(All times rounded to nearest 15 seconds and include bridges following song, if any.)
The 1997 Tour Promo Card
A card showing the TD line-up was issued to promote the 1997 tour. This card has the autographs of Jerome Froese, Edgar Froese, Emil Hachfeld and Zlatko Perica (from left to right)
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"I have never believed to get the chance to experience such an event once again", Josef "Sam" Leitmeier said when spectators queued up in front of the Circus Krone building for the Munich concert. Like him, most of Tangerine Dream's fans in Germany have had already years before given up all their hope to ever see and hear their favourite band on stage again in their home country... until TD returned in April.
Yes, they do exist: For the younger fans, TD's spring tour was definitely the first chance in life to watch one of their concerts, after the band has not been on tour in Germany for almost 15 years. However, in most of the concerts the vast majority of the listeners seemed already to know TD from their time one decade or even more ago. In the audience, there were hardly any spectators of 25 years or less - this may indicate that TD represent some kind of adult generation music, although young people feel addicted to electronic music, but mostly only as long as techno music is concerned.
Anyway, Tangerine Dream tried to keep far away from old style and old fashioned electronic music. The band played two long sets - divided into a "vintage" and a "modern" part - of music in a mostly rhythmic and powerful way, often accompanied by heavy guitar. The years of what had been called the endless cosmic clusters have been over for long; the old Tangerine Dream have passed.
A main influence to TD's profile on stage was provided by Emil Hachfeld, a young Berlin drummer and music student who was with the band for the first time on this tour. With his fast drumming on the electronic percussion, he added very characteristic sounds to well-known TD patterns; this "Codotronic" technology, developed by Tangerine Dream themselves, even allowed him to trigger sampled sythesizer sounds from his drum sets.
Besides Edgar and Jerome Froese, placed behind keyboards in the center of the stage, the fourth member of the crew was Zlatko Perica who has been a well known fellow of the band for years and who already had live experience with the band as a guest during their North American tour in 1992. Even if he did not have a personal input each track, his guitar helped to make several passages of the concert remind very much of the "220 Volt" tour.
Zlatko Perica was to replace Marc Alexej who had first been announced to play guitar during the European tour only four weeks before the first concerts. Zlatko was to "update" the new line up really last minute. Edgar and Jerome Froese had already changed the line-up before and announced a "new incarnation of TD". This meant that Linda Spa (sax) was no longer playing with the band, as well as Gerald Gradwohl and Mark Hornby (guitar) who had been on stage in London in November. "Edgar and Jerome decided long before their Shepherds Bush gig in London November '96 that the last chapter of a long decade using sax and various 'normal' instruments will be over", the band explained their personal changes officially.
This kind of "personnel roundabout" allowed only a short time of preparation for the tour and demanded even some kind of improvisation. "Edgar gave a tape to me to let me know what he thought the concert should be like. Using this as a base, I started to work out the drum passages", Emil Hachfeld said to Dream Collector. "We even did not have a real main rehearsal", Edgar Froese added. "We have had the idea to do so in Vienna, but the tour promoter asked us to do some kind of public rehearsal. So we added the gig in Vienna one day before the tour was to start in Germany."
This was why the band slightly varied, changed or improved their stage set, light performance and desk mixing especially during the first days of the tour. This was sometimes difficult as the band had to face a wide range of various conditions; they played in modern plain town halls like in Stuttgart or Erlangen, in places like the HdK (Hochschule der Künste; University of the Arts) in their home town Berlin as well as in old style flair character buildings like the Circus Krone in Munich or Musikhalle in Hamburg. Acoustical conditions were quite different in various halls and towns, as well as the reactions of the spectators: from very warm-hearted in Vienna to cool and distant one day later in Stuttgart.
The main parts of the two long sets had been adapted and varied from the material performed in London last autumn, but with some additional music they were even longer than in London and clocked in around some 70 minutes each. Especially new material from the Oasis video soundtrack had been added; a long percussion solo opened the second set which also contained some tracks featured in The Dream Mixes like versions. On the other hand, for example Catwalk and all the saxophone parts had to disappear (together with Linda Spa); some of the sax passages have simply been replaced by Zlatkos guitar.
During the first days, the band varied the encores. In nearly all venues, they played Das Mädchen auf der Treppe ('97 Remix) and Thief Yang And The Tangram Seal. In Stuttgart, they played Cottage from the Legend soundtrack instead of Das Mädchen auf der Treppe; in this concert as well as in Hanover and Neu-Isenburg, they added Fort Worth Runway One (working title: Dallas), the bonus track released on the Australian version of Goblins Club; in Berlin they also performed Catwalk. Only the last encore was always the same: Purple Haze, also well known from 220 Volt Live.
For the two main sets, the band used two kinds of stage shows. During the "vintage set", a classical light show with abstract graphical patterns was projecied onto the screen at the back of the stage, some of the designs even reminded of kaleidoscope images typical for the seventies. During the "modern set", a film was performed in the background, mixed together from The Video Dream Mixes and Oasis as well as from the material which had been used for the Tyranny Of Beauty presentation in Milano/Italy in May 1995. However, on stage the landscape and computer images have not been accompanied by the same music like on the video releases. This kind of stage show even allowed a former member to appear with TD once again for a few seconds on the screen: Linda Spa.
