Stevie Wright Band (Warner Vision) (1987)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Audio Biographies-Cast Gallery-Photo Interviews-Cast-Stevie Wright (Audio-Only) Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	1987
Running Time	75:23 (Case: 77)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Bob Potts
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Stevie Wright Glenn GoldSmith Dennis James Eddie Boekelman Mark Mitchell Paul DeMarco Lyndsay Hammond Dey Chambers
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	?	Music	None Given

    Stevie Wright was the front man for the Easybeats in the '60s when he was known as a real wild man. He has led a varied career since those early days. From what I can tell from the date of this concert (1987), he must have formed the Stevie Wright Band soon after the 1986 concert tour by the temporarily reunited Easybeats. This particular concert was recorded at the Bridgeway Hotel in Adelaide in 1987.

    He is probably best known for Friday On My Mind (voted the Best Australian Song of All Time by his peers at the Australian Performing Rights Association awards), along with other hits such as She's So Fine and of course Evie. While the concert was filmed in the late eighties it has the feel of a seventies pub appearance. There are no props on the stage, a series of Par60 spotlights hanging overhead with various coloured gels, a simple light chaser and lots of energy. Everyone on stage, but in particular Stevie, puts one hundred percent into the performance and the sweat is dripping from the first song onwards.

    As you can see from the song list, all the favourites are here - they are just sung by someone a little bit older than they were when they wrote or first performed them.

Video

    The concert is presented at what is most probably its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

    Sharpness varies in inverse proportion to the distance of the shot. Close-ups are reasonably sharp, actually a mite sharper than other video concerts I have seen recently, and distance shots are blurred. Motion is also affected by video blur. An example of this is just about any time Stevie is moving, such as at 6:44. Shadow detail is affected by the fact that the only lighting on the stage is the down spotlights and at times there is almost no lighting on the stage at all. All things considered it holds up as best it can. There is a very large amount of noise in this video signal which has triggered a lot of low level noise.

    Colours are again affected by the lighting and the noise. Colour saturation is reasonable and the skin tones are not too bad when a white light is shining on it.

    The bitrate and compression graphs are a little unusual for this title, with very little variation in the bitrate, but this does not appear to have led to any major problems with encoding. The video noise is very apparent throughout the concert. For example, look at the downlight that shows at 6:50. In the cone of light from the spot it looks like it is snowing. During the concert, a number of flash photos are taken from the audience. One interesting frame is at 5:59 where the flash and the video frame are out of sync and the lower part of the image is highlighted in one frame and the upper half in the next. This is not a fault per se, just an interesting coincidence.

    There are no subtitles on this single layered disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Dialogue quality is pretty good overall and the audio is in sync.

    The music is a collection of songs which played at or near the top of the Australian charts in the sixties.

    There was no surround activity present.

    The subwoofer bounced along happily enough but could have been a bit more prominent in some songs.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Biography

    Stevie Wright's very abbreviated biography in four pages of text. Presented at 1.33:1 and with no audio.

Picture Gallery (3:38)

    A series of pictures from the concert presented at 1.33:1 over a 3:38 period. The audio accompaniment is again the song Sorry. Each picture stays up for a long time (9-odd seconds).

Audio Interview (24:00)

    A radio interview with Stevie that was recorded on June 15th, 1987 in Adelaide. It plays over the top of the video footage of the concert but when it ends at 24-odd minutes into the concert, the audio simply goes quiet and the video continues to play though to the end of the concert.

    Despite the rather poor video, this disc does have many songs on it that are burned into the minds (and ears) of those that attended concerts and pubs in the sixties and seventies. While I hadn't heard Friday On My Mind for many years, it only took the opening few bars to transport me back to those days.

    The video is poor but considering the conditions that it was recorded under it holds up as well as can be expected.

    The audio is a reasonable presentation of the songs.

    The interview is interesting. The other extras are not.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall