The Smiths 1986-10-14 Town Hall, Middlesbrough, UK

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Town Hall, Middlesbrough - 14 October 1986

The Queen Is Dead
Panic
I Want The One I Can't Have
Vicar In A Tutu
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
Ask
(Marie's The Name) His Latest Flame/Rusholme Ruffians
Frankly, Mr. Shankly
The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
What She Said (with Rubber Ring intro and outro)
Is It Really So Strange?
Never Had No One Ever
Cemetry Gates
London
Meat Is Murder
I Know It's Over
/The Draize Train
/How Soon Is Now?
//Still Ill
//Bigmouth Strikes Again


After Carlisle we drove across to the other coast, so stay with Paul's sister in Newcastle, and the next day took a day trip down to Middlesbrough for the concert. It's a bit of a bleak city, The drive down from Newcastle is through coal mining country which was in the middle of being decimated by the Thatcher government. Paul is from a mining family, and we stopped off in a little mining village called Seaham to drop in on his Gran. Then Middlesborough itself is set against a backdrop of Industrial smoke and factories. The town hall is an old building. Inside it's a pretty standard hall style set-up, all standing downstairs, with a Balcony with seats. I don't remember this shop being particularly spectacular. As Johnny has said ... I don't think the Smiths ever played a bad show, but the crowd didn't really explode like they had done in some other places. This meant that it was relatively easy to pick a good spot to record where I wouldn't get too much aggravation, and as a result I came away with a pretty good recording.

At the weekend I was back in London doing our market stall ... which was always fun when we had tapes of the recent Smiths shows from out of town. Quite a few musicians used to come down to Camden to look for bootlegs. We had a policy of letting them have what they wanted for free if we had bootlegs of their band. I remember that weekend Dave Stewart came up specifically looking for this show. Said he was a big fan (and obviously his then wife was), and was looking forward to seeing them when they played in London.


Again this was recorded using my Sony Professional Walkman with Sony Mic onto Metal tape

 

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