate back to the US and venture into marketing! The DVD ends with a “specials” section. This begins with a making of the new album, which is quite entertaining. Then there are a couple of TV show clips and an interview which is in Swedish but without subtitles!! We then have a trip to the USSR from 1989 which includes a documentary primarily in Swedish again, and songs from two shows. You’re rarely shown the full songs and the film and audio quality is quite disappointing. The “specials” section ends with three songs from a Swedish show in 1991. Again these are only clips and not the full songs and also of rather poor quality.

As a huge fan of the band I’m not overly enamoured by this release. It is over two and a quarter hours in length, however the live footage does let the package down. This is for diehards only and it’s a huge shame that this year’s Firefest show isn’t being filmed: what a cracking release that would have been.

Az Chaudhry