Notes

A flawless pre-FM soundboard recording. This recording has seen many variants over the years - both dodgy sounding FM broadcast recordings and jumbled pre-FM versions with missing tracks and poor editing - but here it is completely unedited, without fake crowd noise and whispered radio IDs. The equalization's a bit heavy for my tastes, personally - it was not done by me - but nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable recording and is a must-have. There are some audible flaws present throughout the recording, which are likely on the original recorded tapes.

There is still a small amount of missing music: about 30 seconds between Shame and Somebody. The intro ambiance to Somebody is not present as a result, but this is true of all variants; presumably, this segment was not recorded on the master tapes. The recording cuts right after the "thank you" said by Dave after the end of Shame, and it seems that the next twelve seconds of audience noise are taken from the end of Just Can't Get Enough (around 5:17).

The audio mix of this pre-FM recording is a bit strange; certain elements are extremely far down in the mix, to the point of being nearly inaudible. Martin and Alan singing together during the chorus of Everything Counts is quite dissonant, for example; this is likely a mixing oversight as other releases such as the London '84 BBC pre-FM vinyl and especially "The World We Live In And Live In Hamburg" sound quite pleasant. The mix differs greatly to the several officially released tracks from this concert; the official tracks are quite reverberated and seem to emphasize keyboards, plus some sounds clearly audible on the officially released tracks are not audible whatsoever on any radio broadcast derived recording. For example, during the instrumental bridge of If You Want, the choir vocal pad at the end of each bar is heard on the official release, but not on this pre-FM recording and its variants. Additionally, Alan's vocals during If You Want are also quite buried in the mix; it is difficult to hear his vocals, which is unfortunate because the song is a duet with Dave and Alan both singing the entire song.

In 2016, DM Live Wiki surfaced a master FM broadcast cassette recording which was the best available source at the time. That FM broadcast is still available to stream and download at Source 2.

Detailed information about bootleg variants and commercial, non-official releases containing tracks from Basel is provided here: 1984-11-30 St. Jacobs Sporthalle, Basel, Switzerland/Bootleg and commercial variants

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

Total time: 1:35:00

Lineage

Pre-FM CD -> ripped to WAV (unknown ripping tool) -> equalization (unknown specifics) -> in Audacity 2.3.0: normalized to -0.1dB and any DC offset removed -> FLAC level 8

auCDtectTaskManager log included

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