This concert comes from near the tail end of the existence of the Soft Boys, not counting occasional later reunions. Crucially, it happened about six months after the release of the classic album "Underwater Moonlight," so it naturally has a bunch of songs from that. But it even has some songs that presumably would have been on the band's next album, had they stayed together long enough to make another album ("City of Shame," "I Watch the Cars," and "The Lizard," plus, arguably, "Black Snake Diamond Rock").
More and more, I'm realizing that a lot of recordings, especially bootlegs, have the problem of the lead vocals being too low in the mix. I can use the "one weird trick" of boosting the vocals to make everything sound a lot better . That's what I did here, using the audio editing program UVR5. This entire concert happened to have been filmed. The film has never been released, but you can find it on YouTube. Probably, that's why this recording sounds much better than virtually all other Soft Boys live bootlegs, which usually come from audience tapings.
Oh, and one other key factor is that, before I posted this, I passed it on to my music friend MZ. He did his usual thing, fixing the EQ and such, to make it sound that much better. Thanks again, MZ.
One other problem this recording had was that there was a strange buzz at times. Oddly, it mostly happened between songs. I'm guessing maybe it was an electric guitar that was making a noise whenever it wasn't being played. I was able to use noise reduction to greatly reduce that, and MZ's fixes helped too. Note that, as usual, I only used noise reduction for the stuff between the songs, not the actual music. There's still some buzzing here and there, but it's not nearly as bad as before.
There was one other significant problem with this recording: the very tail end of the Pink Floyd cover song "Astronomy Domine" was missing, as well as maybe a minute and a half of the start of the next song, "Underwater Moonlight." So I used versions from another concert bootleg (Hope and Anchor, London, Britain, 3-28-1980), to patch in those missing parts.
This bootleg probably didn't get around much until now due to both the buzz problem and the low vocals
problem. Now that those have been fixed,
it can take its place as one of the best Soft Boys live recordings,
either officially released or not.
The band was really rocking here, with barely any pause between songs. Note that they played the song "Only the Stones Remain" twice.
The concert is 53 minutes long.
01 City of Shame (Soft Boys)
02 Only the Stones Remain (Soft Boys)
03 Strange (Soft Boys)
04 I Wanna Destroy You (Soft Boys)
05 Queen of Eyes (Soft Boys)
05 talk (Soft Boys)
06 I Watch the Cars (Soft Boys)
07 Kingdom of Love (Soft Boys)
08 Leppo and the Jooves (Soft Boys)
09 The Lizard (Soft Boys)
10 Black Snake Diamond Rock (Soft Boys)
11 Insanely Jealous (Soft Boys)
12 Astronomy Domine [Edit] (Soft Boys)
13 Underwater Moonlight [Edit] (Soft Boys)
14 Only the Stones Remain (Soft Boys)
https://www.upload.ee/files/15222438/TSoftBys_1980c_DingwllsLondnBritain__12-7-1980_atse.zip.html
The cover photo is from the video of this exact concert. It's rather low-res and blurry, unfortunately. That's Robyn Hitchcock singing into the microphone and Kimberley Rew to the side.
No comments:
Post a Comment