The Tourists Newcastle City Hall 19th September 1980
The Tourists Luminous tour of Great Britain called at Newcastle City Hall on 19th September 1980. The tour was to promote their third and final album “Luminous Basement”, which wasn’t as successful as the previous two releases, making No. 75 in the chart. The single from the album “Don’t Say I Told You So” made No. 40 in the singles chart. Support came from the Barracudas a surf/garage/psych/pop band who had a summer 1980 hit single “Summer Fun” and were great fun. The Tourists star was starting to wane, and although this was a fun show, the City Hall was far from full, and things weren’t going so well in the Tourists camp. The band split later in 1980, with Anne Lenox and Dave Stewart forming a liaison which would soon yield much greater success as the duo Eurythmics. The end of the Tourists came in Bangkok, when an airline strike stranded the band. The rift came with Stewart and Lennox disagreeing with the band’s main singer-songwriter Peet Coombes. 
Annie said in NME at the time: “Now Peet can be his own spokesperson…It was always part of Dave’s and my dilemma that we were acting as spokespersons for someone else’s work within a pop context, yet we weren’t able to put across how removed he was from that whole scene….We were on a funny boat, The Tourists….A strange craft… When we did that song [I Only Want to be With You] it was purely for fun. But after that it became bizarre. The things that happened to us were so wild, yet everyone got the impression of nice, clean poppy people. Dave Stewart: “The publicity thing just became like a bigger and bigger black cloud, until the only way we probably could have continued to exist with any dignity as people was to step aside and say, ‘Look this just doesn’t exist anymore. Let’s do something else’.” And that’s exactly what they did.
Archive for the ‘Barracudas’ Category
14 Oct
The Tourists Newcastle City Hall 19th September 1980
Posted by vintagerock in Barracudas, Tourists. Tagged: concert, concerts, gig, gigs, music, new wave, pop, rock, rock n roll. Leave a comment
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