Probably the same tool that kept blowing the whistle in the "Parade" boot from Wembley! I want to shove that damn whistle down their throat!

Note to everyone in the world: A WHISTLE IS NOT A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT AND THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE CIRCUMSTANCE WHERE THE BLOWING OF A WHISTLE HAS MADE OR EVER WILL MAKE ANY SONG BETTER.

There, I feel better.

Juicy information from all, including those ebay tapes...what the heck, I'm sure many of us would have paid big bucks for those had we known!

We're lucky to follow an artist who is so narcissistic, and footage will spill out at some point but perhaps not until my eyesight is extremely poor and I have to turn the volume up.

I agree, such a shame technology wasn't up to the job in the early years...but then if it had been, the music would have sounded different...the tech was of it's time and that's just the way it is.

I'm still looking forward to 'Prince's Home Videos: The Footage He Didn't Want The World To See', due to be shown on Sky 1 around 2040.

unique said:

xenophobia2002 said:

a 10 minute audience video recording from Rotterdam exist. Never to be released, only a handfull of people have ever seen it ..

how come only 10 mins? was the taper caught or did they chicken out to avoid being caught or batter run out, tape run out etc? or just crap quality and they gave up? or did someone trip over the power cable and pull it out the wall socket? you needed muscles like arnie to hold one of those things from the 80s. there were several deaths each year from camcorders falling on children at xmas parties

My Uncle had a Sharp model back in '83 and the battery pack was separate from the camera itself - both were almost the size of a shoebox. So kudos to anyone for filming shows back then!

Scotsman1999 said:

unique said:

how come only 10 mins? was the taper caught or did they chicken out to avoid being caught or batter run out, tape run out etc? or just crap quality and they gave up? or did someone trip over the power cable and pull it out the wall socket? you needed muscles like arnie to hold one of those things from the 80s. there were several deaths each year from camcorders falling on children at xmas parties

My Uncle had a Sharp model back in '83 and the battery pack was separate from the camera itself - both were almost the size of a shoebox. So kudos to anyone for filming shows back then!

i know what you mean. i pity the guy who had to stick that up his arse to get it into the venue. no wonder they could only film for 10 minutes

Dewrede said:

unique said:

i just spent literally about 80 mins checking my completist collection against a list (ie. using a list and checking i had everything), and it's right there isn't a fully shot SOTT normal tour show in circulation. you have the first ave 87 pro shot, the new years show at paisley, you have a few soundboards, you have the SOTT movie outtakes from paisley, and a few tv performances, and a few tv clips from main shows, but not one proshot or cammed main show

if you look back, there was only a few cammed shows until the 90s as camcorders were fucking huge things using full size VHS tapes. it would be like trying to smuggle in a box of timberland boots under your jumper, whereas now we have cellphones that shoot HD footage that would litereally fit up your arse. theres one cam job from 85, god knows how they got in with that, they must have had help from an insider, then you have the paris and japan shows from 86, and the quality is fucking awful. skip 87 and you start to get the odd thing in 88, nothing in 89, and things start to kick off in the 90s with cam jobs, but the quality is nothing better than absolute shit. theres only rock in rio in 91 which was fortunately proshot in full in excellent quality multi cam broadcast, then from 92/93 you get a reasonable amount of shows and the quality starts to get a bit better, but it's usually shakeycam stuff from far back, with people hiding cams in holdalls with holes cut out, pretty unwatchable really. theres one or two watchable shows from 95, just one shakycam from japan 96, but by 97 the quality starts to pickup a fair bit, smaller cams, stabilization stuff and some reasonably watchable stuff. security starts to get real tight but you have a nice berlin show from 2002 and a bunch of watchable shows from 2004, but as all the shows are pretty much the same, you just need to stick to the pro shot LA tour opener. the o2 videos were pretty crap as security was tighter than a gnats ass so even though cams were small, tech was good, you needed massive balls of steel to shoot one of those shows

whats nice now is with the advent of cameraphones and youtube we enter the new world where a whole show can be peiced together by editing together all the youtube clips synched to a complete audio recording, and the end results are pretty amazing. lots of good quality HD footage, mostly widescreen and close to the stage, and as they are made up of lots of clips you get an interesting change of camera viewpoint instead of a fixed static camera, so you get close ups most of the time, and further back shots and shots from the video screens

it's just a shame we didn't have all that back in the old days, but we still got things covered pretty well on the audio front, but a lot of recordings from back then were a bit ropey. these days the quality is pretty excellent and every show gets circulated so we have a great document of his career

i disagree ;

