The Grateful Dead - Golden Era Cover Versions, Volume 1: 1969-1970

It's been too long since I've posted any Grateful Dead albums here. I have lots to post, especially from what I consider to be their "golden era," roughly from 1969 to 1973. I've already posted four albums of mostly original songs from 1970 to 1972 that never got released on studio albums at the time. This series is meant to complement that, gathering cover versions they did during approximately that same time period. These are all full-band versions. There's a whole other large batch of songs done acoustically that I'll do something with at a later date.

The Dead came up with lots of great original songs. But that didn't stop them from covering literally hundreds of additional songs over the years. I haven't included every single cover song they did during these years. 

For one, I skipped songs that they did so often and so well that they're closely identified with the band, such as "I Know You Rider," "Me and My Uncle," "Morning Dew," and a few more. 

Secondly, I already made two albums of cover songs the band did very early in their career (1965 to 1966). So I often avoided songs during this "golden era" that are also on those albums, unless there's something significantly different about them. 

I also avoided songs were there's no excellent recording. But those are surprisingly few. The band got serious about recording their own concerts almost from the very beginning, and there have been bazillions of official live albums by now. However, the occasional song did slip by, such as "So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)," where only one poor sounding audience recording exists. A few other songs didn't get recorded at all, such as "Cathy's Clown," "I've Just Seen a Face," and "Games People Play."

Finally, this collection begins in mid-1969, which is when the band really hit their stride, in my opinion. I did consider a few covers from earlier in 1969, but they either weren't that good (such as versions of "Hey Jude") or they're already included on the stray tracks album I made for that time period, called "The Seven."

Okay, that's all about what I did not include. Now let me talk about what I did include. I think many of the songs in this series will be a surprise to you, unless you're a fanatically dedicated Deadhead. Some songs here were played dozens of times, such as "Dancing in the Street" or "Hard to Handle." But others were played only once, such as "Mystery Train" or "My Babe," only were played only a small number of times. 

I strived to make sure there was a balance between songs sung by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. Unfortunately, I could only do so much since I felt obliged to include all the (non-overplayed) cover versions from a certain time period. For this album, there's an unusually large number of songs sung by Pigpen, and only three sung by Garcia. The balance is a lot better on the later volumes in this series.

If you are a serious Deadhead and you see some songs I missed, please let me know. It's particularly tricky for me because I'm only including full-band versions here, as I mentioned above, and there were many songs only done acoustically around this time. Sometimes, a song almost always done acoustically was done with a full electric band, such as the version of "Monkey and the Engineer" here. But I probably missed a couple more like that.

This album is an hour and 28 minutes long.

As an aside, I mentioned above the stray tracks album "The Seven." I moved a couple of songs from there to here, because I thought they fit better. But I also added in a couple new songs there that I'd missed, including one the band only played a single time, in 1968, "Death Letter Blues." So you probably should redownload that album if you have it already.

Oh, one last thing. While making this, I also fixed all the Grateful Dead albums I've posted so far, adjusting the volume balance between songs and updating the mp3 tags to the new system I'm using. So you might want to grab those again too.

01 New Orleans (Grateful Dead)
02 Hi-Heel Sneakers (Grateful Dead)
03 Ole Slew Foot (Grateful Dead)
04 Big Boy Pete (Grateful Dead)
05 Smokestack Lightning (Grateful Dead)
06 Hard to Handle (Grateful Dead)
07 He Was a Friend of Mine (Grateful Dead)
08 Walking the Dog (Grateful Dead)
09 Dancing in the Street (Grateful Dead)
10 It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World (Grateful Dead)
11 Mystery Train - My Babe (Grateful Dead)
12 Monkey and the Engineer (Grateful Dead)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700756/TGRATFLDED1969-1970_GldnEraCovrVersonsVolum1_atse.zip.html

I love how weird the album cover is. I would never presume to make something that weird myself for an album cover. But for this series, I decided to use versions of concert posters. There are lots of really interesting concert posters for the Dead, whereas photos of the band in concert are far less interesting in comparison. This particular poster is for a concert in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 1970. 

Since posters are rectangular and album covers are square, I had to cut parts of the top and bottom. I also did some resizing vertically to squish more in. Finally, all the images of this poster that I could find had some damage to them. So I used the best bits from two versions, and then cleaned up some remaining rough parts. If anyone has an idea of what the heck this image is about, please let me know!

