Gaumont, Ipswich
William, It Was Really NothingThe setlist was reshuffled to something closer to what it had been before the previous date. "William, It Was Really Nothing" returned as opener while longer tracks "Meat Is Murder" and "Barbarism Begins At Home" were played towards the end of the set. "Stretch Out And Wait" was included in the set again for the first time in over a week.
Nowhere Fast
I Want The One I Can't Have
What She Said
How Soon Is Now?
Stretch Out And Wait
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
Handsome Devil
The Headmaster Ritual
Shakespeare's Sister
Rusholme Ruffians
Hand In Glove
Still Ill
Meat Is Murder
/Barbarism Begins At Home
/Miserable Lie
The Gaumont was an old cinema type theatre, all seated, with bossy ladies to keep you in your seats. The audience was receptive but not the liveliest. Morrissey wasn't very talkative througout the evening. His first banter, after greeting the audience at the very beginning, came before "How Soon Is Now?" when he thanked the audience "Thank you for spending your all your birthday money on this ticket!".
In "Stretch Out And Wait" Morrissey added emphasis to a line by singing "What's really at the back of your mind?". "The Headmaster Ritual" was introduced as a song "... about the timeless things in life" while "Shakespeare's Sister", which was one week away from being released as a single, was presented as "... our new single". When the Smiths returned to the stage after a break to perform the encore, Morrissey thanked "...all you precious young people" and then said something like "...it didn't last".
Nine tracks from this concert were released around 1986 on a bootleg LP titled "Music Is Magnificent". The LP was eventually transfered to cd and is now traded among concert collectors under that format. The makers of the original LP had the original idea of putting the songs in the same order as on the "Meat Is Murder" album (replacing the never played "Well I Wonder" by the non-album single "Shakespeare's Sister") and giving the bootleg a titled with the same acronym (M.I.M.). Unfortunately this meant that the album only included nine songs from this date.
A rather good quality audience recording of the whole concert can be found on a less circulated bootleg (recorder: Soundsville's Steve). This is very likely the recording found here and there under the title "Where The Hell Is Ipswich?" and without doubt the one from which the songs on "Music Is Magnificent" were lifted, via a cassette copy.
Digital transfers of "Music Is Magnificent" are reasonably easy to find on file sharing programs, but the better sounding full set is more scarcely found outside torrent sites.
Do you have information about this concert? Or do you own an uncirculated recording of it? If yes please contribute and get credited.