The accompanying live document to the ‘Third Day’ rehearsal recordings CD as featured in the previous post – ‘It’s All In The Brochure’ captures a selection of not only Wire’s performance but also the various other supporting acts from the occasion of their concert at the Royal Festival Hall, 26th February 2000.
Of Wire’s set list, the CD includes only eight of the seventeen tracks that they performed on the night, so it is in no way a complete document and it’s certainly not all in the CD… Of the tracks included on the ‘Third Day’ rehearsal CD, only ‘Pink Flag’ is duplicated on both CDs – ‘The Art of Persistence’ and ‘Mercy’ were played live but not captured here. Although rehearsed and captured on ‘Third Day’, in the end ‘Blessed State’ did not make the cut for the live show.
Of the other acts featured, they are all of course Wire related in some way – Immersion being Colin Newman and Malka Spiegal’s act of the time, while He Said has been one of the many names under which Graham Lewis has worked and which has been featured on these pages in the past, with ‘Take Care’ and ‘Could You?’. I didn’t recognise any of the He Said set as played, it was all a good bit different from the previous releases though. On the night, I didn’t care too much for the DJxDJ set and the extract on the CD gives enough of an idea of what didn’t work for me with it. Lastly, the ‘Royal Wave (extract)’ is a humorous reminder of the effective stagecraft of the night. With the building background music rising, a sudden spotlight shone upon one of the boxes and an announcement over the PA drawing attention to two seemingly regal guests waving their blessings to proceedings – a suitable distraction that allowed a wonderful sleight of hand entrance for Wire, as the curtain revealed the band from the hitherto darkened stage front and they powered into ‘Pink Flag’.
As for the CD, I picked this up at the first of Wire’s run of three gigs at ‘The Garage’ in London in May 2000, but is now king out of print, but it remains available in digital download form from Wire’s PinkFlag site.