The Spectrum, Philadelphia PA

First of all, I must admit that Peter Gabriel's So Tour for some reason isn't one of my favourites of his. Since I want to cover every tour of Peter's career in the MUPPET project, I simply couldn't leave out the So Tour. That's where the search for a great sounding, or the best performance, or the most interesting setlist of the So Tour began. I did have a couple of gigs from the tour, but none of them were outstanding in performance. The July 21, 1987 Philadelphia soundboard is of course fantastic in sound, but since it was already heavily circulating, I skipped that choice. I had long heard stories about the two Philadelphia gigs, half a year earlier. It was said that Peter did the only performance of Wallflower on this tour at one of these two November gigs. At that point I thought it simply was never recorded, and this one-off performance was sadly never captured. I've always been on the look-out for it though, and after a long time I came across a list which listed the second night of Philadelphia. After asking about Wallflower, it turned out that the recording did indeed have the song, so you might understand my excitement when I finally found it after a lot of searching :)

Wallflower is done instead of Here Comes the Flood: Peter plays the first half of the song on piano. It is not really clear why he simply stopped in the middle of the song, but the two minutes that he DOES play are simply beautiful. Apart from the one-off Wallflower, Not One of Us is done here for the first time on the tour. Also one of Peter's most well-known songs Solsbury Hill is introduced for the first time into the setlist.

The performance throught-out the show is very good. San Jacinto is excellent, with some nice playing by Tony Levin. Shock the Monkey is funky as ever, and Not One of Us gets an energetic performance. The Family and the Fishing Net is a great rendition as well. Lay Your Hands on Me features the infamous backwards dive into the audience, but also has a great intro. In Your Eyes couldn't do any harm on this tour: the magic and joy was there at every gig with Youssou 'n Dour on guest vocals, and it is well-captured on this recording too.

One final note: Manu Katche-fans will love this recording: the drums, and especially the toms, are high in the mix, and have a fantastic sound! :)

WHAT WAS DONE?

After a 32-bit conversion, the volume was brought up to an audible level, to make work easier to judge. First equalization was done. With raising some of the high frequencies, hiss became more audible. Some slight noise reduction was used. This still left a lot of hiss in, but it just made it a bit less annoying, while not destroying warmth and the music itself.

My favourite remastering-tool multiband compression was done after this. During the multiband-compression I expanded the stereo image of some of the frequencies, while doing the opposite on some of the others. This helped a lot to get a better balanced sound as well.

After this was completed, I needed to fix a lot of moments in the recording where the sound suddenly got muddy for 1-2 seconds. This is still very audible in a lot of places, but at least it's a little less annoying than what it was first. There were numerous cuts inbetween the songs, which were corrected as well. There was also a 5 second-cut in the Red Rain intro. I used the Rochester '86 recording to fill in this gap. It is very clear where this happens, but the music continues now, which sounds a lot better to me than a sudden stop.

Finally, some very slight EQ tweaks were done, and the dynamics were expanded just a very little to let the recording breath a little more. Some extreme loud peaks like loud audience claps inbetween the songs were brought to a lower level by hard limiting them. The last step was normalization to a -.1 dB level. Finally, the recording was converted back to 16-bit, with dithering.

A FINAL THANK YOU

Thanks to LC for trading this special gig!
Thanks to Casimiro for helping out with the CD labels in the artwork!
Hope you enjoy this remaster! Jesper Moonen August 13, 2004 [Jesper Moonen]