Genesis - Six Of The Best (Redux) (1982)

Time for another guest post from Mike Solof, and it's an upgrade to a unique album by one of the favourite bands of both of us...Genesis

This project came about because I always loved this 1982 reunion concert but was always disheartened that it was never properly recorded at the time, and that the only versions of it that exist are mostly mid, to fairly decent, audience recordings… UNTIL NOW! What a lot of people don’t know is that four days before the concert, the group gathered together at the Hammersmith Odeon concert hall and professionally recorded the rehearsal of almost the entire concert! I stumbled across these recording years after I had purchased the original bootleg of the live concert, and I was stunned. It contained beautiful, clear, stereo recordings of almost every song they played live just a few days later, with only 'Turn It On Again' and I' Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe)' missing. My friend Paul from Albums That Should Exist (I often guest post there too), recently took the original bootleg of the live concert and remastered it. He did a beautiful job, but still the source was only a fairly decent audience recording, and so there is only so much he could do to improve the sound quality. But then I had a thought. 

Let me digress for a moment. I have lots of bootlegs. And by lots I mean 14TB’s worth. And many times, when the bootleggers couldn’t make a complete concert from one source, they would use a second one (or third or fourth or in some cases even a fifth) to fill in the missing spots so that you got the entire concert with nothing left out. This meant you had the entire show, but often the sound quality varied from source to source. To hear the entire concert you just had to deal with the sound quality changes as it went along. And that’s when I had a thought - why couldn’t I take the fair sounding live concert, and mix in the phenomenal sounding rehearsal recordings to get a really cool sonic upgrade. So that was the Genesis (lol) of this project! I wanted to be as true to the live source as I could…and yet replace as much as I could with the upgraded soundboard recordings. So what you have here is my hybrid version mixing the live and soundboard rehearsal recording. What I ended up doing was first listening to the live recording and seeing which part of each song had that live feel, meaning which parts the audience participated in the most. Sometimes that was clapping out the beat. Other times it was singing along with Gabriel during the chorus’s. And others it was just applauding and cheering in between songs. I wanted to really capture the essence of those original live recordings, but as we all know (or at least hope), crowds don’t yell and scream throughout the entire songs of a concert, usually they just do it at the beginnings and endings, and occasionally other key parts too. 

That gave me my way into this project. I have taken the parts with the audience (usually the beginnings and endings)… and then mixed in the soundboard material as much as possible for the remainder of the song. So the entire concert ended up being about 25% live and 75% soundboard. And, amazingly, it turned out to be a seamless mix! Ok, that’s a lie. It actually turned out to be a semi-seamless mix most of the time. I tried my best to make the transitions between live and soundboard as smooth as I could, but the problem was thqat the live cuts were well...live, and the soundboard was in a perfectly quiet concert hall, so occasionally the transitions are glaringly apparent. I did as much as I could to smooth these spots out by overlapping parts and then fading in and out the tops and tails of the switches and they ended up being mostly successful. The most unsuccessful of these attempts unfortunately occurs during the first song, 'Back In N.Y.C.'. I had a double problem with that one. On top of trying to mix live and soundboard, the rehearsal version of this track cuts in about a third of the way into the track mid sentence, so not only did I have to include a lot more of the fair sounding live version than I would like, but the edit also comes mid sentence. There was no way to smooth this over. It just suddenly happens. BUT THAT’S THE ONLY TIME IT HAPPENS! So be forewarned. It gets much better after the first track! I’m really happy with how this turned out. I think it offers a great alternative to the commonly found live concert and puts its own unique spin on that incredible night. So please, sit back and enjoy this NEW version of 'Six Of The Best' in hopefully the best way you’ll ever hear it! It is certainly an eye and ear opening experience!!        Michael

For my part I thought that this new version deserved it's own unique cover, and so I located an article about the concert in Prog Magazine, which has a superb cover picture, and I've adapted that for the artwork to the album.       pj

Track listing

01 Intro by Jonathan King

02 Back In N.Y.C.

03 Dancing With The Moonlit Knight (Opening Section)

04 The Carpet Crawlers

05 Introduction by Peter Gabriel

06 Firth Of Fifth

07 The Musical Box

08 Solsbury Hill

09 Turn It On Again

10 The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

11 Fly On A Windshield / Broadway Melody Of 1974

12 In The Cage

13 Tube Story

14 Supper's Ready

15 I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)

16 The Knife

17 Closing Words

PS. You guys all know I love to include info packed PDF’s for each of my projects, and this one is no different. In the folder is the original PDF info as provided by Paul on his site. (Check it out… it’s an amazing sister site to this one!) He did such a great job on it that I knew I couldn’t do better, so he’s generously letting me just repost it here. Thanks Paul!! 

Michael