Lovetown Amsterdam 18.12.1989

RAI Europa Hall

Amsterdam, Holland.

18 - December - 1989.

Attendance: 16.000 (sellout) - Support: BB King

Disc 1 (72:01)

01. Hawkmoon 269

02. Desire

03. All Along the Watchtower

04. All I Want is You

05. Where the Streets Have No Name

06. I Will Follow

07. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

08. MLK

09. The Unforgettable Fire

10. God Part II

11. Help / Bad

12. Van Diemen's Land

13. New Year's Day

14. Pride (In the Name of Love)

15. "40"

Recording Equipment - History

D3 > Analog Master > DAT-Master > CDR-3 > SHN > CDR

Comments

Outstanding recording overall. Clarity and crispness are just excellent, with absolutely clean output. Sound comes through pretty strong, very powerful, with a nice mix with Bono's vocals. Audience noise is not an issue, only adding a great live feeling with their participation. The only blemish is an edit between The Unforgettable Fire and God Part II, that cuts off a few seconds of the intro of the latter. An almost unnoticeable small edit can be found after Pride, that only affects to crowd noise during the encore.

The show ends prematurely due to Bono's voice problems. You can notice this problems when Bono really avoids the high notes during Bad. The three-song set with BB King's band is left out, going directly to "40". The last track, "40", includes after the song the comments of the promoter of the concert, while the audience is still singing "how long to sing this song". He talks in dutch, and says the next (according to Pimm Jal de la Parra's book U2 Live by Omnibus Press):

"Quiet please... you may have heard: Bono can't sing another note. With a hundred-thousand apologies, the best audience of the tour so far. His voice is gone, we have to end now. One thing: hold on your tickets".

After this, 6.000 tickets were valid for the four January dates in Rotterdam (1.500 per night), and the 10.000 remaining got their money back.