The Hollies - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: 1971-1975

Here's the fourth and final album of the Hollies playing at the BBC.

There's a grand total of one song here that's been officially released: "Too Young to Be Married." That comes from the "Radio Fun" album. That came from a "Top of the Pops" BBC studio session. All of the unreleased tracks also come from "Top of the Pops" sessions, with one of them even from the same session as the released song.

These "Top of the Pops" recordings come from transcription discs sent to overseas radio stations at the time. For those discs that have survived, the sound quality is excellent. For instance, you can't tell the difference between the released song and the others.

My thanks goes to my musical associate Marley for providing me these recordings.

Surprisingly, even as late as 1971 and 1972, there was still a lot of BBC DJ talk over the music. I've noticed that the more poppy a band is, the more likely their songs get talked over. So I did the usual thing of using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe out the talking and keep the underlying music. Ten out of the 14 songs here have "[Edit]" in their names due to this problem.

After about 1972 or 1973, it became rare to have live performances on the Top of the Pops show, but there were occasional exceptions. We got lucky with one last live performance from 1975, which make up the last two songs here. One of those, "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," is a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song.

This album is 48 minutes long.

UPDATE: On May 15, 2025, updated the mp3 download file. I added two songs I'd previously missed, "Lucy" and "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Both are from 1975.

01 Hey Willy [Edit] (Hollies)
02 Survival of the Fittest [Edit] (Hollies)
03 Too Young to Be Married (Hollies)
04 Hold On (Hollies)
05 Look What We've Got [Edit] (Hollies)
06 The Baby [Edit] (Hollies)
07 Oh Grannie [Edit] (Hollies)
08 What a Life I've Led [Edit] (Hollies)
09 Blue in the Morning (Hollies)
10 Magic Woman Touch [Edit] (Hollies)
11 Won't You Feel Good That Morning [Edit] (Hollies)
12 Slow Down (Hollies)
13 Lucy [Edit] (Hollies)
14 4th of July, Asbury Park [Sandy] [Edit] (Hollies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CEooJkEP

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/IzL1whcU2NLOe9Y/file

The cover art photo shows the band playing on the "Top on the Pops" TV show in 1974.