RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - What Hits!?

Many video collection releases before the DVD era tend to get shifted straight onto the new format. In a case like this you get exactly what you did when it got its initial video release - the year in question here, 1992. That leaves a full decade unaccounted for. This captures the early heyday of the Red Hot Chili Peppers with videos varying in quality, artistry, humour and tackiness. Re-mastered for 5.1 Surround sound, that fact is a good one on its own. Extra stuff would've been great though. Behind The Sun, Under The Bridge, Show Me Your Soul, Higher Ground, Fight Like A Brave, Catholic School Girls Rule, Fire and Subway To Venus are some of the dozen or so funked-up rock tunes that also include 3 live numbers. Psychedelic with a punching groove, the quartet led by visual vocalist Anthony Kiedis and bassist Flea sliced an image and identity all their own amid hair-metal and bad pop. The videos just stop short of the big time rise to even bigger heights in the wake of their Blood Sex Sugar Magic album, trademark tunes like Give It Away (and beyond) not seeing light here - Under The Bridge being the only track featured from there. Wild, colourful and suredamnfunky, RHCP may have seemed like clowns at times, but what unforgettable ones they made!

4 / A
- PB