U2 - Unauthorised Live Vol. 3 (The Lovetown Tour)

(Irish 1976-Present)
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I bought this U2 'Unauthorised Live' recording a while back, when they were really popular in Australia, as few bootlegs existed on CD format at the time and the series is no longer available. In fact, I've found quite a few other titles since at garage sales and flea markets, but none quite match the recording quality of this little gem.
This is a classic example of 'don't judge a book by it's cover' - the cover might look pretty average but the music is excellent, and I would compare it to any of their 'official live releases' such as 'Under a Blood Red Sky' and 'Rattle and Hum'.
The cover makes no mention of the origin of the recordings, but a little research on the Internet has revealed that the recordings were made during U2's Lovetown Tour in 1989-90 when they toured DownUnder, so I'm guessing the recordings were done in Australia and consequently released by an Australian company called Joker.
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The Lovetown Tour was limited in scope, but did try to reach places that their 1987 Joshua Tree Tour had missed, all the while avoiding the United States entirely. The tour's opening night was on September 21, 1989 at the Entertainment Centre in Perth, Australia. The first leg took place over the next 10 weeks in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. A brief second leg hit four countries in Europe for four weeks, ending on January 10, 1990 at the Sport Paleis Ahoy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Of the tour's 47 concerts, 23 were played in Australia.

The Lovetown Tour is famed among fans as it had the greatest set list variety of any U2 tour, including the use of six separate songs to open concerts, which is still U2's record amount of concert openers for one tour. The tour featured the most different original U2 songs of any tour in the 1980s, though it did not have as many total different songs as the Joshua Tree Tour, which featured a large number of cover songs.
B. B. King toured with the band and played the first set each night. At the end of U2's set, King and his band joined them for a short encore.

The tour was plagued by troubles with Bono's voice due to both excessive use and illness - he stated in concert that he caught "some pretty psychedelic germs" in Australia and that they were "having their Annual General Meeting" in his throat. These vocal troubles meant three Sydney concerts had to be postponed. Later, severe troubles meant a concert in Amsterdam had to prematurely conclude; two other Amsterdam shows were cancelled and replaced by four shows in Rotterdam, causing the tour to spill over into 1990 instead of ending on New Year's Eve at Dublin's Point Depot as planned. However, when Bono's voice was not troubling him, he had an impressive singing range, with the falsetto later mastered starting to seriously appear, but without sacrificing the powerful depth of his lower singing range.
As with all U2 tours from 1983 on, the stage and lighting design was done by Willie Williams. The tour name, possibly a contraction of the Rattle and Hum song "When Love Comes to Town", was the first not to be named for the band's then-current album, all of their subsequent tours have also had different names from any album [extract from wikipedia]
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The rip was taken from CD at 320kps and includes full album artwork (plain though it might be)
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Track Listing
01 - Twilight
02 - Two Hearts Beat As One
03 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
04 - An Cat Dubh
05 - I Threw A Brick Through A Window
06 - A Day Without Me
07 - October
08 - Gloria
09 - 11 O'Clock Tick Tock
10 - I Will Follow
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Band Members:
Paul Hewson (Bono) - Vocals
Dave Evans (The Edge) - Guitar
Adam Clayton - Bass
Larry Mullen - Drums
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U2 Link (86Mb) New Link 18/10/2024
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