If there was one Jon Anderson tour I'd like to have seen, it would be this one, from his golden period — more than all the Yes tours (even Detroit in 1976). It was a recording of this tour that made a Jon Anderson fanatic of me in the first place: on Easter Monday 1981, Fluff played Jon's Albert Hall 1980 show on Capital Radio. I still have the tape I made that evening, and it's had a lot of wear over the intervening 28 years. Fantastic show, well recorded.
Come on: I wasn't the only one that taped it off air. Why didn't someone release that instead of this cruddy recording? Let me speculate. Remember my story about meeting Jon Anderson's lawyer (of course you do), who said that Jon didn't meddle but just let him get on with his job? Lawyers getting on with the job, eh? So he couldn't be arsed to negotiate rights with Capital or whoever, thinking, "Well, some hucksters have told us they've got this dodgy bootleg from the mixing desk in Sheffield, and I can easily screw a good royalty rate out of them by threatening action if they don't play ball." Yeah, it sounds shitty… and the cover, well, best not to mention the cover. But it costs us nothing, aside from an off-the-shelf Jon-quote ("The most exciting thing to hear is the crowd," he says, but you can't hear the audience on this recording!), and maybe nets Jon a few grand, less a "modest" legal fee. "Created by project co-ordinator Daniel Earnshaw, with Jon's full co-operation and consent," it says here, but there's no need to include it on Jon's official discography, so he almost retains plausible deniability.
It's long, long way from the exemplary and meticulous approach to quality shown by DGM Live when cleaning up old live recordings of King Crimson and Robert Fripp. They've bought in the expertise and given the time to give fans the best sound they can manage. By contrast, there's the most miserable hiss on this album until midway through the 17th track, when it suddenly vanishes. Surely an engineer could have cleared that up in a couple of hours?
Anyway, glad to have got all that off my chest… Under the murk, the music sounds great! No reason to revise my opinion about this tour. And the CD has a more extensive setlist than my Capital Radio tape, complete with recordings of rehearsal sessions. But I bought the CD in the hope that it would be a long-term replacement for the tape. It's not; I still enjoy the tape more.
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Tracklinsting and credits for this album from fan site Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album |
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