TANGERINE DREAM
From Virgin To Quantum Years: Coventry Cathedral 22 KSCOPE
Electronic pioneers (re)sent to Coventry half a century after legendary show.
Tangerine Dream’s invitation to play Coventry Cathedral in 1975 was a hot potato. In December the previous year, the classic line-up had performed at Reims Cathedral, where around 6,000 “hippies and deadbeats” turned up and desecrated the coronation site of French kings, according to France’s biggest news outlets. Concerns that the same thing could happen again in England were never far away, while others saw the invite to a Berlin-based group as a mark of disrespect anyway, given that the original Coventry Cathedral had been bombed by the Germans during the war, a catastrophe that would have been fresh in the memory for many in the West Midlands at the time. In the end, the event went off without incident – no hippies, deadbeats or Anglo-German tensions.