*** Kate's Live Bootlegs UPDATED ****

[rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)]

        Thanks to Paul R. for the info about the NEVER FOR EVER boxed 
set.  Another box I can't afford. :-( 
        He also asked about the live bootlegs.  The Bristol set is the 
most complete, but the Manchestor one is a little better quality 
(though all comparisions are relative!, it's still _BAD_  I just got up 
the nerve to listen to it today, and am afraid to get the ones that 
don't even sound as good!).
 
        Here's part I of an article I compiled a few weeks ago.  I've 
updated and corrected it somewhat since then. 




KATE BUSH LIVE BOOTLEGS

LAST UPDATED: August 21, 1992

        by Andrew Marvick (IED), Ronald Hill, Doug Allen, Woj, and 
Barth Richards. 

        This is a compilation of various messages from Love-Hounds, 
done by Ron Hill who takes responsibilty for any errors that may have 
occured during editing.


        There are five main sources for the material on the live 
bootlegs.

        1) The official _Hammersmith_Odeon_ videotape.  The best 
sounding boots simply are recorded off of the laser-disk.  
        The official video tape contains only one hour out of the two 
and a half hour show.  The un-edited film has only been seen at the 
1985 convention.  So far, no audio recordings off of the un-edited film 
have surfaced.

        2) Fan-recorded tapes from the Bristol, Paris, Manchester, 
London Palladium, and Amsterdam concerts.  There is also the 
unidentified (and undentifiable) "Temple Of Truth" tape (see bootleg 
entry). Note that there is only one known tape from each of these 
concerts, although they have been released in different formats.  The 
sound _is_ abysmal, there are no bootlegs of the 1979 concerts that 
have good sound. The best-sounding one that includes all the songs and 
incidental bits and pieces is probably the Manchester concert (a two-LP 
set, though only a little less complete than the _Dreamtime_ 3-LP set). 
But they're all miserable.      They feature not only songs, but a 
chant, readings by John Carder Bush, and incidental bits of music, all 
of which were heard while Kate changed costumes in between songs during 
the concert. Specifically, there are: a heartbeat passage preceding 
"Room For the Life"; an ethnic chant performed by the band in unison; 
two synthesizer introductions to songs; three brief readings by 
John--one known as "Two in One Coffin" (preceding "The Kick Inside"), 
the others passages of unidentified prose (perhaps by John); an 
arrangement of Satie's 1st "Gymnopedie", which is used to frame 
"Symphony in Blue", and a short jam session by the KT Bush Band. Also 
of note is the live version of "Egypt", which sounds very different 
from the LP version. 


        3) Kate. This was a forty-five minute TV special which aired in 
England on December 28, 1979; sometimes called the "Christmas Special". 
In addition to a couple of lip-synchs of LP tracks and one or two new 
vocal performances of old songs, several new and unique bits of music 
appeared on this show. They include a brief introduction, an 
arrangement of part of Satie's "First Gymnopedie" (as an introduction 
to "Symphony in Blue"); an early version of "December Will Be Magic 
Again"; a choral introduction for Peter Gabriel (Kate's guest on the 
show--he sings "Here Comes the Flood"), sometimes referrred to as 
"Peter, the Angel Gabriel"; a brief bit of blues piano; and a duet with 
Peter of Roy Harper's song, "Another Day". 

        4) There are a few clips from other live Tour of Life shows on 
three different TV programmes: the Tour episode of _Nationwide_ (UK 
TV); a German programme called _Kate_Bush_in_Concert_ (which has some 
songs from the Hamburg and Mannheim concerts); and a Swedish show 
called _Rockdrotting_ (with a few songs from the Stockholm concerts). 
All are in mono TV sound, however. 

        5) Bill Duffield concert.  A modified Tour of Life show, staged 
at London's Hammersmith Odeon on May 12, 1979 for the benefit of the 
surviving relatives of Bill Duffield, Kate's lighting director for the 
Tour, who had died in an accident at the very beginning of the tour.  
The concert featured Steve Harley, Peter Gabriel.  In addition to songs 
from The Tour of Life, this concert featured Let It Be, sung by Steve 
Harley, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush ;"Them Heavy People" with verses 
sung by Harley and Gabriel; "The Woman With the Child in Her Eyes" sung 
by Harley and Gabriel; Gabriel's "I Don't Remember" sung as a duet by 
Gabriel and Kate; and Harley's "Come Up and See Me", sung by Harley, 
with Kate and Gabriel on backing vocals. 
        See _Japanese_Fan_Club_EP_, _If_You_Could_See_Me_Fly_ and 
_Passing_Through_Air_.


ALBUMS

        _Japanese_Fan_Club_EP_ The more common yellow-vinyl edition is 
not the original version of this disk.  The _actual_ record, as put out 
by the Japanese fan-club (now apparently defunct and succeeded by a 
different group in Japan), was a simpler affair: a red flex-disk with a 
white sleeve. On the disk where a label ordinarily would go was a KT 
symbol in silver. The disk had John's spoken message first, followed by 
Kate's brief message, followed finally by the excerpt from the live 
performance of "Let It Be" from a fan's in-audience (i.e., pirated) 
Walkman recording of the benefit concert for Bill Duffield. (The other 
singers on that track are Steve Harley and Peter Gabriel.) 

        _Wow_ : a two-record set containing a poor stereo dub of the 
Hammersmith odeon video's audio track and a mono dub of the BBC tv 
special _kate_ (one on each record).  This is probably the first KaTe 
booTleg, appearing in 1982 or early 1983 and was put out by New York 
based bootleggers. 
 
        _Moving_ : beautiful re-packaging of _Wow_.  Equally poor audio 
though.  Made in the UK. 
 
