Verminator!

Verminator (1997). The Hamsters are well known on the UK band circuit for their tributes to Jimi Hendrix and ZZ Top but up until 1996 they had released two CDs and one DVD solely containing Hendrix covers, so far they had released nothing paying homage to ZZ Top. It was decided that they would do a ZZ Top tour and during one of the shows would record a live video. Verminator! is the result. It's their third video release and was released originally mid-way through 1997 on VHS in "HiFi Stereo".

Verminator! was re-released (along with the rest of The Hamsters' video back catalogue) in 2005 when it was re-edited and re-mastered into the DVD format (MPEG2 with Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo).

Track listing

1. "I Thank You"
2. "Arrested For Driving While Blind"
3. "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide"
4. "T.V. Dinners"
5. "She's Just Killing Me "
6. "Waiting For The Bus"
7. "Jesus Just Left Chicago"
8. "I Got The Six"
9. "Fool For Your Stockings"
10. "Can't Stop Rockin'"
11. "My Head's In Mississippi"
12. "Pincushion"
13. "Got Me Under Pressure"
14. "Rough Boy"
15. "Legs"
16. "Tubesnake Boogie"
17. "La Grange"
18. "Tush"
19. "Gimme All Your Lovin'"
20. "Sharp-Dressed Man "

Personnel

• Snail's-Pace Slim – guitars, lead vocals.
• Rev Otis Elevator – drums, vocals.
• Ms Zsa Zsa Poltergeist – bass, vocals.

Production

• Recorded sound – Chris Fallon
• Concert sound – Nick Foote
• Camera – John Sellings
• Vision mixing – Simon Travis
• Video editing – Kurt Adkins.
• Post-production audio editing – Kurt Adkins
• DVD authoring, DVD mastering, Video digitising – Kurt Adkins.
• Cover layout – Kurt Adkins.
• 'Jimi Hamster' design – Des Penny

Recording error

• When the video was first released an accident occurred during the original recording the result of which was that there was a 30 second gap in the audio during the final track. This occurred due to a mistake being made by the original audio engineer (there is no record of his name) whereby the audio feed had been routed through a DAT tape deck (presumably to make a bootleg recording) before it reached the vision mixing desk (which was also handling the audio feed to the S-VHS video deck making the recording). During the finale the DAT tape ran out and accordingly no longer passed any audio through to the video deck. This wasn't noticed until several weeks later during the post-production video editing. As it wasn't possible to go back and redo it, it was decided to release the video along with an abject apology. It remained this way for 8 years until the remastering to DVD took place where, thanks to modern digital editing tools (Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Audition), it was decided to take a section of another show (recorded 18 months after the original ZZ Top show) and insert it into the gap. Although the edit isn't seamless it's close. As a result the band have received many thanks^[1] from fans who have been irritated by the gap.

References

1. ^ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hamsters-Verminator/dp/B000AAVDVK Amazon customer review