Elkie Brooks - BBC Sessions, Volume 4- In Concert, NEC Arena, Birmingham, Britain, 8-9-1987

Here's the fourth and final BBC album I have for British singer Elkie Brooks. 

Brooks' singing career began back in the early 1960s, but she didn't start having hit songs (in Britain only) until 1977. Once she started though, she had a bunch of them with six Top Twenty hits between 1977 and 1987, and a bunch of lesser hits. Her last hit was "We've Got Tonite" in 1987 (which is performed here). So this concert came at an ideal time to wrap up the end of the hit-making phase of her music career.

All of her big hits were performed here. Plus, she did some nice lesser known covers, like "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Goin' Back," and "Maybe I'm Amazed." She didn't release her first official live album until ten years later, and then two more in the years after that. I prefer this one. 

This is unreleased, and I believe hadn't been widely bootlegged. But it was replayed by the BBC in 2025, so I was able to get an excellent sounding version.

This album is an hour and 20 minutes long. 

01 Fool [If You Think It's Over] (Elkie Brooks)
02 Goin' Back (Elkie Brooks)
03 Nights in White Satin (Elkie Brooks)
04 Hiding Inside Yourself (Elkie Brooks)
05 Only Women Bleed (Elkie Brooks)
06 Pearl's a Singer (Elkie Brooks)
07 What's a Matter Baby [Is It Hurting You] (Elkie Brooks)
08 Ain't Misbehavin' (Elkie Brooks)
09 No Secrets (Elkie Brooks)
10 If You Leave Me Now (Elkie Brooks)
11 Hold the Dream (Elkie Brooks)
12 Lilac Wine (Elkie Brooks)
13 All or Nothing (Elkie Brooks)
14 Don't Cry Out Loud (Elkie Brooks)
15 Gasoline Alley (Elkie Brooks)
16 No More the Fool (Elkie Brooks)
17 We've Got Tonite (Elkie Brooks)
18 Maybe I'm Amazed (Elkie Brooks) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/djNpMwWa

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/umcaxfa4G827Lr1/file 

The cover image is a screenshot I took from a video of this exact concert. 

Don McLean - BBC Sessions, Volume 5: Don McLean and Friends, Pebble Mill Studios, Birmingham, Britain, 12-26-1978

Here's another BBC album by singer-songwriter Don McLean. This one is the music from a 1978 TV special called "Don McLean and Friends." The friends are Elkie Brooks and the vocal harmony band the Jordanaires.

When I started looking for McLean's BBC material some weeks back, I was surprised how much came up. I'm particularly surprised the BBC gave him this special in 1978. Although he put out an album that year that reached the Top Twenty in Britain ("Chain Lightning"), he didn't have any hit singles that year, or any other year since 1973. He would have a big comeback in 1980 with his cover of "Crying," which would hit Number One in Britain, but of course that wasn't known yet in 1978. Anyway, kudos to the BBC for giving him this special. 

McLean had two guests. Elkie Brooks became a big star in 1977, and was arguably more commercially successful than McLean at the time of this special. She sang two of her recent hits, "Don't Cry Out Loud" and "Lilac Wine." The Jordanaires were a vocal quartet formed in 1948. They put out a lot of their own music, especially gospel albums. However, they were better known for being backup singers, especially for Elvis Presley. They backed him extensively in recordings, concerts, and films from the 1950s to the 1970s. So it's fitting that they sang a medley of Presley classics here, as well as backing McLean on some of his songs.

One slightly frustrating thing about this concert is that while McLean is best known for his classic hit "American Pie," it seems he'd grown tired of it by the time of this concert. He only performed a short version of it, which lasts less than three minutes, instead of the well-known seven minute version.

This album was very hard for me to find. I don't think it has existed as an audio bootleg. I found a YouTube video of it, and concerted that to audio format, then broke it into mp3s. The sound quality is very good. 

This album is 51 minutes long.

01 American Pie [Short Version] (Don McLean)
02 And I Love You So (Don McLean)
03 talk (Don McLean)
04 Lotta Lovin' (Don McLean)
05 talk (Don McLean)
06 Blue Suede Shoes - All Shook Up - Loving You - Don't Be Cruel - Hound Dog (Jordanaires)
07 talk (Don McLean)
08 Genesis (Don McLean)
09 Crying (Don McLean)
10 Don't Cry Out Loud (Elkie Brooks)
11 Lilac Wine (Elkie Brooks)
12 talk (Don McLean)
13 Words and Music (Don McLean)
14 Chain Lightning (Don McLean)
15 It's Just the Sun (Don McLean)
16 Vincent (Don McLean)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/uBpiHs7d

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/XYY0Z9lM8WSNAHj/file

The cover image is a screenshot taken from this exact concert. 

