Elton John - BBC Sessions, Volume 9: Wembley Pool, London, Britain, 11-3-1977

I thought I was all done posting BBC albums by Elton John. But the other day, I came across a BBC concert from 1977 I'd missed that was posted at a bootleg sharing site. It was too interesting to not post, especially with guest appearances by Kiki Dee and Stevie Wonder. So here it is. 

But note that by posting this, I've had to renumber all the Elton John BBC albums that come after this. So the former Volume 9 becomes Volume 10, the former Volume 10 becomes Volume 11, and so on. I just did all that renumbering, so feel free to redownload those if you don't want two Volume 9's.

This entire concert was professionally filmed by the BBC. Apparently, when this concert first happened, only about an hour of it was shown on BBC TV at the time. But over the years, more of it has come out here and there until this is probably the whole thing. A person named Emmanuel Hercules posted the entire video file, which is where I got this. He stitched it together from multiple sources. I converted it to audio format and then broke it into mp3s. The only critique I'd have of his nice work on this is that the audio from the different sources were sometimes at different volumes. But I think I've evened that out. The sound quality is generally excellent, roughly the same as the other 1970s BBC concerts.

This was kind of the end of Elton John's prime 1970s era. He was feeling burned out (and even attempted suicide roughly around this time). In this concert, which was a special one done for charity, he announced he would stop touring for a while. He was pretty low profile for the rest of the 1970s before coming back with more hits in the early 1980s (and beyond).

Regarding the two guest appearances, Kiki Dee did her usual thing, dueting with him on their Number One hit song "Don't Go Breaking My Heart." 

The Stevie Wonder appearance was rather disappointing, in my opinion. He joined Elton John on stage for the final number, "Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance)," which I think went on too long (13 minutes). He didn't do much except play some tambourine (as one can see on the video of this concert) and sing some backing vocals. It was almost certainly a spontaneous thing where he showed up on stage without even knowing the song. But the fact that he showed up on stage at all was a big deal. Wonder was probably at the peak of his popularity, but he was kind of in seclusion for most of the late 1970s, kind of like John Lennon doing the same thing around that time. He didn't play any full concerts in 1976, 1977, and 1978, and only made a few brief appearances like this one.

This concert is two hours and 19 minutes long.

01 talk (Elton John)
02 Better Off Dead (Elton John)
03 Daniel (Elton John)
04 talk (Elton John)
05 Roy Rogers (Elton John)
06 talk (Elton John)
07 The Goaldiggers Song (Elton John)
08 Where to Now St. Peter (Elton John)
09 talk (Elton John)
10 Shine On Through (Elton John)
11 Tonight (Elton John)
12 I Heard It through the Grapevine (Elton John)
13 talk (Elton John)
14 Island Girl (Elton John)
15 talk (Elton John)
16 Candle in the Wind (Elton John)
17 talk (Elton John)
18 One Horse Town (Elton John)
19 Bennie and the Jets (Elton John)
20 Rocket Man [I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time] (Elton John)
21 talk (Elton John)
22 Cage the Songbird (Elton John)
23 talk (Elton John)
24 Levon (Elton John)
25 Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me (Elton John)
26 talk (Elton John)
27 [Gotta Get A] Meal Ticket (Elton John)
28 talk (Elton John)
29 Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word (Elton John)
30 Philadelphia Freedom (Elton John)
31 Funeral for a Friend - Love Lies Bleeding (Elton John)
32 talk (Elton John)
33 Your Song (Elton John)
34 talk (Elton John)
35 Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Elton John & Kiki Dee)
36 talk (Elton John)
37 Bite Your Lip [Get Up and Dance] (Elton John with Stevie Wonder)

https://www.imagenetz.de/eVDcZ

The cover photo is from this exact concert.