The Gang of Four - BBC Sessions (1979-1982)

The Gang of Four are the next musical act to get the BBC treatment. I'm interested mainly in their original years together, 1978 to 1982. (Like so many musical groups, there were various reunions later.) As far as I know, they didn't do any BBC concerts in that time frame, and this one album is all there is.

The first 11 songs here have been officially released as "The Peel Sessions Album." If that was all there was, I wouldn't be posting this, since the official album took care of things perfectly. But that's not the case. Those 11 tracks just happen to be all the BBC sessions with DJ John Peel. They also did two appearances on the BBC TV show "The Old Grey Whistle Test" (tracks 12 to 14), and another BBC session with DJ Kid Jensen (tracks 15 to 18). All of those are unreleased, so I figure that's enough to justify putting them all together here.

The sound quality is excellent all the way through, for both the released and unreleased tracks. Two of the Old Grey Whistle Test songs were done before a studio audience, but it was a small one, and there's only a bit of clapping at the ends of those.

This album is an hour and six minutes long.

01 I Found That Essence Rare (Gang of Four)
02 Return the Gift (Gang of Four)
03 5.45 (Gang of Four)
04 At Home He's a Tourist (Gang of Four)
05 Natural's Not in It (Gang of Four)
06 Not Great Men (Gang of Four)
07 Ether (Gang of Four)
08 Guns Before Butter (Gang of Four)
09 Paralysed (Gang of Four)
10 History's Bunk (Gang of Four)
11 To Hell with Poverty (Gang of Four)
12 He'd Send in the Army (Gang of Four)
13 Call Me Up (Gang of Four)
14 I Love a Man in a Uniform (Gang of Four)
15 The World at Fault (Gang of Four)
16 I Will Be a Good Boy (Gang of Four)
17 History of the World (Gang of Four)
18 We Live as We Dream, Alone (Gang of Four)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15454298/Gango4_1979-1982_BBSssions_atse.zip.html

I had fun making this particular album cover. I was searching the Internet for a good photo of the band, and came across one where the band members were posing dramatically, with their fists in the air. That reminded me of the dramatic statues of Communist countries like Russia and China. Perhaps that was intentional in the photo session, since the band is named after four political leaders from Communist China. But in any case, I found a photo of two giant bronze statues in North Korea. I used Photoshop to get rid of those, and then pasted in the band, and colorized them to look bronze.