Van Der Graaf live in Amsterdam 5 October 1977 (remastered)

00:00 Crying Wolf 05:15 Lizard Play 13:22 Chemical World 21:44 Still Life 30:48 Cat's Eye / Yellow Fever (Running) 36:06 The Sphinx In The Face 42:40 A Plague Of Sleepwalkers (medley) 55:29 Pioneers Over C. 1:11:30 Last Frame For some reason I couldn't find any other release of these tapes for this Oct '77 Paradiso concert, so this must be the YT premiere of such. Though I may assure you the originals never sounded this good, and I'm very much pleased with the final result of what I was able to do with this record. Anyway, some of my subscribes (namely @tallpity4646) requested me to work on some show band did featuring possibly Charles Dickie, so I've looked for the first proper tape I had on my hands and here it is. Some notes as it goes: before Charles joined the band played also like 3 shows during the summer - two of those were in Ibiza island, with 1st of them being amazing, according to band members memories as displayed in 'The Book' by Jim Christopulos and Phil Smart, but 2nd turned out to be very bizarre with Nick Potter playing bass too loud due to gear problems, so the band members tried to match that sound and it ended up to be... too tense, I suppose. Also there happened some others truobles for the band members, such as Graham Smith almost drowning at the shore, or band members (and other residents of Ibiza these days) observing some kind of UFO... No tapes were ever made for those, but anyway, later VDG released their 'The Quiet Zone" LP (recorded back in May - June) and hired Charles Dickie (somewhere in August). Seems like this is the 3rd ever recorded gig with Charles Dickie. There was also one recorded at Scheeßel (from 3rd of September, but I have only the incomplete recording, w/o first 3 songs) and Rotterdam (from 4rd of Septermber, the one there Charles got slightly drunk due to the band having a lengthy delay getting on stage, but this is one of the few recordings that I still don't have). Anyway, as we came to describing this very show: 'Crying Wolf' was played the 1st time since the spring series of concert band did when Graham Smith joined Peter Hammill, Guy Evans and Nick Potter and guys played in quartet format. 'Lizard Play' and 'Chemical World' were played the 1st time ever. 'Still Life' and 'Last Frame' were regular numbers at those early VDG shows happened during the spring of 1977, and also been played at both Scheeßel and Rotterdam. 'Cat's Eye" and 'The Sphinx...' also were played at Scheeßel and Rotterdam concerts, while 'A Plague of Sleepwalkers' and 'Pioneers Over C' were the world premieres played for the 1st time right here. 'A Plague' being new for the band members can be noted quite easily, cos Guy Evans did kind of unusual rhytmic pattern during those early verses (maybe playing by just memory) and he later re-arranged his perfomance to the same we're familiar with listening to 'Vital'. What was done to the tapes I've had: it consisted of two parts, the latter starting from the applauses after 'The Sleepwalkers'. You can see it coming somewhere at the 53:45 mark, with the tapes overlapping one into another. I'd prefer to have the 1st tape to continue, cos it had much wider stereo-base, even though having slightly more reverb. This 2nd tape (capturing 'Pioneers Over C' and 'The Last Frame') was just straight mono, so I've tried it to sound similar to how I've treated the 1st part. Both tapes were too fast (2nd tape even slightly more, about 0,13 semitones faster than the 1st one), so they were corrected. As usual I've rearranged stereo-base, so the second tape is no more mono. Vocal track was manually raised at some places where PH sings too quiet/far from microphone, all the separate tracks went through the according EQ settings. Noise reduction applied, also the 1st tape went through some de-reverb (FoxJoy Reverb Removal), although I tried (as usual) to treat the originals carefully, so the de-reverb was the slight one, cos harsh ones tend to deform how it all sounded irl. I used also the Apollo_LQ_MP3_restoration plug-in (applied with the MSST tool). On the future releases I also plan on enhancing tapes with the freshly installed Izotope RX 10, it's just some info for few of those who were asking what I do to the tapes. Usually I use both mvsep.com (which has all that's needed for the work on the tapes) and the UVR installed on my PC. Try your luck if you want to make a better shot on any of the tapes you want. Cheers and see ya all somewhere later in November, when I hopefully will be able to release the better version of the Peter Hammill 1974 November 27-28 shows (check the info on the issue I have with them currently on the early part of this video). *The picture is taken from the 'Van Der Graaf Cat's eye Promo clip' video you can also find here on YouTube and enhanced with using different shots from the same video:    • Van Der Graaf Cat's eye Promo clip