U2
1987-07-08 - Brussels
Voorst National
2020-10-15 audio & video remaster
LikeASong / U2santos for U2start.com
This is one of the best concerts U2 have ever played. Ever.
We at U2start adore it for all the right reasons. It's got
an incredible performance by the band, it's got a great crowd
that sing along to all the songs in a passionate way, and it
also has a great audio recording that has allowed thousands
of fans to enjoy it through the years, making it a very popular
bootleg among fansites. There is also an audience-shot,
almost-complete video - something quite rare for 1987.
The video has a much worse sound quality than the audio bootleg
so for a long time I've been wanting to remaster them both and
put them together. The 2020 covid quarantine was perfect for that.
That's much easier said than done, though! Stitching audio
and video together is easy as pie... When both run at the same
speed and with no missing parts or glitches here and there.
Which wasn't the case for both Brussels sources. The audio ran
too fast (mostly around 6% faster than it should, which also
changed the music pitch) and the video ran... Well, at many
different speeds throughout the tape, haha. There are songs
that needed a 99,4% adjustment, others needed a 100,7%, some
needed a more fine adjustment like 99,783% and some other
songs even ran at different speeds in different moments of
the song so they needed a dynamic adjustment for each part.
And to make it all worse, the video misses some random parts
(from the top of my head, a bit of October, the first two
minutes of Running To Stand Still, and some random seconds
here and there). The audio is also missing some parts (most
notably the whole of the encore), so syncing the audio and
the video was an absolute nightmare.
What I did was to split the whole, main video recording in songs,
then split each song in 3 or 4 asymmetric parts, and then adjust
the speed in all of them separately to fit the audio recording.
You might find the odd spot where the video is slightly out of
sync with the audio for a couple of frames, but all in all
I think it's as good as it gets. I had to adjust over 70 split
video sections with the audio so bear with me! I remastered
the audio in Audacity, did the video speed adjustment in
Vegas Pro 17.0 and remixed it all in Adobe Premiere Pro 2020.
The video source misses the whole of Streets and the first half
of I Will Follow. I used the Brussels proshot for Streets
(thanks Bibien!), which again was missing the last minute - so
I used the proshot from Florida 1987-12-05 to fill the gap.
I used the Boston R&H outtake (1987-09-18) for I Will Follow.
There are better '87 Streets & IWF videos out there but these
were the video sources that fit the most with Brussels. I tried
to make it all fit as good as possible. It's not proper Brussels
footage but it's better than having a black screen for 7 minutes!
Last but not least, the second half of '40' was also missing,
and for that I used the Tempe 12-20 R&H outtake and did a bit
of cinema magic to fit the final part. It now looks as if
Brussels starts and ends with a proshot, which is kinda nice.
Overall I think this is the best possible document from an
incredible show. It took me several days to complete the project
but it's worth it. Now we can watch the epic Brussels show,
for the first time 99% complete, and for the first time paired
with this excellent audience recording.
Enjoy!
Sergio - LikeASong - U2start.com
). 'October' was nice, really cool. 'New Year's Day' was wicked pissah. Probably the best version of this song IMO. 'Pride' had soul. Overplayed or not, this version blew me away. 'Party Girl' was another treat. Really good song, something they should've re-recorded later on. 'With or Without You' is another crazy-good performance. The show closes with '40'. 'Nuff said there. Overall, every song here was played really great. Maybe no definitive performances here for U2's entire career, but this show is special. Something must have been on the band's mind that night, something. Whatever got them to play so good, they have to replicate this magic. It's sheer brilliance. And Gerard is right....where was One Tree Hill that night? Would've been awesome!
