"GoldDisc 1809" - Various Artists
Promotional Release
U2 Related Content:
Full Track Listing:
- Rockin’ at Midnight – Honeydrippers
- Stealin’ – Alvin Lee Band
- Desire – Rockets
- Victims of Illusion – Michael Schenker Group
- No More Lies – Neal Schon & Jan Hammer
- Don’t Let Him Know – Prism
- Winner Takes it All – Sammy Hagar
- Lights Are On (But No One’s Home) – Outlaws
- R.U. Ready 2 Rock – Blue Oyster Cult
- Goin’ South – Nils Lofgren
- Strutter (Live Version) – Kiss
- Silver and Gold (Live from Denver) – U2
- Kentucky Fried Blues – Nazareth
- Spaceage Sacrifice – Montrose
- Agnes – Donnie Iris
- Hot Summer Nights – Walter Egan
- 20 Eyes – Misfits
Background Information
This is a promotional disc put together by a company called TM Century. TM Century were a large broadcast service company that provided music libraries, jingles, and is based in Dallas Texas. TM Century put together four popular lines of musical product for radio stations, HitDisc and GoldDisc are aimed at providing music to radio stations for a subscription fee. PrimeCuts is distributed mostly to independent DJs and the fourth line is for the music video industry.
The service would make their own musical compilations each month and send them to the radio stations subscribed to their services. They would often edit the tracks themselves in the period from 1987-1990 and also touted their “NoNoise” technology in the same period, which was a copious amount of noise reduction applied during the editing process which they claimed improved the sound of the discs for radio. From 1990 onwards it appears that TM Century transitioned to digital sourced masters for most of their discs and it is rare they created their own masters or applied noise reduction from that time frame onwards.
This particular disc does contain a unique edit of “Silver and Gold” taken from the performance live in Denver that is heard on the Rattle and Hum album. The song is edited so it starts 2 seconds earlier than the album version removing some of the crowd noise, and the music comes up louder in volume faster, to cover the remaining crowd noise. At the end the song cuts away quick after the music stops, and fades out completely, where the album version continues for a few seconds of crowd noise, and then continues into the next track never fading out. The edit on the GoldDisc contains five and a half seconds of silence at the end of the track.
Island did allow their tracks to be part of this service. However, they may not have been aware of the edits that were being made on these tracks before distribution to radio. This CD is an actual pressed CD, and contains the NoNoise logo which showed that noise reduction had been applied to the tracks.