Davies said: "The Mackie HDRs were all flight-cased and rack-mounted and we all had to do was connect the multicore, press the record button and we were away. It was as simple as that. We didn’t have a lot of opportunity to listen back to the recording on the road. But when we finally did, the results that came out of the Mackies were phenomenal."
However, sifting through all material recorded from 45 shows was not quite so easy. Davies made minidisks of each show and spent days listening to them all so he could earmark the best three of four versions of each song. These were then played to the band who chose which version they wanted for the CD.
"We really feel after all that hard work that we have got the ultimate performance of each of the songs," said Davies. "There is no way we could have done that by hiring various mobile recording trucks around the world and recording just half a dozen shows."
"Bryan [Ferry] is quite fanatical about capturing as much as he possibly can of the live performance and the Mackies gave us the opportunity to have a personal recording system for the band wherever they went."
The CD is as live as possible, explains Davies, with no studio fixes unless "there were an obvious mistake or some feedback that we had to get rid of - otherwise what you hear is exactly what was performed."
(Lee Baldock)
