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Fact #165886

When:

Short story:

Bob Dylan plays at Copps Coliseum, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, supported by The Alarm.

Full article:

Mike Peters (The Alarm) : The melody for (The Alarm song) Hardland came to me when I was actually crossing the border from America to Canada and it must have been five or six in the morning and we all got there in our tour buses and we had to get off to go through immigration. We were travelling in convoy with Dylan's bus and Dylan got off and I was walking behind him to go through immigration and for some reason I started going "Hardland, ripped it all apart..." and all the time I was going through immigration, I was thinking I must remember this song. I got back on the bus and I always carry a little recording Walkman with me with blank tapes in it, and I switched it on and was singing "Hardland, ripped it all apart" and all that stuff.

The next day I think we were playing in Hamilton, just outside Toronto and I remember playing it to Dave in the dressing room, and Dave really liked the song. We actually rehearsed it in the soundcheck, I showed Mark Taylor how to play it on the piano, it came together really fast. Luckily our sound engineer recorded the soundcheck and it sounded really good, so I kept the tape and put it away for future reference and I think we probably did an acoustic version of it on the acoustic demos later on when we were in LA.

We'd been rehearsing it for months and we were trying to turn Hardland from a Mike Peters / Eddie Macdonald song into an Alarm song, and we weren't really getting very far. We were trying to turn the whole thing round and it was getting further and further away from what I thought. I remember going back home and kind of losing it a bit and going back and getting the tape of the soundcheck and saying, "That's how we should be playing it." It did sound great and, you know, sometimes when you over-think your music you can get it all wrong, but your first instinctive approach to it, that can be the way it is.
(Source : not known)