Elkie Brooks - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1977-1987

Here's a third volume (out of four) of British singer Elkie Brooks performing for the BBC. In this case, every song comes from appearances on BBC TV shows.

The first album in this series consisted of BBC studio sessions. It ended in 1977, which was the year Brooks had her first big hits. The second one was a full concert from 1977. In Volume 1, I only had two of her hits, "Pearl's a Singer" and "Lilac Wine." But from 1977 until 1987, she had lots of hits in Britain (while she never had any hits in the U.S.). So I tried to put this collection together to deal with that period. 

Everything here is unreleased. I often had to dig deep to find the material. For instance, I found she did some appearances on the BBC TV show "The Two Ronnies" in 1980, but none of them were on YouTube. So I downloaded all the episodes of that show that year from SoulseekQT and went through them, found the songs she did, and turned them into mp3s. Those are tracks 4, 5, and 6.

As for the other tracks, the first three plus tracks 9 and 13 are from the "Top of the Pops" BBC TV show (not to be confused with the BBC radio show of the same name). I rarely use that as a source for my BBC projects, because the vast majority of performers on it lip-synced when on the show. However, Brooks usually did not. In ease case, I carefully compared those versions with the album versions to make sure. They're from 1977, 1978, 1979, 1982, and 1987 respectively.

Tracks 7 and 8 are from the TV show "Parkinson" in 1982. Tracks 10 and 11 are from a 1983 TV show hosted by singer Leo Sayer. Track 12 is from a TV show called "Wogan" in 1987. Generally speaking, I used the MVSEP program to get rid of crowd noise on the songs where there was crowd noise.

I searched for more BBC TV appearances after 1987, but I couldn't find any good ones until way later, and those were mostly repeats of earlier hits. That makes sense, because she didn't have any significant appearances after that year. Between this volume and "Volume 1" in this series, you'd have a pretty good "greatest hits" collection for her entire career, with only a couple of key songs missing.

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 Sunshine After the Rain (Elkie Brooks)
02 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Elkie Brooks)
03 The Runaway (Elkie Brooks)
04 Don't Cry Out Loud (Elkie Brooks)
05 Paint Your Pretty Picture (Elkie Brooks)
06 Dance Away (Elkie Brooks)
07 Fool [If You Think It's Over] (Elkie Brooks)
08 Superstar [Groupie] (Elkie Brooks)
09 Nights in White Satin (Elkie Brooks)
10 Gasoline Alley (Elkie Brooks)
11 Giving You Hope (Elkie Brooks)
12 We've Got Tonite (Elkie Brooks)
13 No More the Fool (Elkie Brooks) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/me7Fh3Yn

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/V2ubR7qCxIoT7jV/file

The cover photo was taken circa 1980. I don't know more details.

Elkie Brooks - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: Golders Green Hippodrome, London, Britain, 10-8-1977

This is the second of four BBC albums I'm posting for British singer Elkie Brooks. The first one consisted of studio sessions, but this one is a full concert.

Elkie Brooks began releasing singles as far back as 1964. But for many years, success eluded her. Then everything thing changed for her in 1977. She had her first hit early in the year, with the song "Pearl's a Singer." Later in the year, she had a second hit with "Sunshine After the Rain." Both of those reached the Top Ten in Britain. (She never had any hits in the U.S.) From that year on, it was like a switch was flipped, and she became a hit-making machine in Britain for the rest of the 1970s and all through the 1980s.

This concert catches her at the end of that pivotal year for her, 1977. It came after her two big hits that year, and both of them are included. It also includes "Lilac Wine," which wasn't released by her yet, but would be another hit for her in early 1978.

Brooks always had a great voice, but she'd never had success writing her own songs. However, by 1977 at least, she and/or her producers (the songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller) developed a knack for finding the right songs for her to sing. As an example, both of her 1977 hits, "Pearl's a Singer" and "Sunshine After the Rain" had been released by other artists years earlier, but they hadn't met with success until she did her versions. For most of the rest of the concert, she stuck with classic songs that had been hits in previous decades, going as far back as "Sophisticated Lady" from the 1930s.

