Hot on the heels of the band’s 17 track retrospective CD Rockin’ You For 30 Years comes Helix ‘s 30th Anniversary Concert DVD, commemorating the band’s incredibly executed reunion concert in Brantford, Ontario on July 17, ’04. The show, staged in a plush theatre, featured a massive memorabilia display, a number of Helix line-ups (dating back to the mid-’70s) playing songs from their eras, plus a showing of a professional band documentary, available now through www.planethelix.com.
The DVD is scheduled for release through EMI on November 23, with the band performing at launch parties (as such) in western Ontario (in Cambridge November 4, Thorold November 6 and Orillia November 12.
Helix leader Brian Vollmer had this to say about the DVD, marveling about what turned out to be a magical night:
“I’ve seen the roughs; it looks amazing. It’s amazing footage. You know, sometimes when you just keep going forward, things happen and you can’t explain how they happen. That was just like pure luck that everything came together like it did that day,” he says. “I had worked so hard on the show, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect EMI to phone me up three weeks before and say ‘Hey, you got anybody to film this?’ That stuff must have cost major. This is only the concert, but there’s extra footage.”
Vollmer says the film crew gave Helix the full talk-to-everyone-remotely-associated-with-the-band investigative interview treatment.
“They actually came in two weeks before, came to my house,” he says. “Interviewed me, Archie, Linda, all sorts of people in the band, fans, people that came in from out of town. Then they came down the day of the concert, shot outside, shot inside the hall. They interviewed people once again. They came to the practice for the original lineup down in Kitchener at Bruce Arnold’s place. They filmed that, interviewed all the original band; all that footage is in there. The whole thing is about two and a half hours long.
Not everything will be culled from recent filming, though.
“I gave them extra footage, too,” Vollmer says. “I had tons of Super 8 footage leftover, from stuff I didn’t use in mine. I said, ‘Listen, I’ll just give you this; put this on, make a great package and sell a million of these things.’ It’s so lucky for me that EMI has come back into the picture. It means so much and it gives me a foot back in the door to get out there; just more visibility.”
