|
Click on date for concert information: Morrissey's first dates promoting his "Your Arsenal" album was through a handful of European summer festivals. Two of these dates ended up being cancelled. These appearances in front of fans as well as non-fans, featuring mostly yet unreleased new material, served as some sort of rehearsal for the upcoming lengthy North American and UK/Europe tours, scheduled after the release of the album. The fiasco at London's Finsbury Park on 8 August gave Morrissey a lot of media attention during the months that followed. This mostly negative attention had little effect on ticket sales in the USA and Canada. But in England the crusade led by the NME had a great effect on Morrissey's reputation and ticket sales for the British leg of the "Your Arsenal" tour, which only ended up lasting 10 days. Personnel: Boz Boorer (guitars), Alain Whyte (guitars), Gary Day (bass) and Spencer Cobrin (drums).
Surprisingly, nothing from "Kill Uncle" made it into the set. However many songs found on "Bona Drag" were performed, such as early singles "Suedehead", "Everyday Is Like Sunday", "November Spawned A Monster", "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys", "Interesting Drug", and "Piccadilly Palare" as well as b-sides "Sister I'm A Poet" and "Disappointed". "Viva Hate"'s "Alsatian Cousin" and b-side "The Loop", both previously played on the Kill Uncle tour, completed the setlists. Two b-sides which had not been played on the previous tour were added to the set, "Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference" and "Girl Least Likely To". The former had already been collected on "Bona Drag", but the latter was unknown to fans who didn't buy singles. The biggest surprise was the cover of Suede's "My Insatiable One", always performed at the end of "Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference". Suede was at the time relatively unknown, having released only one single. Here is the number of times each song was performed on this leg, in descending order of frequency. This is based on 3 concerts.
Girl Least Likely To - 3 Click here for more tour statistics.
As he did at the end of 1991 when "Sister I'm A Poet" was played live for the first time, Morrissey sang "A plastic bag stranded at the lights, this once was me" instead of the studio version's "Oh no, no, no-no, waiting at the lights, but not this time". In "Girl Least Likely To", he changed a line to "We do think this but we cannot say it to the girl least likely to" or "... we can never say it...". Actually throughout the whole song Morrissey occasionally changed the lyrics from first/singular to first/plural, switching 'I's for 'we's. He also rearranged some of the verses, losing six lines in the process. In "Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference", Morrissey changed the meaning of one of the lines by singing "How I love all of the complicated things of life". At the end of the song, instead of going into the "Leave me alone I was only singing" part, the band went into a cover of Suede's "My Insatiable One". At Madstock, in "You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side", Morrissey changed the line "Someone kindly told me that you wasted eight of nine lives" to "Someone kindly told me you've collected very sharp bread knives" as he would be doing often throughout the upcoming legs of the tour. "The National Front Disco" ended in extended noisy jam with lots of feedback as it would always when played live. In it, Morrissey skipped the "When you've settled the score" line.
The set in Leysin only featured four songs from the upcoming "Your Arsenal" album, so collectors might prefer the reasonably good audience recording of the Belfort concert which featured eight songs from the newest album. This is occasionally available under the title "Belfort 92". A partial radio broadcast of 5 songs from this concert is also out there, but again, the quality is not what would be expected from a radio recording. Finally, a fair sounding audience recording of the aborted Madstock appearance is also circulated on bootleg cds and on file sharing networks. However the set is short and the recording is from the audience, so it will be of interest only to completists.
|