Steve Hillage Newcastle City Hall 1977
Steve Hillage toured a lot during the late 70s. I attended most, but not all, of the gigs he played in Newcastle during that period. He called at the City Hall twice in some years, and I didn’t catch all of those gigs. I did attend his 1977 concert at the City Hall, and pretty fine it was too. Steve was a guy of several faces: the quiet bearded hippy from Gong, the somewhat unlikely guitar hero who emerged during the late 70s, and he even popped up onstage at the Reading festival as a special guest of Sham 69, which was a very unlikely pairing (and didn’t go down well with some of the skinheads in the crowd, as I recall). 
A further side of Steve has emerged in recent times, as the leader of electronic ambient new music visionaries System 7. During the years I am blogging about here, Steve was very much a guitar man, releasing a clutch of pretty fine albums, and playing some pretty good gigs. Support came from Glen Philips on this 1977 tour. The tour waa to promote Steve’s latest album Motivation Radio and the set was drawn from that album and his previous album L. I found a setlist from the Glasgow gig of the tour on the Glasgow Apollo site. I would imagine the set at Newcastle will have been similar to this: It’s All Too Much; The Golden Vibe; Unidentified (Flying Being); Light in the Sky; Radio; Aftaglid; Electrick Gypsies; The Salmon Song; Solar Musick Suite; Saucer Surfing; Searching for the Spark; Hurdy Gurdy Man; Hurdy Gurdy Glissando; Not Fade Away
15 Mar
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Posted by Mitch on March 15, 2013 at 12:00 pm
I recall that the 1977 concert was nowhere near as good as the previous years. Hillage had been gigging a lot at this period and it showed – I found this a tired / going through the motions type effort. Infact I’m sure I remember some of the audience walking out midway through the set as the show lacked any sort of spark whatsoever !
The set list was exactly as described in the blog.
But what you forgot to mention is that a 7″ vinyl single was given away free to all audience members upon entry.
This was in a picture sleeve and had Steve Hillage ‘Ley Lines to Glassdom’ on the A side and Glenn Phillips ‘Lies’ on the other.
Posted by vintagerock on March 15, 2013 at 5:16 pm
Hi your memory is much better than mine! I wonder what I did with the single! I really can’t remember being given it. I’m getting too old.