1990 - 06 - 03 - Feyenoord Stadium , Rotterdam

1990 - 06 - 07 - Alsterdorfer Sporthalle , Hamburg

1990 - 08 - 04 - Festivalterrein , Wercher

1990 - 08 - 05 - Ijsstadion Thialf , Heereveen

are all decent/good imo

[Edited 8/16/10 4:53am]

i'll check these when i get home as i think IT would have a shit fit if i streamed them from my home pc to the office. i vaguely recall heereveen and hamburg weren't too bad and the rotterdam and wercher ring a bell, but i'd been checking out a few lately and can't believe people were watching some of this stuff on vhs at the time. i suppose tellys were much smaller then. i was flicking through stuff on my 50" plasma, and it really shows up how bad some of the stuff it. i think some of the cammers got jobs in hollywood doing those movies were the fucking camera shakes about all over the place and you get seasick and want to vomit, like cloverfield and all them iraq war movies that look the same

Video bootlegs prior to the advent of pocket size cameras were often (but not always) from a) someone at the venue filming with a camera that never left the site, b) someone associated with the group/artist, c) tv broadcasts. How those got leaked is another question. There was the ocassional backpack setup snuck into a venue. But then you'd have to hope security doesn't care, or that you can dodge them the entire show. And I'm assuming that you had a battery that held more than an hour charge. The SOTT tour is actually quite a long time ago - cameras were huge! The internet didn't even exist for the public yet. I know some of this stuff has been said before, but if you put it all together with the small amount of European only shows it actually makes perfect sense. There isn't even much video from that time covering the jam bands who allowed recording, such as the Grateful Dead and the Allman Bros. Alomst everything that is in circulation for those bands comes from the venue cameras, used to supply footage for the in house video screens, filming done for tv broadcasts, or the bands themselves.

unique said:

i'll check these when i get home as i think IT would have a shit fit if i streamed them from my home pc to the office. i vaguely recall heereveen and hamburg weren't too bad and the rotterdam and wercher ring a bell, but i'd been checking out a few lately and can't believe people were watching some of this stuff on vhs at the time. i suppose tellys were much smaller then. i was flicking through stuff on my 50" plasma, and it really shows up how bad some of the stuff it. i think some of the cammers got jobs in hollywood doing those movies were the fucking camera shakes about all over the place and you get seasick and want to vomit, like cloverfield and all them iraq war movies that look the same

That, plus the fact that the quality of VHS and audio metal tapes gets a lot worse over time! I for one still have a LOT of material left that I only have on (video)tapes, and never got around to get on or make digital. A lot of them are probably fucked up already, one of those I have to do but due to the enormity of the task never get around to.

unique said:

i know what you mean. i pity the guy who had to stick that up his arse to get it into the venue. no wonder they could only film for 10 minutes

GuardianAngel said:

unique said:

i'll check these when i get home as i think IT would have a shit fit if i streamed them from my home pc to the office. i vaguely recall heereveen and hamburg weren't too bad and the rotterdam and wercher ring a bell, but i'd been checking out a few lately and can't believe people were watching some of this stuff on vhs at the time. i suppose tellys were much smaller then. i was flicking through stuff on my 50" plasma, and it really shows up how bad some of the stuff it. i think some of the cammers got jobs in hollywood doing those movies were the fucking camera shakes about all over the place and you get seasick and want to vomit, like cloverfield and all them iraq war movies that look the same

That, plus the fact that the quality of VHS and audio metal tapes gets a lot worse over time! I for one still have a LOT of material left that I only have on (video)tapes, and never got around to get on or make digital. A lot of them are probably fucked up already, one of those I have to do but due to the enormity of the task never get around to.

i have pretty much everything digital on HD's (backed up off course). there's a couple of tapes that i have that have never been bootlegged that i need to stick on dvd though. one is second gen pro shot from pro master tapes

unique said:

GuardianAngel said:

That, plus the fact that the quality of VHS and audio metal tapes gets a lot worse over time! I for one still have a LOT of material left that I only have on (video)tapes, and never got around to get on or make digital. A lot of them are probably fucked up already, one of those I have to do but due to the enormity of the task never get around to.

i have pretty much everything digital on HD's (backed up off course). there's a couple of tapes that i have that have never been bootlegged that i need to stick on dvd though. one is second gen pro shot from pro master tapes

I know what you mean. Complete tours on tape and VHS. I really need to plan to start with this before it's too late. Gonna fill in a vacation aplication form today...