The music here remains unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. 

This album is 57 minutes long. 

01 I'm Gonna Make You Love Me (Elkie Brooks)
02 Be Positive (Elkie Brooks)
03 talk (Elkie Brooks)
04 Rich Man's Woman (Elkie Brooks)
05 Love Potion No. 9 (Elkie Brooks)
06 Sunshine After the Rain (Elkie Brooks)
07 Mojo Hannah (Elkie Brooks)
08 Slippin' and Slidin' (Elkie Brooks)
09 Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Elkie Brooks)
10 Sophisticated Lady (Elkie Brooks)
11 Lilac Wine (Elkie Brooks)
12 If the World Was Run by Little Children - Mercedes Benz (Elkie Brooks)
13 Pearl's a Singer (Elkie Brooks)
14 Saved (Elkie Brooks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/7NCsRu5f

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/XeDj2biQQydugLO/file

The cover image comes from this exact concert. I took a screenshot from a YouTube video. The original was very blurry and low-res. I used Krea AI to fix it up, but it could only do so much with a bad source.

Elkie Brooks - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1964-1977

I recently got a request from a commenter for a BBC album by Elkie Brooks. I was happy to see that, because I had already made three BBC albums for her. It's just that there's a very big backlog on getting albums posted, generally speaking. So here's the first one. It's a collection of BBC studio sessions.

This is a rather strange album in terms of which years the music is from. Elkie Brooks had a solo career as a singer in the 1960s, without much success. Then she was a part of the band Vinegar Joe from 1971 to 1974. That band had two lead singers, her and Robert Palmer. (I've already posted two BBC Vinegar Joe albums, by the way.) Then she resumed her solo career in 1975. So this album has a big time gap. The first ten songs are from 1964 to 1966, and the last five are from 1976 and 1977.

The first song here, "Nothing Left to Do but Cry," is the only one not done for the BBC. It's from the US TV show "Shindig!" In 1964, they did a rare episode from London, and she was a part of that. The next nine songs are from the "Top of the Pops" radio show. All of these have been officially released, on the obscure various artists album "British Beat Girls Live on Air: 1965-1970." The first six songs are from two 1965 sessions and the last three are from a 1966 session. A bunch of these had BBC DJ Brian Matthew talking over the beginnings and ends of songs. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program to wipe out the talking while keeping the music. Those are the four songs with "[Edit]" in their titles.

Brooks had a lot of vocal talent, but she didn't have any hits, so by 1967 she was no longer popular enough to make a prominent BBC radio show like "Top of the Pops." So it wasn't until 1976 when there was another BBC session (or at least one that survived). She performed four songs for DJ John Peel's show. Peel generally liked to promote up and coming musical acts, not those who were stars already. But in 1976, still had yet to be involved with a single hit, so I guess she was still up and coming.

That all changed in 1977, however. She finally had her first hit with "Pearl's a Singer," after more than ten years of failed singles. That made her a star, and many more hits soon followed. But while "Pearl's a Singer" is the last song here, the rest will have to wait for a later volume in this series. 

This album is 45 minutes long. 

01 Nothing Left to Do but Cry (Elkie Brooks)
02 Getting Mighty Crowded (Elkie Brooks)
03 The Way You Do the Things You Do (Elkie Brooks)
04 Yeh Yeh [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
05 All My Life (Elkie Brooks)
06 Breaking Point [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
07 I Put a Spell on You (Elkie Brooks)
08 Love's Just a Broken Heart [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
09 Baby Let Me Love You (Elkie Brooks)
10 Bye Bye Blues [Edit] (Elkie Brooks)
11 Jigsaw Baby (Elkie Brooks)
12 Lilac Wine (Elkie Brooks)
13 Try a Little Love (Elkie Brooks)
14 Where Do We Go from Here [Rich Man's Woman] (Elkie Brooks)
15 Pearl's a Singer (Elkie Brooks)  

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3hQd3mfg

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/oEuU29weTGQCjEV/file

The cover photo is from August 1964. 

VinegarJoe - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: BBC in Concert, Golders Green Hippodrome, London, Britain, 12-1-1973

Here's the second and last of what I have of the British band Vinegar Joe at the BBC. In case you missed the Volume One post, Vinegar Joe had Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks as co-lead vocalists in the early 1970s, before they both became famous with their solo careers. The first volume contained BBC studio sessions. This one contains live material.

