Saturday, December 10, 2022

The Hollies - In Concert, Cologne, Germany, 1975

Previously, I'd had an album of BBC sessions for the Hollies that ran from 1971 to 1976. Most of that actually wasn't from the BBC, and in fact the biggest part of it came from this concert. I have since radically redone that album. Now, it only deals with the years 1971 and 1972, and all of it is genuine BBC studio sessions, the vast majority of them unreleased and previously unavailable anywhere.

Here's the link to that:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-hollies-bbc-sessions-volume-4-1971.html

Since everything I had from after 1972 actually isn't from the BBC, I decided to make a non-BBC live material out of that. The vast majority of it comes from one unreleased concert in 1975. Details about just where and when this concert is from are scanty. You can watch all of it on YouTube, and it's clear the band walks into a stage area with the words "In Concert" on the wall. So it's definitely from a TV show with that name. Most sources say it was a Swiss TV show. But I found one source that seemed more knowledgeable, and claimed the show was actually recorded in Cologne, Germany, and broadcast on both German and Swiss TV. So I'm going with that. I still don't know the exact venue or the date though. If anyone does, please let me know.

The first eight tracks here come from that show. There were a couple of talking sections in the middle I cut out because there was a German translation spoken over virtually everything the band members said. The concert continued, with the band starting to play "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" as the credits rolled, but the song was cut off near the beginning, so I didn't include that.

I've added three other songs at the end from other TV appearances in that same time period. "Long Dark Road" is from 1973, "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" is from 1975, and "Draggin' My Heels" is from 1976. Those are all unreleased too.

I had some trouble with the song "Draggin' My Heels." The version I found had many microgaps of total silence in it, often less than a second long. Luckily, I discovered that if I closed those gaps in my audio editing software, no music was lost.

To be honest, the Hollies still did some TV and radio shows after 1976, but my interest in the group rapidly wanes after that. They were hit by the dreaded disco bug in the late 1970s, and generally followed some musical trends that didn't fit well for them

01 talk (Hollies)
02 I Can't Tell the Bottom from the Top (Hollies)
03 Another Night (Hollies)
04 4th of July, Asbury Park [Sandy] (Hollies)
05 Stop, Stop, Stop (Hollies)
06 I'm Down (Hollies)
07 The Air that I Breathe (Hollies)
08 He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother (Hollies)
09 Long Dark Road (Hollies)
10 Draggin' My Heels [Edit] (Hollies)
11 Long Cool Woman [In a Black Dress] (Hollies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15123237/THollis_1975_InConcrtCologneGermany__1975_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from a TV appearance in Germany in March 1975. But it's different than the main concert here. You can see from the YouTube video that they're wearing different clothes and are on a different stage.

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