Dave and Greg Clifford’s Outsider Artists: The Story of Paranoid Visions (2025) digs deep into the group’s staunchly DIY ethos and wholehearted rejection of a traditional career as musicians through interviews, live recordings, and other ephemera from their 40 year run. Since the band’s inception in 1981, Paranoid Visions has been defined by an energetic anarcho-punk spirit. Throughout lineup changes, a brief hiatus, and the shifting tides of the music industry, founding member Deko Dachau’s gravelly vocals and driving vision have remained constant. The film anchors itself with detailed interviews with Dachau about the group’s evolution over the years, as well as appearances from many of his past and present bandmates.
While their later works speak to a more global audience, many of Paranoid Vision’s earliest recordings were grounded in working-class Irish realities. The response audiences had to the song “Strange Girl,” written about the tragic death of 15-year-old Ann Lovett, who died while giving birth beside a holy grotto in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary, shifted the way Dachau and his collaborators approached their music. This had an immense impact on the band’s mission, and they began to more openly challenge what their audiences believed Ireland was, developing a more political bent to the project.
Through this, Paranoid Visions played a huge role in the developing Dublin DIY-scene: they made zines, swapped tapes, and put a keen attention to detail into everything they created, treating ephemera less like merch and more as a way to share ideas with like-minded people while building a resilient punk community in the city. Later in the band's history, core members of the group became mentors to a younger generation of punk musicians: Jay Bagnall, the band’s current drummer, was babysat by older members growing up.
This need to create their own stage and build a punk scene from the ground up was a struggle shared by their San Francisco counterparts. Screening alongside Outsider Artists, Jon Bastion’s San Francisco’s First and Only Rock’n’Roll Movie: CRIME 1978 was developed in part using footage originally created for a local TV special on the scene that never came to fruition. It presents a thoughtful portrait of one of the United States’ earliest punk bands—and the very first on the West Coast—who helped nurture the nascent scene in San Francisco. Traditional venues like Bill Graham shut punk bands out of their bookings, so CRIME jumped at the opportunity to perform in unusual places. The film is riddled with footage of these spaces: Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino restaurant by day and punk venue by night that quickly became the epicenter of the city's punk scene, or, perhaps most notoriously, San Quentin State Prison.
CRIME understood punk as spectacle first. They frequently donned police uniforms or dressed up as hardboiled film noir detectives while antagonizing their audiences. Their antics were political and caked in a cheeky sense of irony: CRIME 1978 features previously unseen footage of their infamous gig in San Quentin's exercise yard on Labor Day, 1978. Donning their usual police getups, CRIME performed “Piss on Your Dog” to more than 500 inmates while correction officers stood around with their guns. A window to the cell where Sirhan Sirhan sat in solitary confinement was directly opposite the stage. CRIME had been invited by the artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman to perform at the prison as part of her Museums Without Walls project.
Unlike Paranoid Vision’s endless output, CRIME only released three singles, but their provocative, defiant attitudes and commitment to pushing their audience’s buttons distilled the early San Franciscan punk scene into its purest form. Together, these two documentaries showcase different pieces of the global language that is punk, both in politics and a defiant rejection of authority.
“Punk Rock Docs - Crime 1978 & Outsider Artists” takes place Sunday, October 26, at Shapeshifters Cinema.
