Paul Weller - BBC Sessions, Volume 7: Victoria Park, London, Britain, 8-8-1998

I've been wanting to post the next album in this series of BBC albums performed by Paul Weller, but I wasn't sure how to proceed. It made sense to make the next album a BBC concert from 1996 or after. Thanks to the official box set "At the BBC," I had lots of choices. There was one concert each from 1996, 1997, and 1998. But all of them were edited down to less than an hour and all the banter between songs was removed. Furthermore, the song selections in all of them were similar. 

What I really wanted was a full concert with all the banter. That box set had a second concert from 1998 that at least was a full concert, at over an hour and 10 minutes long. However, the banter was still missing, and even a lot of the applause after songs was missing, with quick edits from one song to the next. I found that annoying. I think it's a much better listening to concerts where there are breaks between songs, otherwise it ends up kind of sounding like one song. So I was stuck. I had four BBC concerts to choose from, and I wasn't happy with any of them.

Then I found a soundboard bootleg of a concert Weller did in Edinburgh in July 1998. That did have banter between many songs, as well as complete applause, and the set list was largely the same. So what I'm presenting here is the music from the BBC concert in Britain, but with banter and applause added from the Edinburgh bootleg. The sound quality is excellent in both cases, and all the banter fits. (There were a few bits that didn't fit, such as a mention of Edinburgh, so I cut those out.) I hope when you listen to this is just sound like one concert and you'd never know that some bits came from a second source. (I didn't put "[Edit]" in the names of songs like I sometimes do, because basically all of the songs here have been carefully edited with their applause and such.)

So I finally got what I wanted, a full BBC concert from this time period. Weller was probably at the peak of his solo career popularity at this time, and the set list is excellent.

This album is an hour and 14 minutes long.

01 Into Tomorrow (Paul Weller)
02 Peacock Suit (Paul Weller)
03 Friday Street (Paul Weller)
04 Mermaids (Paul Weller)
05 talk (Paul Weller)
06 Sunflower (Paul Weller)
07 Out of the Sinking (Paul Weller)
08 talk (Paul Weller)
09 Science (Paul Weller)
10 Heavy Soul (Paul Weller)
11 talk (Paul Weller)
12 As You Lean into the Light (Paul Weller)
13 talk (Paul Weller)
14 Wild Wood (Paul Weller)
15 talk (Paul Weller)
16 Up In Suzes' Room (Paul Weller)
17 talk (Paul Weller)
18 Can You Heal Us [Holy Man] (Paul Weller)
19 talk (Paul Weller)
20 The Changingman (Paul Weller)
21 Porcelain Gods (Paul Weller)
22 Woodcutter's Son (Paul Weller)
23 talk (Paul Weller)
24 I Walk on Gilded Splinters (Paul Weller)
25 Broken Stones (Paul Weller)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16651258/PAULWLLR1998BBSssonsVlum7VctraPrkLndnBrtin__8-8-1998_atse.zip.html

A professional video for this concert was made, and can be found on YouTube. It seems the audio from the box set is taken from that video, because the lack of banter and applause is exactly the same. Anyway, I wasn't able to find any good photos of Weller at this concert, so I took a screenshot from the video. It's a bit low-res, but I like the perspective that shows Weller looking towards the crowd.