56. Vince Jones at the Basement, 26/11/86

(A photo would be great here. Contact me if you have one)

This is the second of a pair of consecutive recordings made during the band’s November trip to Sydney that year. It was another hot Sydney night, an aspect made even more uncomfortable by the lack of ventilation and hot stage lights in the club, and the fact that Vince’s shows were always crowded to capacity. Whatever the situation on the previous night, the recording isn’t settled and the band actually finished 16 minutes into the third set for some reason. There is nothing in the previous night’s recording that isn’t better presented here, so it has been dropped from the list, yet the numbering retained to mark it’s existence. Musically, the band is heard evolving as Barney and Tony settle in and Barney brings some keyboards along for extra colour. The number of instrumental tunes is increasing as well, giving everyone a chance for to stretch out and while Steve Hope continues to make cameo appearances, these are developing to include the band more as well.

On a technical note, the room mic is rather mono, unfortunately, and I may have been experimenting with using M/S in an effort to control width given that the mic’s position was fixed. To do this for a 2 track recording with my limited rig, I had an outboard box made that took the S (stereo) channel and gave 2 outputs with one split phase inverted – it worked, but there obviously wasn’t enough of it in the mix. Also, on this recording there was a 35 second section at the beginning of the play-out for the first set (track 1.7) that no longer plays. For the sake of continuity, I have taken the first half of the out-head and edited it in to replace the missing initial half of the first head.

Set. 1 – play complete set

Set. 2 – play complete set

Set. 3 – play complete set

Play individual clips