Knebworth Festival, Knebworth House, Knebworth, Britain, 6-30-1990, Part 1: Tears for Fears

The Knebworth Festival has been happening most every year in Knebworth, England, since 1974. The 1990 festival was the first one since 1986, and was a special one, because it was the location for the Silver Clef Award winners concert, the only time that happened at Knebworth. This is a British music industry annual award. In 1990, the Silver Clef winner was Robert Plant.

The musical acts that played in the 1990 festival were bigger names than all festivals there before or since: Tears for Fears, Status Quo, Cliff Richard, Robert Plant with Jimmy Page, Phil Collins and Genesis, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, Elton John, Paul McCartney, and Pink Floyd! Unlike other festivals such as Live Aid, there were a lot fewer musical acts, but each one got to play an average of a little less than an hour, for a total of eight hours of music.

The organizers behind this festival realized it was a big deal, because they later released audio and video versions of the festival. However, these were only about two CDs worth of highlights. The vast majority of the music has remained unreleased. The only exception is the Pink Floyd set, which was later released in full. Luckily for us, though, the entire concert was broadcast by the BBC at the time. So I'm posting the full concert, thanks to people who recorded the broadcast.

One snag about the festival is that the weather was not good. The outdoors crowd got rained on from time to time. Worse, from a listener's point of view is that it was very windy. In these recordings, there are occasional comments by the performers about how windy it was. That meant that sometimes the wind blew against the microphones, causing rustling noises. I tried fixing this, but I barely made a dent. So I've decided to post it, windy noises and all. Luckily, the wind was only noticeable during the banter between songs and especially quiet parts of songs. It also was pretty infrequent. Don't consider it a big problem, more like a minor annoyance here and there.

In 1990, Tears for Fears were arguably at the peak of their popularity. In 1989, they released the album "The Seeds of Love," which went to Number One in Britain. Tears for Fears was a duo made up of Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal. After the 1990 tour supporting the album, Smith would leave, and not rejoin for another ten years.

This album is 53 minutes long.

01 talk by Dave Dee (Tears for Fears)
02 Head Over Heels - Broken (Tears for Fears)
03 Change (Tears for Fears)
04 Pale Shelter (Tears for Fears)
05 talk (Tears for Fears)
06 Sowing the Seeds of Love (Tears for Fears)
07 All You Need Is Love (Tears for Fears)
08 talk (Tears for Fears)
09 Advice for the Young at Heart (Tears for Fears)
10 I've Got to Sing My Song (Tears for Fears with Oleta Adams)
11 talk (Tears for Fears)
12 Badman's Song (Tears for Fears)
13 talk (Tears for Fears)
14 Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears)

NOTE: The download link has been removed due to a copyright issue, sorry. But look for my comment in the comments section.

The cover photo of Tears for Fears is from this exact concert.