Prefab Sprout - Newcastle City Hall 8th April 2000 - Audience (A-)
From uncirculated minidisc master (ATRAC SP)


Paddy McAloon - vocals, guitar
Martin McAloon - bass
Neil Conti - drums
Jess Bailey - Keyboards


Listing

01. I Remember That
02. Bonny
03. The Sound of Crying
04. Machine Gun Ibiza
05. Andromeda Heights
06. We Let the Stars Go
07. Life's a Miracle
08. If You Don't Love Me
09. Jordan: The Comeback
10. Faron Young
11. Couldn't Bear to be Special
12. Dragons
13. Appetite
14. A Life of Surprises
15. Electric Guitars
16. Cars and Girls
17. Cruel
18. I'm a Troubled Man
19. Carnival 2000
20. Moving the River
21. Hey Manhattan
22. Lions in my Own Garden (Exit Someone)
23. Swans
24. One of the Broken
25. When Love Breaks Down
26. Goodbye Lucille #1
27. Cowboy Dreams
28. Looking for Atlantis (truncated)
29. Where the Heart is
30. Prisoner of the Past

Lineage Master Minidisc->SPDIF->Audacity->VST Equalisation+compression+dynamic limiting->declipping on applause only->Audacity track and flac

No 6 in a series of careful remasters of the Prefab Sprout 2000 tour, with the hometown gig in Newcastle. Lots of shoutouts to local friends and family, and a reference to the early residency at the Brewer's Arms in Gilesgate 20 years previously. Very nice recording, though there's a small taping problem in the encores, with looking for Atlantis a little bit dodgy and then truncated.

We're nearing the end of the first pass through the uncirculated tapes, with just Manchester and the two London gigs to come. I may return to Cambridge, Leeds and the Fleadh recording, all of which have been circulated already to see whether there's any room for improvement.


**Backstory, cut and pasted from Nottingham 30/3/2000**

A year or two ago, a big Sprout fan lent me his collection of minidisc masters of the stripped back Prefab Sprout tour in 2000 so I could transfer and archive them. This included pretty much the entire tour minus Warwick, Liverpool main show (due to a recorder problem only the encores were recorded), and the second half of Cambridge.

I did post a couple of the shows up on Dime last year, but was scratching my head about what to do with the others. There were problems with the recordings, often the levels were very low relative to the applause, and there are some excellent other recordings from the tour, including the BBC FM broadcast of Cambridge in an edited form, and excellent Leeds and Dublin recordings - Dublin in particular is definitive. So I put them to one side and got on with other projects.

However having recently had access to some excellent VST mastering tools, and suffering from a bit of a dearth of new material to work on, I decided to have a look at what could be done with the recordings. A touch of equalisation to round out the sound, then some careful compression and dynamic limiting to even out the levels between applause and music, then declipping of the limited applause only to clear the harshness the limiting left.

Searching for the Liverpool, Cambridge and Warwick shows from this tour, and any alternate recordings there may be. And of course any and all Prefab Sprout material.


See also http://psgigs.wikispaces.com and follow @sproutology on twitter.