HW08

Palace Theatre, Manchester, 28th April 1975

This is the second of the two nights Genesis played at Manchester on the latter part of the UK Lamb tour, and also comes from Colin Dodd's tapes of the evening's performance. 

There is not really a lot to say about this remaster that I haven't said in my notes for HW02; the 1st of the Manchester concerts. The performance as ever was exemplary, with an awesome extended Waiting Room (Peter adding vocals), and the second encore with Watcher of the Skies. 

The master tapes of this evening are, if anything, slightly brighter than those of the 27th, which may be just an example of how tapes degrade inconsistently over time rather than anything in the original recording itself. The tapes (two Phillips C120s) were flipped during the applause after Chamber of 32 Doors, and when the first tape runs out about a minute into 'it!'. I have patched the applause in the first flip, but as Colin mentions in his comments, the second flip caused more of a problem...

The tape speed wobbles that are present on the second tape are quite extreme to begin with, 'it!' is pretty unlistenable. 'The Musical Box' also has this regular lift in pitch, from the tape slowing, 'grabbing', during recording, although as the tape progresses the problem eases. On Colin's original transcription of his tape, which has been circulating on CDR, he only replaces 'it!', so you can hear the problems that remain on 'Musical Box'. 

I have chosen to totally replace both 'it!' and 'Musical Box' for this remaster. During the audience interactions between songs, these speed wobbles are not apparent. So I have retained the audience sections; the applause after 'it!' and Peter's intro to Musical Box, and the applause between MB and 'Watcher'. You can still hear the pitch instabilities slightly during Watcher, but of course, it is a feature of this evenings concert, being the encore that was missed the previous night.

As with HW02, I have made a new transcription of Colin's master tapes, optimising for mono. I have then denoised the recording and lifted the treble out a bit more. The bass was nice and strong, and there was no need for eq balancing. Early reflections were added to the final audio to open up the mono soundstage a little. 

As with the 1st Manchester recording, I have had to place the disc side edit between Waiting Room and Anyway, to give 2 discs of roughly equal length. This annoys the hell out of at least one friend of mine, who likes to hear the whole of the 3rd & 4th parts of the Lamb uninterrupted. All I can say in my defence is that I agree on aesthetic grounds, but considering that audio versions of these discs will be weeded on from one person to another, having 80 min discs is inviting copy errors. Also, with this recording featuring 'Watcher', it would have overshot the 80min mark anyway. 

The artwork for this release comes from Kryzsztoph Welian once again, who designed the cover to companion the earlier Manchester recording. Spot the differences :-))