Episode 95 - Slang Tour - Part One

Well, I think the birth of it really started in the summer of 93 on the Adrenalize Tour because – That tour, it kind of quickly morphed from the full big in-the-round production thing to...

When they came back to the States, it was, okay, here's some arena shows.

But then once they got to the summer of 93, it was a lot of amphitheaters, which is how it continued in the States in 96.

But that's when you saw them strip away guitar solos and some of the epic tracks.

And then they brought in some things that might be a little heavier, like Rock Rock Till You Drop and another Hit and Run.

And then you put... two steps behind in there and the production scaled down.

So I think the, the birth of it really started in the summer of 93 where they started to distill it down to basics and while still having a production element to it.

So by the time slang came out as an album, that kind of stripped things back.

But I think the actual slang tour is where they really just cut it down as basic as they could.

And then we got to see that in its full realized form, you know, initially in 1996 on the slang tour.

That's a really good point.

Andy, anything you want to add?

Yeah, because we're going to sound like a perfect double act now because I thought that before we went into this sort of ins and outs of the tour set, if you like, I thought it would be worth just to give a bit of sort of refresh as the band's sort of mindset at the time because you could tell, like Kurt just said there, 93, the impact of what was going on with just in rock music in general, with stuff being more stripped down and that came in.

on the Adrenalise tour.

So I'm just going to read, this is a quote now, this is a direct quote just before the Slang tour and it's from an American music magazine.

So Joe is asked the question, can you compare this tour to the others in terms of presentation? Now Joe's response is, you won't believe the difference.

Gone are all the toys.

We got to the point where we had some festivals to do in Europe in the summer of 1993 and where we couldn't do anything but put the minimum of backlight up and go out there and play.

And we headlined this one festival in Germany, and it was about 60,000 people, and we felt naked when we first went on because we had nothing but us.

But by the time we came off, anybody that was there from our record company or from our road crew that had already seen us a dozen times on the tour, said it was the best they had ever seen us because they saw us instead of a bunch of toys.

And we were well aware that the show we put on for Adrenalise and Hysteria was very much like a Broadway show.

In the round, things moving, this, that and the other.

And we were just part of the overall picture.

And all of a sudden, we realised that we were better than that.

And we wanted people to remember the band.