Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral

On the first glance on the cover of this DVD release one might think to see a live taping of TD's concert at Coventry Cathedral, but actually it contains a half-hour concert montage of performance footage heavily processed by video effects. This is how it was broadcast on BBC2 on October 3rd, 1976 -- almost a year to the day after the Coventry concert. Tony Palmer had filmed the concert for a 50 minute edition of 'Omnibus' (being the BBC's then flagship Arts programme), but somebody carelessly lost the audio -- forcing Palmer to completely re-do the entire programme. So he edited the shots to excerpts from TD's then new album Ricochet. The UK press announced that Chris Franke flew in specially to help with the editing.
The audio mix is standard mono and no other details are provided of the event, except..
On 4th October 1975, they began a longer tour in England. The first concert, where Tangerine Dream played in Coventry Cathedral, was filmed for the BBC by Tony Palmer. This 28-minute long TV film was shown on Swedish TV shortly afterwards, and I think that this was one of my first rendezvous with Tangerine Dream and their music.
This movie gives quite a good picture of how Tangerine Dream made use of visual elements as an important part of their show. It is not as much the pictures of the musicians on stage as it is the use of colours, candles, the architecture of the church together with the music that creates the special mood.
Well, there might be another reason why you do not see that much of the musicians; if you look closely, you will see that something is not right; what you see and what their fingers play are not synchronized -- the music is taken from the album Ricochet and put on to the pictures later -- and even Ricochet is an album put together from many different live pieces and not just one concert.
The following year it became one of Tangerine Dream's trademarks to play at exotic venues rather than ordinary concerts at ordinary concert halls. Many churches, cathedrals and other historically interesting places have formed the visual background for the music.

1. Ricochet Part One 00:00
2.Ricochet Part Two 18:40

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