Jethro Tull
1972-03-16
Victoria Hall
Stoke On Trent, UK
Soft Venus or The Other Half
UPGRADE

Remaster & editing by TheTooleMan, August 2007

I found I had a better copy of this show than that in the torrent found at http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=156548 . It is at least one generation closer to the original. In addition, the tracks on my copy are in the correct order, unlike that of torrent 156548, where “Cross-Eyed Mary” and “A New Day Yesterday” are flopped. Also, Aqualung is complete here, whereas it was cut short in the other torrent.

Repeated passages, loud clicks and pops, and dead spots where someone rewound and restarted the original tape for the copy have all been removed. Pitch has been lowered to something closer to correct. There is some obvious difference in the quality of either the original tapes or the ones used in making the copies we have of this recording, but I reduced that with EQ. And no noise reduction software was used to clean up the sound, only a parametric equalizer to shave off hiss at high frequencies and rumble in the lows.

“Thick as a Brick” sounds pretty good here. There are tape glitches in the intro to Cross-Eyed Mary which could not be fixed, and some hiss and background noise remain in the recording. It won’t win any prizes for sonic clarity. But it was a great Tull show, and you can hear it a lot better now.

If anyone can lay hands on a lower generation copy, please share it! This is one of the few TAAB shows which are complete from beginning to end, including encores.

TheTooleMan
August 2007

Tracks:
Disk 1
Ian’s Introduction
Thick as a Brick pt 1
News and Weather
Thick as a Brick pt 2

Disk 2
Insane Introduction (lots of bad tape here)
Cross-Eyed Mary
The Girls Playing ‘Name That Tune’
A New Day Yesterday
Aqualung
Wind-Up
Locomotive Breath
Hard-headed English General
Wind Up (reprise)