Hot Chocolate - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: Lighthouse Poole Centre for Arts, Poole, Britain, 8-27-1982

Here's a short BBC concert by the British R&B band Hot Chocolate.

Note that I previously made a collection of BBC studio sessions by this band. Now that I've found this, I've renamed that album to "BBC Sessions, Volume 1." You can find the updated version with new cover art and so forth at this link:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2025/05/hot-chocolate-bbc-sessions-1970-1976.html

When I was putting that album together back in May 2025, I was annoyed to find the band did many TV appearances in the 1970s and 80s, but the vast majority were lip-synced. They even did an entire concert for German TV that was lip-synced. Furthermore, the band never released a live album. I couldn't find any bootlegs from them either. This particular concert was so obscure that in all my digging to find any live recordings of the band, I never even found a hint of its existence.

Happily, recently, I've been in contact with a musical associate who goes by the nickname Progsprog. He has a very large music collection, and we've been trading dozens of albums. Look for a lot more great stuff sourced by him in the coming days and weeks. I was very pleasantly surprised to see he had this, and I'm posting it straight away. Now, a concert from this band can start to circulate.

This concert shows the band was very capable of performing live, so there was no need for them to lip-sync so much. That was probably just a reflection of the kinds of TV shows they were going on, where lip-syncing was often standard procedure. The sound quality is excellent. The only disappointment is it's quite short.

At the time, 1982, the band had two hits in Britain, "It Started with a Kiss" and "Girl Crazy." So it's not surprising that both of them were performed here. 

This album is 29 minutes long. 

01 You Sexy Thing (Hot Chocolate)
02 Are You Getting Enough (Hot Chocolate)
03 Emma (Hot Chocolate)
04 It Started with a Kiss (Hot Chocolate)
04 So You Win Again (Hot Chocolate)
05 Heaven Is in the Backseat of My Cadillac (Hot Chocolate)
06 Girl Crazy (Hot Chocolate)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/SHr8CfXd

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/EjWyEYD6PsiUNLw/file

The cover image is from a 1982 concert. It's a screenshot I took of the band's lead singer Errol Brown, taken from a YouTube video of a 1982 TV show. The video suggests it was a BBC TV show, but it doesn't seem to be this concert, since I checked versions of the song being performed, and they're different.

Hot Chocolate - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1970-1976

Here's an album of the British R&B band Hot Chocolate performing for the BBC. Everything here is unreleased, and I believe the vast majority of it hasn't been publicly available until now. Once again, I'm getting some great "Top of the Pops" radio show material from an anonymous helper.

In my opinion, Hot Chocolate are very underrated. Today, they're mostly known for a few songs, especially "You Sexy Thing" and "Every 1's a Winner." But they had many other good hits, for a surprisingly long time. In fact, they had at least one hit a year in Britain every year between 1970 and 1984!

Unfortunately, what they did for the BBC is frustratingly incomplete. The vast majority of the songs here are from the Top of the Pops BBC radio show. As I've mentioned in previous posts, live performances just for that show generally died out around 1972 or 1973, although there were some exceptions. That's the case here. Tracks 1 through 12 are all from that show. But after that, the show just played the record versions. This is one exception though, track 14 ("A Child's Prayer"), which was done live on Top of the Pops in 1975, even after that show had started merely playing their records. (In cases like this, I compared the BBC versions with the record versions to see if they were different.)

So that's the bad news. The good news is, at least this gives us a great look at the band's early years. Hot Chocolate was very unusual in that they started having hits in 1970, yet they didn't release a studio album until 1974. Even BBC DJ Brian Matthew, while introducing one of the 1972 songs here, commented how strange it was the band hadn't released an album yet. I'm guessing this is because the band was produced at the time by Mickie Most. Most had an extremely impressive track record of getting bands to have hit songs in the 1960s and 70s, but he was almost exclusively focused on hits. (In fact, I might later post an "album that should exist" of a studio album this band should have released around 1972 or 1973.)

Most of the songs here are versions of the A- and B-sides of singles at the time. But there are exceptions. "Money Don't Make a Man," "Orphan Boy," and "Dance to the Music" were never released by the band in any form. The first two probably are originals that would have been on an early studio album if they'd been allowed to release one. "Dance to the Music" is a cover of the famous hit by Sly and the Family Stone.

I tried to augment this album with some later TV performances, but I was mostly frustrated. It turns out that the vast majority of TV performances were lip-synced. I even found a short concert done for TV in East Germany in 1978, and the entire thing was lip-synced. But I did find two songs that were done for TV shows in 1974 and 1976 respectively and were actually live: "Cheri Babe" and "You Sexy Thing." Those show the band was more than capable of playing these songs very well for TV shows. It's a shame that so many shows at the time favored lip-syncing.

This album is 47 minutes long.

UPDATE: On November 8, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same, but I renamed the album after finding material for a "Volume 2." So I had to change the cover art and the mp3 tags. 

01 Love Is Life [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
02 Money Don't Make a Man [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
03 You Could've Been a Lady (Hot Chocolate)
04 Everybody's Laughing [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
05 Orphan Boy [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
06 I Believe [In Love] [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
07 Caveman Billy [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
08 Dance to the Music (Hot Chocolate)
09 Give Them a Hand (Hot Chocolate)
10 Mary Anne [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
11 You'll Always Be a Friend [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
12 Go-Go Girl [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
13 Cheri Babe (Hot Chocolate)
14 A Child's Prayer [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
15 You Sexy Thing (Hot Chocolate)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/FUgagFSy

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/iZM83Qxm2aBuAR8/file

The cover photo shows the band in 1972.