Has to sweep back the other way

My occasional series on Pearl Jam tour posters has inadvertently become very occasional.* So, applying the paddles (clear!), I shall delve back into 2012, when the conflict in Syria was but a year old and those in the know confidently predicted it would soon be over, Obama was persuading us of the merits of four more years of masterly inactivity, and Mitt Romney and Donald Trump were best buds. But at least the Lib Dems were keeping the Tories in check from their worst, austerity-inflected excesses, and no one expected an outright Tory win in 2015, not with PM-in-waiting Ed Miliband providing such effective opposition.

Find a lighthouse in the dark stormy weather

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Carrying on my (charmingly intermittent) series on Pearl Jam posters, here’s this autumn’s harvest from their 12-date North American tour, along with notes about a few of the gigs. Click on the dates themselves to see setlists; professional bootleg recordings are available from the Bootleg page on the Pearl Jam website. The Bridge School concerts and Ed’s solo gig are being saved for separate posts.

Whispered songs inside the wind

Autumn is the season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and Pearl Jam North American tours. With the band’s latest tour now well underway,* it’s a chance to look back at last autumn’s tour posters.

July over here in the UK can often be autumnal, so I’ve included the two July dates in London, Ontario (I was initially very excited when I saw they’d announced a London date…) and Wrigley Field, Chicago (home of Eddie Vedder’s beloved and perennially under-achieving Chicago Cubs).

Support on the latter dates came from Mudhoney, and the tour finished in Seattle, their first hometown gig in four years.

PJ, London, ON, 16 July 2013.

All those yesterdays

Continuing the poster gallery begun with the EV 2014 tours of South America and Australia, here are the ones from Pearl Jam‘s trip to New Zealand and Australia at the start of 2014. All the shows were for the Big Day Out. One notable feature of Australians* resides in their succinct naming of things. (Their domestic T20 cricket competition is the Big Bash. No mistaking the type of cricket on offer there.)

PJ, Auckland, 17 Jan 2014.

Follow the strangest tribe

Continuing the poster gallery series,* here are the posters from Pearl Jam’s European jolly this summer. The Trieste one looks like a Spinal Tap cover. I’ve added Vedder’s solo show in Meco, Portugal to the end. There’s a separate post about Vedder’s anti-war comments at Milton Keynes.

Between the gigs in Poland (3 July) and Belgium (5 July), Matt Cameron and Mike McCready found time to get over to London to join Soundgarden at Hyde Park, where the band played Superunknown straight through. Here’s a review from Every Record Tells a Story. The other band members were doubtless grateful there were no travel hitches.

PJ, Amsterdam (1), 16 June 2014.

PJ, Amsterdam (2), 16 June 2014.

As I walk the hemisphere

Following on (backwards) from the EV South America 2014 tour posters, here are the ones from the 2014 Australia tour that Vedder tagged on to the Pearl Jam tour. Support from the ever-reliable Glen Hansard.

Again, posters were saved from Spreading the Jam. Once you look at enough of these critters, certain themes start to take shape, some more predictable than others: ukuleles and guitars, surfing and the ocean, nature, an old-fashioned futuristic science fiction, and 60s-infused weird stuff.

EV, Perth (1), 7 Feb 2014.

Go forward in reverse

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One of the cool things that Pearl Jam have continued to do – beyond the records and the regular tours and stuff – is produce posters for every gig they play. The same holds true for Eddie Vedder’s solo gigs. It is now quite a substantial output; whoever keeps churning out fresh poster ideas must be starting to fray at the edges.

Since 1996, PJ have produced silk-screened* posters, for sale at their shows: all of them original and imaginative artwork. As you can imagine, what with there being the odd hardcore PJ fan out there, many of these are also now collector’s items. The merch stands at PJ and Vedder shows are usually pretty lively when the doors first open.