The Who

Wembley Football Stadium, 18th August 1979

The complete show in very good sound quality from the original master cassette tapes.

As far as I am aware this is the best recording of this show that is available.

Taper: Steven Carr

Very good recording in stereo. Complete show. Some small cuts. No adjustments to levels. Reasonable level of crowd noise between songs but little during the music. During the first song (Substitute) I was getting set-up and hence the quality is not so good as the single point microphone was not up in the air. At the start of the second song (I Can't Explain) the quality gets much better.

This was my first time to see the Who. It was just a shame it was not with Keith Moon. I went with three friends, we travelled to London on the day on the train and then caught the tube to Wembley. We hid all of our bottles of booze under a bush somewhere outside the stadium because somebody told us we would be confiscated if we tried to take them into the stadium. I had my tape recorder in a black sports bag and I got stopped and searched going into the stadium but they were only looking for bottles so they let me in without a problem. Having been to see Led Zeppelin two weeks before I knew I had to get to the front as quick as possible so off we went pushing through the crowd and eventually got parked in a spot about 25 metres from the stage in a central position. Now I wish I had taped all of the supporting acts because they were all good, Nils Lofgren, AC/DC (with Bon Scott), The Stranglers and then finally The Who. It was a wonderful day but we had problems getting home again due to a tube strike directly after the show, then to top it all off when we finally got to Kings Cross, British Rail had cancelled the train home! What a day...

Equipment Used to record the show: -

Single Point Stereo Microphone and ITT Studio 720 Portable Stereo Cassette Deck with no dolby noise reduction and two TDK-SA 90 Cassettes.

The transfer was made from the Master cassette tapes using the following equipment: -

Playback via Nakamichi ZX-7 cassette deck with manual adjustment to height and azimuth of playback head to match that of the original tape recorder to optimise the sound during playback.

Direct connection to analogue input of Audiophile 2496 soundcard via high quality Clicktronic interconnects with 24K gold plugs.

Transfer made at 48KHz 16bit resolution to wav files which I combined using Adobe Audition.

The wav file was trimmed at the start and end and normalised using Adobe Audtion I noticed that the speed of the recording was slow so I also corrected this then re-sampled down to 44.1Khz.

The 44.1kHz source was split into individual wav files and saved in FLAC format with no SBE's.

Track Listing: -

Substitute (a bit muffled)
I Can't Explain
Baba 'O Riley
The Punk and the Godfather
Behind Blue Eyes
Boris the Spider
Sister Disco
Drowned
Music Must Change (small cut at the start)
Magic Bus
Pinball Wizard
See me feel me
Trick of the Light
5:15
Long Live Rock (small cut right at the end)
Who Are You
My Generation (with long jam)
Dreaming from the Waist
Won't Get Fooled Again
1st encore - Summertime Blues
2nd Encore - The Real Me

For give away or trade only - do not sell or .mp3 (except for your own use).

Steven Carr - 26th January 2008

www.LiveMasterTapes.co.uk

Additional Notes(Sept. 2009)
This recording ran fast so this version is a speed/pitch corrected version. All tracks were joined together into 1 giant .wav file and adjusted -0.54 semitones(-3.071%) then retracked again using cdwave editor and flaced afterwards.

Runtime after speed correction 121:18