Spinal Tap - Unwigged and Unplugged (Riverside Theater, Milwaukee, WI, 5-31-2009)

Turn it up to 11, man! It's time I posted some music from the greatest band that never really existed, Spinal Tap. In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, "This Is Spinal Tap" is one of the funniest movies ever made. A big reason for that are the songs, which are both amusing and really good songs, period. The three main guys in Spinal Tap - Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer - went on to much more success in the movie business, which sometimes involved creating new amusing songs, as well as putting out occasional new Spinal Tap material.

In 2009, the band had a significant concert tour for only the second time. (The first time was in 1992.) This was called the "Unwigged and Unplugged" tour because they dressed in street clothes instead of their usual costumes, complete with wigs, and because the songs were mostly done in an acoustic style. Wearing street clothes made sense because they played songs from a variety of sources, not just Spinal Tap stuff. Most importantly, the three main guys in the band pretended to be the 1960s folk band "The Folksmen" in the 2003 movie "A Mighty Wind." A number of the songs here were from that movie. It would have been weird to play those songs in their heavy metal Spinal Tap costumes, and changing outfits repeatedly would have been tough too. Furthermore, they also played some songs from the 1996 movie "Waiting for Guffman" (directed by Guest), and a couple from a Harry Shearer solo album. So it makes even more sense that they didn't bother to change their outlooks for each of the different sources.

One concert from this tour was recorded for an officially released DVD, which was given the same name as the tour, "Unwigged and Unplugged." This is the audio from that DVD. Due to the source, the sound quality is fantastic. I converted the files to mp3, as I've never seen them from this show in that format anywhere. I also boosted the vocals of the talking between songs sometimes, but otherwise I didn't need to make any changes.

Of course, as an audio document, it doesn't matter what they were wearing. In my opinion, it's great to have these songs from many different sources all done by the Spinal Tap guys, significantly increasing their limited oeuvre. The fact that the songs were generally done in an acoustic format was another bonus for me. Not only am I a big fan of acoustic music, but hearing hard rock songs like "Hell Hole" done this was further heightens their ridiculousness. 

Note that a couple of the songs - "Back from the Dead" and "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" - were not actually played live by the band, but were video clips done so that videos could be shown to the audience. For instance, some fan made a video of "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" using only Lego blocks, and the band liked that enough to want to share it. I kept those because they were truncated versions, and it helped to understand their commentary before and afterwards.

Speaking of commentary, there's a bunch of talking between songs. I've put all those on separate tracks, so you can choose to listen to them or not.

I did cut out two sections however. At one point, they showed a video clip called "Cheese Rolling." This was made to promote the "This Is Spinal Tap" movie in 1984, but it was shown just to movie theater owners to help convince them to book the movie. It really needs to be seen and not just heard to be understood, so I cut it. However, if you're interested, it's on YouTube.

I also cut out an audience question and answer section from the middle of the show. At 12 minutes, I felt it was too much talking for much replay listening value. But I've included it as a bonus track if you do want to hear it.

Even with those cuts, this concert is quite long, just one minute short of two hours.

01 talk (Spinal Tap)
02 Celtic Blues, Part 1 (Spinal Tap)
03 Hell Hole (Spinal Tap)
04 talk (Spinal Tap)
05 Never Did No Wanderin' (Spinal Tap)
06 talk (Spinal Tap)
07 Clam Caravan (Spinal Tap)
08 talk (Spinal Tap)
09 Rock and Roll Nightmare (Spinal Tap)
10 talk (Spinal Tap)
11 Bitch School (Spinal Tap)
12 talk (Spinal Tap)
13 Loco Man (Spinal Tap)
14 talk (Spinal Tap)
15 Corky's Funky Dance (Spinal Tap)
16 talk (Spinal Tap)
17 This Bulging River (Spinal Tap)
18 talk [The Clotworthy Memo] (Spinal Tap)
19 All the Way Home (Spinal Tap)
20 talk (Spinal Tap)
21 Blood on the Coal (Spinal Tap)
22 talk (Spinal Tap)
23 Back from the Dead (Spinal Tap)
24 talk (Spinal Tap)
25 [Listen to The] Flower People (Spinal Tap)
26 talk (Spinal Tap)
27 Corn Wine (Spinal Tap)
28 talk (Spinal Tap)
29 The Majesty of Rock (Spinal Tap)
30 talk (Spinal Tap)
31 All Backed Up (Spinal Tap)
32 talk (Spinal Tap)
33 Stonehenge (Spinal Tap)
34 talk (Spinal Tap)
35 A Penny for Your Thoughts (Spinal Tap with Judith Owen)
36 talk (Spinal Tap)
37 Start Me Up (Spinal Tap)
38 talk (Spinal Tap)
39 Cups and Cakes (Spinal Tap)
40 talk (Spinal Tap)
41 Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight (Spinal Tap)
42 talk (Spinal Tap)
43 A Mighty Wind (Spinal Tap)
44 talk (Spinal Tap)
45 Saucy Jack (Spinal Tap)
46 talk (Spinal Tap)
47 Big Bottom (Spinal Tap)
48 talk (Spinal Tap)
49 The Good Book Song (Spinal Tap with Annette O'Toole)
50 talk (Spinal Tap)
51 A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow (Spinal Tap with Annette O'Toole)
52 talk (Spinal Tap)
53 Rainy Day Sun (Spinal Tap)
54 talk (Spinal Tap)
55 [Funky] Sex Farm (Spinal Tap)
56 talk (Spinal Tap)
57 Gimme Some Money (Spinal Tap)
58 talk (Spinal Tap)
59 Old Joe's Place (Spinal Tap)
60 talk (Spinal Tap)
61 Celtic Blues, Part 2 (Spinal Tap)
62 Heavy Duty (Spinal Tap)

Audience Question and Answer (Spinal Tap)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Vi5Bh6gu

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/pphCbPIMj8BSiFz/file

I could have used the cover of the official DVD for the cover here, but I didn't like the look of that one. So instead I found a photo of the three main band members on stage during this tour, but in New York City instead of Milwaukee. I added the logo of the band name at the top, then did my best to imitate that look for the words at the bottom. From left to right, that's Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, and Christopher Guest. Surprisingly, no drummers were killed in the making of this album. ;)

Deep Purple - BBC Sessions, Volume 6: In Concert, Paris Theatre, London, Britain, 3-9-1972

Here's the sixth and possibly last album of Deep Purple playing for the BBC. (Regarding that "possibly last" comment, see below.) 

This is an entire concert broadcast live for the BBC. However, it's only an hour and 15 minutes long, shorter than their usual concerts at the time, probably due to BBC time limits. Most of the comments between songs are done by a BBC DJ. This time it's Mike Harding instead of the usual John Peel, since Peel soured on the band by this time, finding their music too loud and heavy. 

This concert took place a few weeks before the release of the band's classic album "Machine Head." The songs from that album were fresh in their mind. So this was one of only two times the songs "Maybe I'm a Leo" and "Never Before" were played by the original Mark II version of the band. They also closed with a rare cover of the 1950s classic "Lucille."

I mentioned above that this might be the last in this series. The "might" is because I know of a 1974 concert the band played for the BBC. However, that's with the Mark III version of the band. I'm much more of a Mark II fan. It also has been officially released in full. But if people here express interest, I could post that too. (That 1974 concert seems to be the last BBC recording before the band broke up for eight years, starting in 1976.) 

In my opinion, 1972 is when the band was at its peak, both in terms of songwriting and in terms of instrumental prowess. So if you listen to just one of these BBC albums from them, I'm recommend this one.

01 talk (Deep Purple)
02 Highway Star (Deep Purple)
03 talk (Deep Purple)
04 Strange Kind of Woman (Deep Purple)
05 talk (Deep Purple)
06 Maybe I'm a Leo (Deep Purple)
07 talk (Deep Purple)
08 Never Before (Deep Purple)
09 talk (Deep Purple)
10 Lazy (Deep Purple)
11 talk (Deep Purple)
12 Space Truckin' (Deep Purple)
13 talk (Deep Purple)
14 Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple)
15 talk (Deep Purple)
16 Lucille (Deep Purple)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15109509/DeepP_1972_BBSessionsVolume6InConcertParisTheatre__3-9-1972_atse.zip.html

The cover photo shows the band playing a concert in Copenhagen in March 1972. You can only see a couple of the band members, but I like how it showed some of the crowd as well.

Tom Jones - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1967-1968

Here is the third and last of Tom Jones's "BBC Sessions" albums. However, I'm far from done with him. He had a British TV show from 1969 to 1971 where he seemingly sang duets with every famous musician on the planet at the time. I'm planning to post no less than six albums of that material.

