1984-10-13 Odeon, Birmingham, England, UK/Source 1

Notes

A very good audience recording. Very clear and direct with little crowd noise. There's still some noticeable hiss, but it is not nearly as bothersome as prior higher-generation copies of this recording.

The right channel is somewhat more prominent than the right. There is some evidence of digital clipping introduced during digitization, causing some additional distortion during louder parts of the recording. Though this recording has been speed-corrected against the 1984-11-30 Basel pre-FM recording, there are still some portions of the recording which have minor speed fluctuations. There is a tape flip between Ice Machine and Lie To Me, and the first 13 or so seconds of Lie To Me are missing as a result. Just Can't Get Enough strangely has worse fidelity than the rest of the recording; perhaps the taping location changed between encores.

This may be Steve Doughty's recording and might be sourced from master tapes, but it is uncertain because he used to keep ticket stubs for all the concerts he attended, and his tickets for DM concerts are unaccounted for. Unfortunately, the source cassette tapes were discarded after digitization to CD-R copies.

This is a particularly interesting concert because the band seems to be very lively, frequently improvising keyboard parts. Backing vocals are very audible in the mix as well, so it's very easy to hear Martin and Alan's backing vocals compared to other recordings.

Also noteworthy from this performance:

• Martin dedicates Somebody: "I've been asked to dedicate this one tonight, to Yvonne from Daryl. The message is, he loves you."
• Martin sings "treat me like a dog" as Master And Servant begins. He sings this several times later in the song during the instrumental break (beginning at 3:04) as well.
• Also during Master And Servant at 3:49, the distorted "master" sample is quickly repeated several times.
• Dave dedicates Just Can't Get Enough: "This one is for an old friend of ours, and I hope he's wearing his wig tonight. This one's for Jo. This is Just Can't Get Enough!"

Many thanks to Steve Doughty for likely having recorded this concert. Steve sadly passed away in 2020. Many thanks also to Steve's wife who generously took the time to rip the CD-R copies. Steve's website is still available here.

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

The CD-Rs' sleeve.

1. [1:03] Play Intro
2. [3:58] Play Something To Do
3. [4:35] Play Two Minute Warning
4. [3:54] Play Puppets
5. [5:11] Play If You Want
6. [4:12] Play People Are People
7. [5:03] Play Leave In Silence
8. [4:17] Play New Life
9. [4:17] Play Shame
10. [4:54] Play Somebody (*)
11. [3:44] Play Ice Machine
12. [5:12] Play Lie To Me
13. [5:22] Play Blasphemous Rumours
14. [4:45] Play Told You So
15. [5:09] Play Master And Servant
16. [4:25] Play Photographic
17. [6:05] Play Everything Counts
18. [4:06] Play See You
19. [3:53] Play Shout
20. [6:05] Play Just Can't Get Enough

• Total time: 1:30:10

Lineage

• unknown recording equipment -> master cassettes or possibly low-gen cassette copies -> unknown transfer -> 2xCD-R -> ConverterLite -> WAV -> in Audacity 3.2.5: normalized to -0.1dB and DC offset removed, stereo channels phase aligned, slowed down 4.1%, JCGE slowed down an additional 3.0%, track splits -> FLAC level 8
• Taper: likely Steve Doughty (RIP)
• Generation: low-gen, possibly master
• auCDtectTaskManager log and photo of CD-R sleeve included

Download

• Download ZIP - FLAC 16-bit 44.1KHz - 578.06MB