AUTUMN 1996

Issue No 10

Contents

• Fish Soup (News)
• The Best of Manfred Mann's Earthband (Warner archives)
• Four Manfred Mann Originals - EMI
• Manfred Mann The Manfred Mann Album/ The Five Faces EMI
• McCalla 'Hot From The Smoke'
• Platform End - The Video
• Wendy's Story
• MMEB UK Tour - Spring 1996
• Antipodean Manfred - Collecting Manfred Down Under
• Winged Messenger (Letters)
• Notes from America (Greg Russo)

MMEB UK Tour - Spring 1996

When news broke of the Soft Vengeance album and tour I was rather excited, having not yet seen Earth Band play live. Better still, all six of the UK dates were within reasonable driving distance of my home town of Birmingham. Having such a choice was nice: if money was no object I could have attended them all, but I restricted myself to three - in Stoke, Brierley Hill and London. Also it's possible to have too much of a good thing, and I don't think there is any band I'd want to see more than three times in one week. I doubt I'll ever get near Barry Winton's tally of 80+ Earth Band gigs.

After a near miss on the Stoke one-way system, I parked up and was chuffed to find that the Wheatsheaf was just around the corner. With a foot high stage and space for less than a few hundred, it seemed hardly the location to mark Manfred's first show with Chris Thompson in a decade, but hey ho, a gig's a gig!

Brierley Hill's Robin, is vastly superior to the Stoke venue, with sensible promotion that was enough to sell out the gig. Nick Roberts, a great guy I met at The Good Earth filming last October, had travelled up from Swansea without a ticket, but still got in! There were loads of other Platform Enders here tonight, along with Chris' young son Daniel, who joined dad on stage during 'Blinded'.

I'd been to the Bottom Line loads of times to watch Thompson front the SAS Band - this was to be the first non-SAS gig I'd seen there. Another venue with the right reputation, this one sold out too.

I was mightily impressed by the performance, from the opening instrumental (who's only familiar moment was a snippet from 'Joybringer') onwards. I admire bands that play songs they don't record, another example on this tour being 'The Times They Are A Changin'. Other Dylan tunes in the set were 'Father of Day', 'Quinn' (no surprises there), and one of my favourites off the new album, ''Shelter From The Storm', sounding stunning with the lead vocals from Noel, Chris and Mick.

I could be wrong, but I don't remember hearing more than four songs from Soft Vengeance - the first four on the CD! One of these, 'Play With Fire', featured more excellent rearrangement in the form of lyrics from Arthur Brown's Fire. Spookily enough, this is the third song with Brown's vocals to have been done later on by Thompson! (For trainspotters like myself, the other two are We Gotta Get Outta This Place and The Tell Tale Heart). The rest of the Earth Band set was 'Greatest Hits - based, and they kept the same set each night.

So well worth all the petrol - here's looking forward to the next tour!

Steve Hillyard

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