The following are reviews of live bootleg recordings and are listed to give fans information on quality and content, and in no way are meant to encourage or condone such recording sales or practices by this club or publication.
A CD review by Michael Simone
Disc 1
Total time 65:34
Disk 2
Total time 55:17 minutes
Recorded live at N.E.C. Birmingham, West Midlands, England, this double CD boot, is one of the few boots of an entire Roger Waters concert. The first half consisting of most of the Pink Floyd material he performed during the show, the exception are the two ending encores. And the second half consists of the entire Pros and Cons of HitchHiking. The sound quality is VG+(very good plus) and excellent in spots, but though it's not sound board quality, as bootlegs and audience recordings go, a VG+ is highly recommended.
Silver Rarities has definitely improved both on their content and their packaging. Not only is this 2 CD set a complete concert with plenty of music for your money on both discs, but the packaging is much better than previous Silver Rarity CDs. The front cover is a copy of the 1984 British tour program cover, and the insert is a double page fold out with Gerald Scarfes caricatures of Roger, Reg, and Eric on the inside, and the band lineup on the back, also copies from pages in the tour program. The CD back cover gives all the song listings over the bare bottomed hitchhiker, again from the tour program. Though it doesn't give much more information about the concert other than the city, date, and song times.
CD's
Roger Waters
SIRA 45/46 Silver Rarities
"The Pros and Cons of HitchHiking Performed Live"
The 1984 tour concerts were shorter than the 1985 shows, in that during the 1985 tour "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert," "Southampton Dock," "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)," "The Happiest Days of Our Lives," and "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" were added while "Hey You" was dropped. Though the 1984 tour did feature Eric Clapton which more than made up for a shorter initial set. The main thing that can recommend this boot is that it's a complete Roger Waters concert, and the sound quality is well above average. There are many excellent live renditions of songs such as "Welcome to the Machine," "Set the Controls ...," "Running Shoes," "For the First Time Today," and many others. A nice collectors item if you can afford it.
Roger Waters
David Gilmour
This boot Lp is very rare especially in the U.S. as it was made in Holland, and has been out of print for a few years now. The sound quality is G+(Good Plus). If you are used to listening to your CD boots, which usually are very good to sound board quality, go back and try listening to your old Lp boots for a change. Oh what a difference. Because of the advances in modern audio technology, even most of my audience taped recordings sound better than the earlier LP boots.
This recording was made from an audience recording and the acoustics sound like your listening through a cone. The concert isn't bad though. But I wonder why so little was recorded on both sides of the album.
The Album cover design is great. One thing I miss about the old Lp format, was that the album covers were not only big enough to be held and read comfortably, but more importantly, they also contained alot more information, and often were real works of art. They could be discussed and viewed and looked at.
The front cover, has a mostly color collage of pictures, one of Dave, one of Rog, One of Paris, and (I guess) one of Stockholm, along with an old geezer that looks like Robert E. Lee, a caricature of Margaret Thatcher, an ink sketch of a fairy tale drawing, and two Japanese swimsuit models. The back has a great cartoon drawing, (not done by Gerald Scarfe,) of a butcher grinding someone up in a meat grinder with a headline of "Making It All Happen." In the upper left corner is a small photo of some stairs leading up the outside of a building, and in the lower right corner is a small photo of an oriental looking native boy with a spear. Credited for the albums manufacture is as follows: Produced by Nuclear World LTD.; Engineered/Mastered by Tom Master; Artwork/Lettering by Passage Studios. Made in Holland, Wall RecordsÑDean Haag.