The Pearly Kings: This Is Hollywood (1981)

The Pearly Kings were an early New Wave band that never quite took off, despite deserving to. Mostly bouncing between clubs in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, they shared stages with the likes of Los Lobos, Oingo Boingo, and Missing Persons. According to bassist Chelsea Sykes, they had a friendly competition with The Bus Boys, although that competition ended when the Bus Boys ended up getting an Arista record deal and an appearance in the movie "48 Hours". Having never gotten a record contract, there is no Pearly Kings album; all that remains are bootlegs, and lost footage appearances like this one. As Chelsea put it: "What could have been."

This specific appearance is the first of two live performances in roughly late September or early October in 1981, in the legendary comedy club The Improv.

The Pearly Kings were guitarist Ian Espinoza, drummer Haston Woodlen (RIP), and bassist Chelsea (Clyde) Sykes.

The "cover" photo used at the beginning of the video was originally taken by Ed Clover. What appears in the video is a retouched and enhanced edit of that photo.

Restoration notes: This footage was discovered on Shout's website, and they (unsurprisingly) screwed up the encoding in a way that benefited restoration: Despite scaling the footage incorrectly and encoding it as progressive, fields were mostly still present in the material. Having most of the fields mistakenly included gave me something to work with, although the blended scaling led to horizontal bands where the field order kept reversing, so I had to deinterlace with both parities and edit them together in Premiere to restore the original performance. It's far from perfect, but it's a big improvement from what I had to work with.

Upscaled via nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4,cshift="spline36resize",fwidth=2880,fheight=2160). Couldn't use any AI this time, as the brick wall behind the band utterly confused every model.

Видео The Pearly Kings: This Is Hollywood (1981) канала Generation X Video Archive