Most of this, tracks 8 through 17, consist of the 1973 BBC concert mentioned in the title. But that's rather short, at 28 minutes. (I'm guessing the BBC gave them a half-hour time slot.) I happen to have a few songs from a different concert in Belgium in 1972, so I added those to the front. That recording survives in very good quality because it was the TV show "Pop Circus."

It's a bit odd that the eighth track is a BBC DJ introducing the start of the concert. I considered changing the order, putting the 1972 concert after the 1973 one. I also considered moving just that DJ intro to the very start of the album. But ultimately I decided to just keep it like this.

By the way, note that I found some different versions of the 1973 concert on popular bootleg trading websites. Pretty much all of the different versions have different dates. Some say it took place in 1972, some just say 1973 without giving a year, and so on. But rest assured all these are the same concert, and I did the research to get the date correct. (For one thing, the band played songs from their album "Six Star General," released in October 1973, so it makes sense the concert took place after that album was released.)

That 1973 concert was kind of a last hurrah for the band. They broke up only a few months later, in the spring of 1974.

01 So Long (Vinegar Joe)
02 talk (Vinegar Joe)
03 See the World (Vinegar Joe)
04 Rock and Roll Gypsies (Vinegar Joe)
05 talk (Vinegar Joe)
06 No One Ever Do (Vinegar Joe)
07 Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On (Vinegar Joe)
08 talk (Vinegar Joe)
09 Let Me Down Easy (Vinegar Joe)
10 Food for Thought (Vinegar Joe)
11 Talkin' about My Baby (Vinegar Joe)
12 talk (Vinegar Joe)
13 Giving Yourself Away (Vinegar Joe)
14 talk (Vinegar Joe)
15 Black Smoke from the Calumet (Vinegar Joe)
16 talk (Vinegar Joe)
17 Proud to Be a Honky Woman (Vinegar Joe)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15274969/VinegarJ_1973_BBC_Sessions__Volume_2-_BBC_in_Concert__Golders_Green_Hippodrome__12-1-1973_atse.zip.html

I was only able to find a small number of color photos of the band in concert. The one I chose for the cover is from the Reading Festival in August 1972. I like it because it shows the band's two lead vocalists, Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks.

Vinegar Joe - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1972-1974

I recently posted a couple of BBC albums of the British band Alan Bown. Being in that band was the first big break in the career of singer Robert Palmer. He then went on to join this band in 1971. It broke up in 1974. Palmer then went on to a very successful solo career.

But he wasn't the only one. Vinegar Joe was unusual in that it had two lead singers, a man and a woman. The man was Palmer and the woman was Elkie Brooks. She also would have a successful solo career in Britain, with 13 hits in that country. But Palmer and Brooks typically didn't sing together in harmony like, say, the Everly Brothers. Instead, Palmer would usually sing one song and Brooks would sing another.

The band released three albums from 1972 to 1974, but despite their obvious talents, they never had a hit album or single. You can read more about the band here:

Vinegar Joe (band) - Wikipedia

Everything here is officially unreleased. The songs are from 1972, except for the last two. All but one are from BBC studio sessions. That one is "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," which come from a concert in Stockholm, Sweden, that was filmed for TV. The sound quality is generally very good, although there is some variation.

There's one bonus track. It also sounds pretty good. The reason it's a bonus track is because another version of the song is already on the album. The bonus track version comes from the "Old Grey Whistle Test" BBC TV show.

You may not this is called "Volume One." I have a second volume, which consists of a short BBC concert.

This album is 36 minutes long, not including the bonus track.

01 Early Monday Morning (Vinegar Joe)
02 Rusty Red Armour (Vinegar Joe)
03 Leg Up (Vinegar Joe)
04 Lawdy Miss Clawdy (Vinegar Joe)
05 Rock and Roll Gypsies (Vinegar Joe)
06 So Long (Vinegar Joe)
07 Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On (Vinegar Joe)
08 Dream My Own Dreams (Vinegar Joe)
09 Proud to Be a Honky Woman (Vinegar Joe)

Rusty Red Armour (Vinegar Joe)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15274963/VinegarJ_1972-1974_BBC_Sessions__Volume_1_atse.zip.html

The cover photo was taken at a dressing room after a concert in Aylesbury, Britain, in December 1972. Elkie Brooks is the lone female, in the red dress. Robert Palmer is in the back row in a white T-shirt, which is head turned to the side.