BLACK SABBATH - Moscow, Russia, Afternoon Show

Black Sabbath - Moscow 1989
November-??-1989 (Nov16<->Nov28)
Moscow Russia
Afternoon Show
Pro-Shot NTSC
Mono Recording
85 minutes
Band:
Tony Martin - Vocals
Tony Iommi - Guitar
Neil Murray - Bass
Geoff Nicholls - Keyboards
Cozy Powell - Drums

Setlist:
01.Intro-Ave Satani
02.Headless Cross
03.Neon Knights
04.Children Of The Sea
05.Guitar Solo-Die Young
06.Apache
07.When Death Calls
08.War Pigs
09.(Interpreter)
10.Guitar Solo-Black Sabbath
11.Iron Man
12.Children Of The Grave
13.Heaven And Hell
14.Paranoid

Black Sabbath played a batch of shows in Russia in November/December 1989.
Sometimes they did 2 shows a day, 1 in the afternoon, 1 in the evening.
This is one of the afternoon shows, an evening show (from the same date?) was recorded as well.
At first I had this in a rather bad MPG1-format from the net,but I finally found it on DVD.
The picture is very good,but I thought the sound needed some 'remastering'.
The sound was and obviously is in mono.

DVD Decrypter 3.5.1.0
BeSweet 1.4 + VOBInput1.3 plug-in (VOB->WAV) (No gain/compression used)
Cool Edit 2000:
NO noise reduction
Hi Hiss Reduction
+25dB Treble Boost
+20dB Mid Boost
+ 4dB Volume Boost

It still isn't excellent, but you can see there was way too much low-end.

Video is NTSC.
Re-authored with TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.5.19.59



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Black Sabbath performed 14 shows at Moscow's Olympski Hall from November 19th through the 28th. For the weekend shows, they would play both an afternoon and evening show! They also played an additional 12 shows in Leningrad through December 9th. These were the longest stints they'd played at a single venue since their early gigs at The Star Club in Hamburg!

With the obvious advantage of not having to break down their equipment every night, they decided to record some of these shows for a possible home video release. At least two shows were professionally recorded, although it is likely that more recording was done during their stay in Russia. Unexpected complications arose when they tried to recover their stock footage back from the Russian authorities. These delays and other related issues discouraged Sabbath from actually releasing this footage commercially at the time.

Two of these Moscow shows surfaced in 2002 on the bootleg DVD-R set HEADLESS IN RUSSIA. These are encoded with Dolby Digital 4.1 sound. Each DVD was mastered using MPEG-2 video streams at 4 mbps and MPEG 2.0 audio at 384 kbps, fitting each show easily on to a single layer DVD-R. The running time for the afternoon show is 85:38. The evening show clocks in at 86:14.

Like many other professional recordings that have recently surfaced from this era, these films are probably from Cozy Powell's private collection. Much of his estate was sold after his untimely death in 1996. Being that these were pro-shot, the filming contains an excellent multi-cam perspective of the shows. However, the picture quality does contain numerous flaws. White streaks mar these otherwise beautiful films. These may have been damaged while in storage. On the Afternoon Show disc, there also appears to be a brief accidental erasure that occurs at the beginning of "When Death Calls". There are two brief dropouts, each lasting no longer than 3-5 seconds. There are also VHS copies of this show that are said to be better than the DVD-R’s IF you can find a low enough generation source!

Alexander Rack, webmeister of black-sabbath.de, wrote in with this interesting tidbit about some hidden footage on the HEADLESS IN RUSSIA DVD-R’s. He wrote: “Did you ever saw these Russian bootleg DVD’s with the TV broadcast of the Moscow 1989 shows? As a kind of secret menu [also known as ‘Easter Eggs’ or hidden features], they contain a preview of an "upcoming" release - it is 1 min of LIVE EVIL footage (Intro and Mob Rules) with audio!”

The exact dates for these films are not yet known, but they are each labeled as 'Afternoon Show' and 'Evening Show', so it is assumed that they took place on the same day. In an interview with Pete Sarfas [Black Sabbath Appreciation Society Newsletter Volume 5 - 1990], Tony mentions that Sabbath played 2 shows a day only during the weekend gigs. So, this would narrow the possible dates for the HEADLESS IN RUSSIA videos to either November 19th (Sunday), November 25th (Saturday) or November 26th (Sunday). I’ve been seeing many traders list this show as ‘November 19th’, but I’m still awaiting a definitive confirmation.

An interpreter appears on stage at times to translate Tony Martin's English to Russian!

AFTERNOON SHOW: Missing the "Ave Satani" introduction. Contains a unique live performance of the Hank Marvin & The Shadows instrumental "Apache" during the Afternoon Show! This is the only live version of this song currently in circulation. An aborted rehearsal take of the songs appears on the DEHUMANIZER REHEARSALS boot CD.

EVENING SHOW: This film contains the complete "Ave Satani" / "The Gates Of Hell" introduction. The set list is shifted around a bit, moving "Iron Man" and "Children Of The Grave" closer to the beginning of the show. "Die Young" is dropped back towards the end.

Special thanks to Jarkko Aaltonen and Alexander Rack for their contributions to this article!