Alan Bown (with Robert Palmer) - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1969-1971

Here's the second and last BBC Sessions album for the band Alan Bown. By chance, this album is great for highlighting the start of the career of Robert Palmer. So if you're a fan of his music, you may want to listen to this, even if you care nothing about Alan Bown.

Robert Palmer would later go on to much bigger fame and fortune with hits like "Addicted to Love" and "Simply Irresistible" in the 1980s. From 1966 to 1969, the lead vocalist for the band was Jess Roden. But he decided to leave in 1969 for a solo career. He was replaced by Palmer in time for the 1969 single "Gypsy Girl." That happens to be the third song here. Palmer left in October 1970 to join the band Vinegar Joe. It so happens the all the remaining songs are from the time Palmer was in the band except for the last two. The last two were  recorded in July 1971. The band stayed together until 1972.

As a result, the vast majority of the songs here are sung by Palmer. I think only the first one and last two were not. Most of the songs are from the 1970 album "Listen." That was released in late 1970 as Palmer was leaving the band. They were recorded at the last minute by a new vocalist, so the Palmer versions have never been released. (Ironically, the exact same thing happened when he came into the band. Roden, the previous lead vocalist, had his album vocals wiped by Palmer's versions for most of the songs.) Because of that, one can hear the Palmer versions here, almost like a lost album from Palmer's long music career.

All but one of these versions of the songs here are officially unreleased. The one exception, "Movie Star Baby," has come out on a various artists compilation of obscure BBC recordings. However, the vast majority come from pristine transcription discs, so the sound quality is really good. There are three exceptions. Two songs, "Crash Landing" and "Make Up Your Mind," come from a BBC concert hosted by DJ John Peel. I'm guessing this was a longer show of at least half an hour yet somehow only two fell into my hands. If anyone has the rest of the show, please let me know. Also, the song "Curfew" comes from a BBC TV show called "Disco 2." That show later evolved into the better known "The Old Grey Whistle Test." I found that because a video of it survives on YouTube. Unfortunately the picture quality is crappy and it black and white even though the sound quality is fairly good. But even so, it's interesting, because it's probably the earliest TV footage from Palmer's long music career.

As with Volume One, many songs have "[Edit]" in their names. That's from the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. As usual, I used the audio editing program X-Minus to fix that.

Personally, I like this volume more than the first one. For one thing, you have the Robert Palmer factor. But also, nearly all the songs are original (at least "I Got a Line on You" is a cover), and the band was moving into an interesting progressive rock direction. It's too bad they broke up not long after this. They probably would be a lot better known if they'd stuck around.

This album is 54 minutes long.

UPDATE: On May 15, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. I added two songs I'd previously missed, "Hobby Horses Head" and "Find a Melody."

01 My Friend [Edit] (Alan Bown)
02 Movie Star Baby [Edit] (Alan Bown)
03 Gypsy Girl [Edit] (Alan Bown)
04 I Got a Line on You [Edit] (Alan Bown)
05 Friends in St. Louis [Edit] (Alan Bown)
06 All I Can [Edit] (Alan Bown)
07 Loosen Up [Edit] (Alan Bown)
08 Strange Little Friend [Edit] (Alan Bown)
09 Crash Landing (Alan Bown)
10 Make Up Your Mind (Alan Bown)
11 Curfew (Alan Bown)
12 Make Us All Believe [Edit] (Alan Bown)
13 Pyramid [Edit] (Alan Bown)
14 Find a Melody (Alan Bown)
15 Hobby Horses Head (Alan Bown)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/iHeddCZA

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/wJUmhY0f6dJKLvE/file

I had to look high and low to find any decent photo of the band with Robert Palmer in it. I finally succeeded by searching the Facebook page of a fan club of the band. This is from 1969. Palmer is standing on the far right, holding a hand to his mouth, smoking a cigarette. It was in black and white, but I colorized it.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Alan Bown - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1966-1969

Next up with my big BBC project is Alan Bown. If you don't know who Alan Bown is, I'm not surprised. I didn't know of him until this project. In short, he was the leader of a British band that went by several names: The Alan Bown Set, The Alan Bown!, and finally just Alan Bown. For simplicity's sake, I'm just using "Alan Bown" across the board. But just as Spencer Davis was not the main guy in the Spencer Davis Group (that was Steve Winwood), Bown was the trumpet player and not the lead vocalist or main songwriter, so it's a bit odd to me that the band was named after him. 

Alan Bown never had a big hit, though they came close a couple of times. However, they developed enough of a following to put out five albums and a bunch of singles while the band was together from 1965 to 1972. The band went through all the same musical changes many British bands went through at the time. They started out rooted in blues and jazz. That morphed into soul, then psychedelia, then progressive rock. If the band is remembered for anything these days, it's probably for the fact that Robert Palmer was the lead singer for a while. But the band has enough material for two BBC volumes, and Palmer won't show up until Volume 2.

Here's the Wikipedia link if you want to know more:

The Alan Bown Set - Wikipedia

The first three songs aren't actually from BBC recordings. They're taken from a relatively obscure 1965 live album called "London Swings: Live at the Marquee Club." But I wanted to include them because none of the band's 1965 BBC recordings survive, and I wanted something to document that period. The song "Emergency 999" wasn't well known at the time, but later caught on as a Northern Soul favorite. 

Everything else here is from BBC studio sessions. Only one of those songs is officially released though. "Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies" came out on a various artists compilation focused on BBC recordings called "Shapes and Sounds, Volume 2." But the vast majority of the unreleased songs come from pristine transcription reels and so have excellent sound quality.

You may notice that aside from the first three songs, which aren't actually BBC recordings, every single song has "[Edit]" in their titles. That's because in every single case, BBC DJs talked over the music. But I did my usual thing of using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe that talking while keeping the underlying music.

Actually, one of those didn't have a BBC DJ talking over the music: "Story Book." But it has "[Edit]" in the title for other reasons. The sound quality of that one was so poor that when I first posted this, I only included it as a bonus track. But within 24 hours, musical friend MZ surprised me by making some improvements, and it sounded a lot better. I noticed the vocals were still low, so I used X-Minus to boost them. The combined results were good enough for me to remove it from being a bonus track, but the sound is still somewhat rougher than the others.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 It's Growing (Alan Bown)
02 Emergency 999 (Alan Bown)
03 I Need You (Alan Bown)
04 Do the Boomerang [Edit] (Alan Bown)
05 Gonna Fix You Good [Edit] (Alan Bown)
06 Headline News [Edit] (Alan Bown)
07 Penny for Your Thoughts [Edit] (Alan Bown)
08 Technicolour Dream [Edit] (Alan Bown)
09 My Girl the Month of May [Edit] (Alan Bown)
10 Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies [Edit] (Alan Bown)
11 Toyland [Edit] (Alan Bown)
12 Love Is a Beautiful Thing [Edit] (Alan Bown)
13 Story Book [Edit] (Alan Bown)
14 Magic Handkerchief [Edit] (Alan Bown)
15 All Along the Watchtower [Edit] (Alan Bown)
16 Still as a Stone [Edit] (Alan Bown)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3ybzEtss

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/8UbsXSbwx6wpEqj/file

A couple of days after I first posted this album, I redid the cover with a different photo I found while looking for a good photo for Volume 2. This one come from a Facebook page for the band. A band member who was actually in the photo suggests it dates from 1966 or 1967. Later, I improved the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.