        _Live in Paris_ (1984): single LP containing excerpts of the 
Paris concert.

        "Kate Bush Live in Europe 79 & 80" is a double album credits as 
being from the non-existant Fan Club of Taiwan.   This also appeared as 
a cassette tape.  One record is the soundtrack to the"Kate Bush Live at 
the Hammersmith Odeon" video tape, and the other album is the 
soundtrack to the hour long Christmas special called "Kate" that she 
did in 79.  

        "Kate Bush Live in Europe 79 - 80" a re-packaged three-record 
set that consists of: 1.) a true stereo transfer to vinyl of the whole 
of "Live at Hammersmith Odeon"; 2.) a transfer of the television sound 
track from Kate's 1979 Christmas special (the same TV-hum-filled audio 
track heard on the various video copies), which originally appeared 
along with 1.) as the above-mentioned two-record set called "Wow"; and 
3.) a copy of part of a 1979 Paris concert, which previously appeared 
as the above mentioned Paris LP.  All of these records were pressed by 
the same bunch of people, under several label pseudonyms, most often 
"Rock Solid Records" and"International Records" of New York.


     _A Bird in the Hand_ (1986) is _the_ worst ripoff of all the KT 
boots. Don't buy it unless you have never heard anything from the 
Hammersmith concert video at all before. All it is is an _edited_ 
transfer of the Hi-fi audio track from the video-cassette of the Live 
at Hammersmith Odeon film. Furthermore, the stereo channel separation 
is virtually completely lost in the boot version, although the pressing 
(surface noise) is o.k.  But this particular bootleg doesn't even 
include the whole 53-minute soundtrack! Only about nine songs (perhaps 
eight are listed, but as IED recalls nine are included on the record) 
are transferred, even though other boots have a better stereo transfer 
of the entire soundtrack on single disks. So steer clear!
        The cover boasted two fine early photos in blue ink with pink 
borders. Interestingly, this bootleg is marked: "cover produced in 
U.S.A., 1986"; and according to the labels, the record's alias is 
"Don't Let Me Go".

        _Under the Ivy Bush_.  (1988)  This one features quite slick 
packaging, although the photos used are obviously from positives. The 
cover is of the Japanese-_TKI_ pink leotard shot (uncropped, of 
course). The album is a hodge-podge, but is quite interesting.  It 
bears the misleading label "previously unreleased live German tracks."  
This refers to tracks one and two which are simply mono tapes of the LP 
tracks of "Running Up That Hill" and "The Big Sky" as used by Kate for 
lip-synch performances. The only differences between these and the LP 
tracks are that these are in terrible low-fi TV sound, and they include 
a studio audience cheering at the beginning and end of the lip-synch 
tracks. By the way, these two tracks are taken from Kate's appearance 
on the German TV show "Peter's Pop Show", which was also re-broadcast 
on a French program, both of which aired in the fall of 1985.
     Track 3 is another matter altogether. It is a live version of 
"James and the Cold Gun" that has never appeared in any boot or video 
that IED has seen before. It's not from the Hammersmith film, nor is it 
like the "On Stage" version of the Hammersmith version, nor is it from 
the Bristol or the Paris shows. The sound is better than average for 
bootleg live material, and it's a really confident, loose performance.
     Tracks 4 and 5 are just the Satie "Gymnopedie" and "Symphony in 
Blue" from "Kate", the 1979 Christmas special. However, the audio on 
these tracks is _far_ superior to that on the earlier bootleg transfers 
of the "Kate" program.
     Side Two starts off with "The Man With the Child in His Eyes" from 
the "Kate" program.
     Track 2, Side Two is just an excerpt from the German documentary 
on Kate called "Kate Bush in Concert". You can hear the last words of 
one of Kate's answers to an interviewer's question, which segues into 
the live version of "Violin" from the TV program's filmed excerpts of 
the Mannheim and Hamburg concerts.
     Track 3 is just the "Hammer Horror" from the Tour of Life. (The 
specific concert is untraceable, really, because this recording of the 
song was made by Kate in the studio with the KT Bush Band specifically 
for the Tour, so that she wouldn't have to worry about singing for at 
least one song in the show, which left her a bit freer to dance during 
that song. Consequently this track is identical in all the concerts).
      Track 4, Side Two begins with some bootlegger's idea of a joke: 
it's a phrase from an interview Kate gave for the German TV film "Kate 
Bush In Concert" (IED believes), which the bootleggers have 
_backwards-masked_! The words that Kate utters, when played backwards, 
are: "...will be totally believed by an awful lot of people." Ha ha.
     Track 5 is a pre-tour live version of "Wuthering Heights", taken 
(probably) from one of the two German TV shows on which Kate appeared 
to perform the song in 1978. The sound, again, is quite good for a 
transfer from TV.
     Track 6, the last track on the album, is again a reasonably clear 
transfer from a thin, mono TV original. This one, however, is something 
special: the live version of "Under the Ivy" which Kate performed solo, 
accompanying herself on piano, in Abbey Road Studios for the satellite 
broadcast of a special edition of the U.K.  TV program _The Tube_.
te listenable recording of the live version of "Let It Be" which Kate 
gave at the Amnesty concerts. It's not earth-shaking, but it's a _huge_ 
artistic advance on the performance of the same song which Kate gave 
with Steve Harley and Peter Gabriel in 1979.  This is a very thoughtful 
and well-thought-out interpretation, and Kate sings all but the second 
verse this time around (IED can't say for sure who the male singer in 
this version is, but supposes it could be a very hoarse Gabriel?).

---
rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)
NetRunner's Paradise BBS, San Diego CA