I’m writing this on the day I should have been going to see Heart play in Birmingham, but unfortunately the tour was cancelled in May because Ann Wilson needed surgery and recuperation – and then today the news has come out that the operation revealed she has cancer and is receiving treatment for it. She hopes to be back performing next year, and I hope it all goes well and they come back to the UK.
It’s a real shame as I was looking forward to the show – it wasn’t going to be a cheap gig given I needed return train tickets from Bristol to Birmingham and a hotel in Birmingham, but I decided to go for it because I saw them twice (over 30 years ago) and their back catalogue is actually really good, there’s a lot more to it than the big power ballads of the late 1980s.
I discovered them in 1987 when my friend Dave played me the Heart album when we were at college in Northampton – I was hooked from If Looks Could Kill, the first track, and quickly bought that and the Bad Animals albums.
Even better news was that they were playing at the NEC in Birmingham so we went – March 2nd 1988.
My god that was a loud concert. We had seats quite close to the stage and the crowd moved forward to the barrier when they came on, so we were very close. Unfortunately we were to the right of the stage so I spent the whole show turned to the left, which meant my right ear took the full volume from the stack of speakers in front of us. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took 3 days for the ringing to clear – no earplugs in those days…
I recall a timid looking middle aged man taking his seat near us before the show, and departing quite quickly when it started, covering his ears – I don’t think he’d been to many rock concerts and having heard Alone and These Dreams was perhaps expecting something a little more sedate.
To be honest I made a similar mistake when we went up to Wolverhampton to see Living Colour in 1991 – Love Rears Its Ugly Head was not representative of the rest of their material! That was loud and properly heavy. Good gig though, although support act The Beyond were awful.
They played a number of songs from earlier albums (setlist), which I didn’t recognise at the time, but I then started buying their earlier albums which were a bit of a revelation – quite different to the big hair power ballad band. In a good way.
They played 3 tracks from 1975’s Dreamboat Annie (the title track, Crazy on You and Magic Man) and one from 1977’s Little Queen (Barracuda) – both albums feature acoustic tracks as well as some good 70s rock – they finished their shows with Led Zep’s Rock n Roll for a long time.
Magazine and Dog & Butterfly are good, again with acoustic tracks featuring, and Dog & Butterfly is one of my favourites – Mistral Wind, the last track, is an absolute cracker. I saw that they were playing it on their US dates earlier this year and I was really looking forward to hearing it live.
The next 3 albums – Bebe le Strange (1980), Private Audition (1982) and Passionworks (1983) are a bit strange, quite a different sound but they have their high points. Passionworks marked a change in lineup and I recall it sounding quite flat. I haven’t listened to these 3 albums for quite a while.
Heart toured the UK again in 1990 in support of the Brigade album, and we went again (setlist). To be honest I can’t remember much about it other than they were supported by Thunder and that it was still loud.
I don’t have the ticket from that show as my jeans got washed with the ticket still in the pocket. I did have a Brigade t-shirt which I wore for a good few years, and someone I knew somehow had a bootleg cassette of one of their nights in Birmingham, which I took a copy of. It wasn’t great quality, and for some reason it never got digitised when I got rid of my cassettes.
My main memory around the 1990 show wasn’t about the music – at college a few days beforehand, not long before we finished our HND in Computer Studies, we were throwing a frisbee around and I chased after it and went flying over a low wall I’d forgotten was there. Apparently it was quite spectacular.
I dusted my self down and carried on, but just before we headed to our lecture I noticed a bloody mark on the leg of my (black) jeans and thought I ought to check it out. I the toilet I rolled up the trouser leg to find a 2+ inch long open gash along the edge of my shinbone, which was wide enough to see bone. I took myself off to the medical room, and someone from the college drove me to hospital for stitches – 5 or 6 of them.
The concert was only a couple of days later, and knowing we were near the front again and in with a good chance of getting close to the barrier, I actually went to the concert wearing a football shin pad over the wound. It’s still a decent scar now, 34 years later.
The band went fairly quiet after that, although they did come to the UK once or twice but I don’t think I was even aware they were touring – so seeing that they were touring again in 2024 was a surprise, and I definitely wanted to see them. The US setlists looked really good – very much a “best of” tour.
What made the show even more attractive was that Squeeze were due to be supporting them – they’re celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, so their set would have been a best of as well.
When I got rid of my LP collection in the 90s/early 2000s, the Heart LPs went.
But imagine my surprise 7-8 years ago when I started buying and listening to vinyl again and I went into a charity shop in Bristol and found a full set of Heart albums! I don’t think they could have been mine after that many years, but who knows? Of course I bought them.
In summary, a good underrated band who are a lot better than their most famous years.