Tina Turner – Live In Amsterdam: Wildest Dreams Tour

Extended/Remastered Edition

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B     Extras: B-     Concert: B+

 

 

It has always been my opinion that Tina Turner’s Live In Amsterdam: Wildest Dreams Tour concert, taped in the New Amsterdam Arena on September 1996, is one of the greatest concerts ever captured on video.  Turner is captured in peak form, trying twists on recent hits and delivering a great mix of classic material and new material that has an intensity that never quits.  I have owned it twice before and think this is pretty much the best version yet offered.  The 21 tracks here are:

 

1)     Whatever You Want

2)     Do What You Do

3)     River Deep, Mountain High

4)     Missing You

5)     In Your Wildest Dreams

6)     Goldeneye (James Bond title song)

7)     Private Dancer

8)     We Don’t Need Another Hero (from Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdome)

9)     Let’s Stay Together

10)  I Can’t Stand The Rain

11)  Undercover Agent For The Blues

12)  Steamy Windows

13)  Givin’ It Up For Your Love

14)  Better Be Good To Me

15)  Addicted To Love

16)  The Best

17)  What’s Love Got To Do With It

18)  Proud Mary

19)  Nutbush City Limits

20)  On Silent Wings

21)  Something Beautiful Remains (credited as a “bonus” track)

 

We can always want more, like Typical Male, Hot Legs, The Acid Queen, or her Bryan Adams duet It’s Only Love, but this is one of the most consistent lineups for a concert you will ever see, and it actually gets better with age.  If you have wanted to get this for your home theater system, but were scarred-off by the higher price of the previous DVDs, this is priced right and the clarity is better than ever.

 

It has been issued several times because of its quality and impact.  Besides the obvious VHS release, two 12” LaserDisc versions were issued.  One was a regular version, while the other was a stunning, demo-quality DTS sound edition.  In 1997, one of the first concerts issued on DVD and by Eagle Rock was this one, in Dolby 5.1 before the bugs were worked out for DTS DVDs.  When they were, the DTS DVD arrived in 1999.  Now comes this new, third DTS version.

 

This remastered 2004 edition offers weak Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, better Dolby 5.1 AC-3 & a new configuration of its DTS 5.1 sound.  More importantly, it offers the very best picture ever offered of the event.  Going back to the IDTV (improved definition, possibly PAL, SECAM or SECAM-C affiliated) video master has paid off, with detail that was not available in the previous editions.  It makes you wonder if a digital High Definition playback source would even reveal more!

 

In the case of the DTS, the LaserDisc was at 48 kHz/20 Bits and 1,509 kilobits-per-second.  In a rare early case, that is the full sound that landed up on the DVD, but very few more music DVDs would have that privilege before the demand for higher-quality DTS had companies pairing 5.1 Dolby and 5.1 DTS on the same DVD.  DTS cut its kilobits rate in half to 756, but the new version would be 24 Bits, which worked very well on many DVDs, including Eagle Rock’s Celebrate – The Best Of Tina Turner Live.  Though you can feel some fullness and richness missing versus the previous DTS versions, the new articulation and clarity from the higher bits and going back to the soundmaster adds new life to one of the most energetic concerts money can buy.  Too bad this could not have been in DTS’ stunning 96/24 format, but there is obviously enough dynamics in the soundmaster for that to be amazing, which they can try when they start releasing material in an actual High Definition format down the line like Blu-ray.

 

As for the music, the band is in great form, Tina and her dancers have endless energy and the material is top rate.  Whatever You Want is a great single that deserved to be a huge hit and starts off the concert extremely well.  River Deep, Mountain High is an early showstopper that is worthy of the original Phil Spector-produced classic.  Footage from Goldeneye (1995) is featured on the great video screen surrounded by its own versatile camera iris design and her performance reminds us how not too long ago, the Bond films were still so exciting and fun.  I Can’t Stand The Rain is not the New Wave gem it was on her Rock album masterwork Private Dancer (1984, get the JVC XRCD if you still can), but it is outright acoustic and very down to earth as compared to Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott’s wild remake of the Anne Pebbles classic.  Better Be Good To Me should be wilder and The Fixx not showing up is no excuse, but it is still fun.  Proud Mary really works and Nutbush City Limits is not bad.  The less likely you have heard of a track, the more likely you are to be impressed.  Few concerts on DVD can come close to this, and now that this has been so nicely upgraded, none can outperform it.

 

Also for the first time, this title has been given some extra material.  The first is a nearly half-hour long promotional film for the Wildest Dreams album, discussing all the tracks and how ace producer Trevor Horn delivered one of her all-time great studio efforts.  The other is the exceptional Music Video by the great Stéphane Sednaoui for Whatever You Want, which is just amazing.  He takes his idea of mirror images of the human form that are an autueristic mark of his work into a sensuous new direction for Turner, himself and the clip, which makes it one of the best videos either of them have ever done.  They both have great track records.

 

Except in the case of DTS sound purists who like the 1,506 kbps sound, this remastered and updated DVD of Live In Amsterdam: Wildest Dreams Tour is a must-have DVD for all serious music collections and a challenge for the best home theater systems money can buy.  Even those DTS die-hards will be impressed by the sound detail improvements and if you have never had the privilege of seeing this concert, be ready for the best.  This is why we will always have Tina Turner, because a real artist give it all to their audience and no one does this better than Tina does.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo