Belle & Sebastian - BBC Sessions, Volume 5: Mandela Hall, Queens University, Belfast, Ireland, 12-21-2001

Here's the fifth of many Belle and Sebastian BBC albums. This one is another full concert.

Out of all of the Belle and Sebastian BBC albums I've posted or plan on posting, this is the only one that is fully released material. But I'm posting it for the sake of completeness. This makes up one of two discs of the album "The BBC Sessions." As such, the sound quality is excellent.

There's not much else to say. There were no problems or complexities. However, one interesting tidbit concerns the cover of "I'm Waiting for the Man," originally by the Velvet Underground. As you'll hear from the talking before the crowd, the band invited a random person from the crowd to come up and sing a song. That person suggested a Velvet Underground, and then did a good job singing that song. That might sound staged, but it's a real thing that happened. I know because I listened to a lot of covers by this band while putting together my covers albums by them, and there are a whole bunch of them that were sung by audience members. Apparently, this was a thing they sometimes did around this time period, though they seem to have stopped doing that a short time after this. The audience member was a guy named Barry Bartholomew. There was an article or two about him in the news after he heard himself singing once the official BBC album was released.

In addition to "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Here Comes the Sun" and "The Boys Are Back in Town" are also cover versions.

This album is 50 minutes long.

01 talk (Belle & Sebastian)
02 Here Comes the Sun (Belle & Sebastian)
03 There's Too Much Love (Belle & Sebastian)
04 The Magic of a Kind Word (Belle & Sebastian)
05 Me and the Major (Belle & Sebastian)
06 talk (Belle & Sebastian)
07 Wondering Alone (Belle & Sebastian)
08 talk (Belle & Sebastian)
09 The Model (Belle & Sebastian)
10 talk (Belle & Sebastian)
11 I'm Waiting for the Man (Belle & Sebastian with Barry Bartholomew)
12 The Boy with the Arab Strap (Belle & Sebastian)
13 The Wrong Girl (Belle & Sebastian)
14 Dirty Dream No. 2 (Belle & Sebastian)
15 The Boys Are Back in Town (Belle & Sebastian)
16 talk (Belle & Sebastian)
17 Legal Man (Belle & Sebastian)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602317/BellenS_2001c_BBSessionsVolume5MandlaHall__12-21-2001_atse.zip.html

The cover photo of band leader Stuart Murdoch was taken in San Francisco in September 2001. The background was originally red, but I changed that to make it differ more from the red lettering (which I'm keeping consistent for all the albums in this series).