The Tour Of Life (Godfather Records GR 758/759)
Apollo, Manchester, England – April 10th, 1979
Disc 1 (59:35): Intro with backstage chat and vocal warm-ups, Moving, Saxophone Song, Room For The Life, Them Heavy People, Man With The Child In His Eyes, Egypt, L’Amour Looks Something Like You, Violin, The Kick Inside, In The Warm Room, Fullhouse, Strange Phenomena, Hammer Horror
Disc 2 (73:33): Kashka From Baghdad, Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake, Act III Intro with backstage chat & vocal warm-ups, Wow, Coffee Homeground, In Search Of Peter Pan, Symphony In Blue, Feel It, Kite, James & The Cold Gun, Oh England My Lionheart, Wuthering Heights, Curtain Call & speech. Bonus tracks: Another Day (with Peter Gabriel) (Kate Christmas 1979 Special), Moving (Japanese TV 1978), She’s Leaving Home (Japanese TV 1978), The Long And Winding Road (Japanese TV 1978)
Kate Bush’s only tour lasted six weeks in the UK in the spring of 1979. Recently surfaced and pressed by Godfather onto silver is the April 10th show at the Apollo in Manchester, England. It is sourced from a VHS cassette tape of an untelecast Granada TV special “On The Road.”
It contains the complete concert including the behind-the-scenes vocal warm ups before the show and all the poems recited by her brother. The sound is very good but restricted. It definitely sounds like a video soundtrack but it is a more complete document from the tour, much better than the four song On Stage EP released in September 1979 and the twelve-song Live at the Hammersmith Odeon video/CD package in 1981.
Another silver pressed edition of the show was produced my Idol Mind on Manchester Apollo 1979 (KB790410). Godfather is distinguished from Idol Mind for the copious amounts of bonus material.
Bush draws her set list from the first two albums, playing about all the songs from both including early versions of “Violin” and “Egypt” and the unrecorded “Never For Ever.”
It’s atmospheric also for conveying a more human side to Bush including her smoker’s cough to her cursing “fookin’ ‘ell” when she messes up the beginning of “Fullhouse” to altering the lyrics to “Oh, Manchester, I don’t want to go” in “Oh England” (an alteration she did for all the venues).
Godfather include various bonus tracks from her Christmas special in 1979 and the Japan TV appearance the previous year. Soon after this tape was posted online it has to be shut down when the site received a DMCA notice from IFPI UK. It is scarce now already, so the label have provided a much needed way for Bush collectors to physically obtain this important tape.
Hopefully in the future the actual video tape will surface to provide yet another definitive statement from the era. But to have even this tape is brilliant and The Tour Of Life on Godfather is an essential release worth having.
1 Comment
Thanks for the nice review and evaluation. Yes, I agree, a great project for the video arm of Godfather (Apocolypse Sound) would be their treatment of the “On The Road” Granada TV video tape. On thing is almost certain, Kate Bush will never undertake releasing it. And while I’m dreaming of wishes come true, as others have done on this site from time to time, how about taking the professional quality video of Yes at Queens Park Rangers stadium May 10, 1975 and marrying it with a proper mix of the excellent soundboard audio. Something else that the performing artists will probably never do. Thanks