Show 82: Split Enz - Live at Hammersmith Odeon London - 27 September 1980

A while ago I did a show by Crowded House which has been really popular - and I enjoyed doing it too (you can find that here) so I thought I'd delve a bit further back into the history of the Finn brothers! So - a debut on Live and Loud! for Split Enz, formed by Tim Finn in 1971/72 and a band which his younger brother Neil joined in 1977.

This show catches them on their UK tour after the release of their 5th album, True Colours in June 1980; an album which enabled them finally to break internationally. The recording was in good condition apart from a bit of noise and hum - so once that had been worked on, it was a relatively straight forward EQ and master job - losing the tinniness, bringing up the bass, losing the midrange mud and creating space between the instruments. Job done!

Not quite a full show, this was originally an FM radio broadcast designed to fit in under an hour. As ever with the Finns, a fair bit of chat in between songs, despite this being a radio transcription (chat between songs often gets cut).

The show is now available to download exclusively for free here as 1 MP3 file.

Or, if you would like to have separate tagged MP3s, or even lossless files in FLAC format, head on over to the Donations tab to see how you can obtain these for a very small donation towards the site costs.

Setlist
I Wouldn't Dream Of It
Poor Boy
One Step Ahead
Missing Person
Walking Through The Ruins
Ghost Girl
I Got You
I Don't Wanna Dance
What's The Matter With You?
I Hope I Never
In The Wars
Nobody Takes Me Seriously
I See Red
Shark Attack

Show 81: Tears For Fears - Live at Hammersmith Palais London - 18 April 1983

A debut on Live and Loud! For Tears For Fears. I’ve been looking on and off for a few years for a good early recording with more than a few tracks on it and finally found this recording - a BBC recording made for broadcast in America. And then I found 2 versions - 1 totally drenched in tape hiss but lots of sound to play with, and the other a lower bit rate mp3 which had very little tape hiss but also very little top end so it sounded very dull and thin.

So I went to work on the noisy one - and while I COULD have removed every last bit of hiss, doing that in my opinion ruins the recording as it also removes a lot of the signal - crowd noise especially sounds weird, like its underwater! So I removed most of the noise but not all, so the recording still breathed a bit. So while this gig IS a little more noisy than most on the archive, it still sounds really good. I then spent a quite a while with EQ, separating out the stereo image and the space between the instruments to make them all stand out a bit better; that done I did some final mastering to add a bit of punch.

This is another recording where the sound man took a song or 2 to get the levels right but despite that I hope you agree that this gig is the best stereo representation of early Tears For Fears playing live.

Update 2018
While preparing this old show as separate files for a donator to the site, I found I could now improve the sound quality further, over what I’d originally done to the recording several years ago. You can now download this new version (as of 2018) HERE as 1 new 320kbps MP3 file.

If you would like to have separate tagged MP3s, or even lossless files in FLAC format of the new version, head on over to the Donations tab to see how you can obtain these for a very small donation towards the site costs.

Setlist
Memories Fade
The Way You Are
Suffer The Children
Pale Shelter
Ideas As Opiates
Mad World
Watch Me Bleed
Change
Start of The Breakdown
The Hurting