As I mentioned in previous volumes in this series, Jones started out as a rock and soul singer, but switched more to ballads when he started having huge hits with them in late 1966. The volume definitely has a few ballads, but it still is more tilted towards rock and soul, like "Land of a 1000 Dances" and "Don't Fight It." I suppose those still were the kinds of songs he wanted to sing when he wasn't promoting his latest A-side singles.

Like the previous volumes, everything here is officially unreleased. However, the main bootleg source I used ended right at the end of 1967. I know he did some more BBC sessions in 1968. I've found mention of four sessions, which would mean at least a couple songs for each. But it seems all of those were lost to time. (If anyone has any of those, please let me know.) To make up for that, the last two songs are from 1968 appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show," including his biggest 1968 hit, "Delilah."

As far as I can tell, he didn't do any BBC sessions in 1969 or after. Presumably, he had his hands full with his TV show (on a rival British station). 

The sound quality is excellent throughout, though maybe a bit lower on "Show Me" and "Baby, Baby, Baby," which comes from Dusty Springfield's TV show at the time instead of a proper BBC session. Note though the songs with "[Edit]" in their titles. As usual, this means BBC DJs talking over the music, and as usual, I fixed that with the audio editing software X-Minus.

This album is 48 minutes long.

UPDATE: On May 15, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. I added one song I'd previously missed, "Show Me."

01 Big Boss Man [Edit] (Tom Jones)
02 My Prayer [Edit] (Tom Jones)
03 Money Honey [Edit] (Tom Jones)
04 Trying to Find My Baby (Tom Jones)
05 Sea of Heartbreak [Edit] (Tom Jones)
06 [It Looks Like] I'll Never Fall in Love Again (Tom Jones)
07 Land of a Thousand Dances (Tom Jones)
08 Baby, Baby, Baby (Dusty Springfield & Tom Jones)
09 Show Me (Tom Jones)
10 I Can't Stop Loving You [Edit] (Tom Jones)
11 Sixteen Tons [Edit] (Tom Jones)
12 Ain't That Good News (Tom Jones)
13 I'm Coming Home (Tom Jones)
14 Don't Fight It [Edit] (Tom Jones)
15 Danny Boy (Tom Jones)
16 Delilah (Tom Jones)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/WjK2e68y

alternate:

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

The cover photo comes from a TV special filmed in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1967.

David Byrne - Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN, 8-20-2001

The other day, I found this concert on a bootleg torrent tracker, and I was impressed with the performance and the sound quality, so I've decided to share it here.

David Byrne, of course, was the lead singer and main songwriter for the Talking Heads. His solo career since that band fizzled out around 1987 has been more hit and miss, in my opinion, but he still has many quality songs. This concert is roughly evenly split between Talking Heads songs and his subsequent solo career.

There is an official live album from this tour, though a different date, called "Live from Austin, Texas." However, I prefer this. For one thing, at an hour and 26 minutes, it's about 25 minutes longer. And for another, the sound quality is every bit as good. The song selection is basically identical; it's just that you get more songs here.

There was only one sonic flaw with this album, and that was with the song "U. B. Jesus." The recording came to a halt about halfway through. I patched that with a version of that song taken from a bootleg from Denver on the same tour. That has similarly awesome sound, and the fix was so seamless that I doubt you'll notice it.

If you're a Talking Heads fan but you haven't paid much attention to Byrne's solo career, this is a good place to dip your toes in, since it has that mix of about half Talking Heads songs and half solo ones. It also has an interesting, unexpected cover of the Whitney Houston hit "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)."

01 The Revolution (David Byrne)
02 talk (David Byrne)
03 [Nothing But] Flowers (David Byrne)
04 talk (David Byrne)
05 Buck Naked (David Byrne)
06 Broken Things (David Byrne)
07 talk (David Byrne)
08 And She Was (David Byrne)
09 Once in a Lifetime (David Byrne)
10 talk (David Byrne)
11 The Great Intoxication (David Byrne)
12 talk (David Byrne)
13 Marching through the Wilderness (David Byrne)
14 talk (David Byrne)
15 Dura Europas (David Byrne)
16 talk (David Byrne)
17 Sax and Violins (David Byrne)
18 talk (David Byrne)
19 This Must Be the Place [Naive Melody] (David Byrne)
20 talk (David Byrne)
21 What a Day that Was (David Byrne)
22 talk (David Byrne)
23 Desconocido Soy (David Byrne)
24 Like Humans Do (David Byrne)
25 talk (David Byrne)
26 U. B. