Soundcheck Birmingham 12.11.1984

National Exhibition Centre

Birmingham, U.K.

12 - November - 1984.

Disc 1 (50:47)

01. Boy/Girl

02. With a Shout

03. I Threw A Brick Through A Window

04. Scarlet

--

05. Soundchecking, fixing segments of a couple of songs, crew testing micros

06. Wire

07. The Unforgettable Fire

08. Rehearsing / Soundchecking

09. A Sort of Homecoming

10. A Sort of Homecoming (fixing drums)

11. Bad

12. Preparing MLK sounds

13. Rehearsing / Soundchecking

14. Indian Summer Sky (fixing intro)

15. Indian Summer Sky

16. Pride (incomplete)

Recording Equipment - History

Comments by DBMTB:

All tracks are instrumental versions. Bono does not appear to be in the building.

This recording may be a bit of a lemon as I know virtually nothing about it. I am making it available as SHN.
I acquired a tape of it in mid 1985 via a trading partner, who knew nothing about it either. My copy is certainly not better than third or fourth generation, if that. Yet as it seems to be otherwise uncirculated (whoever has a better copy has been sitting on it for years) then I guess it has to be me who puts it out to the masses.

I don't even know if it is the band who is playing, (as opposed to crew), but I suspect that the taper would not have recorded it if that was not the case.

I have removed the lengthier silences. The original taper turned the recorder on and off on numerous occasions and the relevant clicks were also removed. This was transferred from an audio tape via the line in input on a Soundblaster Live, and recorded using Sound Forge 4.5 in 16 bit stereo. The hissy left channel was removed and the recording converted to mono. I slowed it down some 10 per cent. Then it was processed with the Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction plug in. The Wav file was then converted back to stereo and split into seperate tracks.
A multi-tap delay was added to each track to simulate stereo. The more interesting tracks underwent EQ adjustments. Tracks 4 and 6 were treated with a noise gate process to enhance the drum sounds. The middle of track 4, and track 3 were also treated with reverb. All files had stereo widening added at this point and then normalised.

As this is a somewhat incoherent recording anyway, I have tried to bring out the best in each track. I have not attempted to maintain a uniform sound balance as I cannot see anyone sitting through the whole recording in one go. This is probably mostly of interest to musicians but it also sheds some light on the way in which U2 were setting up their stage set at the time.

DBMTB

Comments

Interesting and rare soundcheck in Birmingham (U.K.), at the NEC on November 12th, 1984. All tracks are instrumental, Bono does not seem to be in the venue. Sound is a bit thin and muddy, but still very enjoyable.

Tracks 1 to 4 are the BBC Radio Session with Kid Jensen at the BBC Studios, on October 14th, 1981, where the band played for first and only time Scarlet.