1987-1988 Music For The Masses tour backing tapes
Notes
A cassette tape of the backing tapes from the 1987-1988 Music For The Masses Tour as well as the light-show cue / tour rehearsal tape from the 1986 Black Celebration Tour were sold on eBay in 2011 by a New Zealand eBay seller. That seller purchased a leather jacket from the lighting director of the 1990 World Violation Tour, Jane Spiers, and the tapes were included with the jacket. View the original listing here (on archive.org).
The complete track listing is unknown. 'Pipeline' is presumably included, though 'Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth' is likely not included since it was not played until the final two legs of the tour, and the tape is labeled as "Sept 87". The backing sequence for that track sourced from a ZIP disc is available to listen to below, however. Short snippets of several tracks were uploaded to DM_Best_Bits' SoundCloud (now an empty account) and are available to listen to below. Short excerpts of several tracks from tour rehearsals of the Black Celebration tour were also uploaded along with these snippets, and you can listen to those at 1986-03-00 Black Celebration Tour Rehearsals, Nomis Studios, London, England, UK. The rehearsals are probably from March 1986 given that 'Here Is The House' is part of the rehearsal.
Please note that DM Live does not have any more audio from these backing tapes other than what appears on this page, since all of these excerpts were publicly posted on Soundcloud in the past. Furthermore, it is not known who possesses a copy the full audio of these backing tapes.
On a related note, 90 second excerpts from every track of the 1990 World Violation tour backing tapes are available for listening, and furthermore 90 second excerpts of six tracks from the 1993 Devotional tour backing tapes are also available for listening.
Excerpts
- Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth:
- This is a track that was present on one of Alan Wilder's Emax II ZIP discs, as told to me directly from an anonymous source who worked with Alan during his 2011 auction. The quality is somewhat degraded due to lossy audio compression used for this track. The clicking artifacts in the middle of the song result from an incorrectly programmed loop point. The guitar, choir "ahh", and choral pad voices are automated in this sequence, leaving the synth bass and pad voices for Wilder to improvise live (which matches the live recordings from the Music For The Masses Tour, as these performed parts differ slightly from recording to recording).
Fan recreations
- The Soundcloud user Michigan-Sweden recreated very faithful sounding "live instrumentals" of many tracks from the MFTM tour and other tours using some of the original samples from Alan Wilder's Emax II setup. Listen to them on his Soundcloud here.
