Bowie very rarely performed concerts prior to 1972, a fact he actually mentions in his banter between songs in this recording. So we're lucky to have this at all. The released version is a big sonic upgrade over the bootleg versions that had been circulating between. However, even that has issues. Most of it has soundboard-level quality. But there are issues, especially the song "Changes." That sounds only okay at the beginning of the song, then suddenly gets a lot better midway through. I couldn't make any improvements to that, and related issues.
However, there were some things I could improve. The main one was the parts that were left out. I checked the bootleg versions with the official version. The official version entirely excluded the song "Queen Bitch." I don't know why, but I'm guessing this was on a CD with some other songs, and there simply wasn't enough room to squeeze in the whole thing. That probably also explains why some of the banter between songs was removed as well. That's especially the case with the banter before "The Supermen," where two entire minutes were removed. There were other removals as well, for instance in front of "Oh, You Pretty Things."
The first thing I did was restore the missing song and banter in their proper places. But that created a problem, because the sound quality difference between the official version and the bootleg version was stark. For the banter, luckily, I was able to close most of that gap. I ran it through the MVSEP program's de-reverb filter, and that helped. Then I took just the vocal parts of the banter tracks (which was most of them, aside from a little applause), and ran those through Adobe's vocal enhancer. That did wonders. Now, in my opinion, one can hardly tell the difference on the sourcing for the banter. I also did the same for the banter before "Changes," which sounded pretty bad on the official version.
It was harder to fix "Queen Bitch," since the bootleg version of the song was muddy. I did manage to use similar tricks to improve the clarity of the vocals somewhat. But still, at the end of the day, that one sounds worse than most of the rest of the songs. But it's still listenable, about on par with the problematic parts of "Changes" on the official version.
Bowie does a surprising number of cover versions here, by his usual standards ("Fill Your Heart," "Buzz the Fuzz," "Amsterdam," "Round and Round," and "I'm Waiting for the Man.") Maybe he was still uncertain how his own songs would go over with a concert audience. He needn't have worried, because the crowd loved him. You can especially hear that at the end, where he has to apologize because the audience didn't want him to stop but his band simply didn't have any other songs they'd practiced and were ready to play.
This album is 60 minutes long.
01 talk (David Bowie)
02 Fill Your Heart (David Bowie)
03 talk (David Bowie)
04 Buzz the Fuzz (David Bowie)
05 Space Oddity (David Bowie)
06 talk (David Bowie)
07 Amsterdam (David Bowie)
08 talk (David Bowie)
09 The Supermen (David Bowie)
10 talk (David Bowie)
11 Oh, You Pretty Things (David Bowie)
12 Eight Line Poem (David Bowie)
13 talk (David Bowie)
14 Changes (David Bowie)
15 talk (David Bowie)
16 Song for Bob Dylan (David Bowie)
17 talk (David Bowie)
18 Andy Warhol (David Bowie)
19 talk (David Bowie)
20 Queen Bitch (David Bowie)
21 Looking for a Friend (David Bowie)
22 talk (David Bowie)
23 Round and Round (David Bowie)
24 talk by emcee (David Bowie)
25 talk (David Bowie)
26 I'm Waiting for the Man (David Bowie)
27 talk (David Bowie)
28 talk by emcee (David Bowie)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/TD1x3zsQ
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/kPGLJZKfsIP9WOa/file
The cover image is from a concert poster for this exact concert. I cropped it to get it to fit into a square space. I also added in the number "1971," since I always want to include the date, month, and year for all the concerts I post.
Thank you
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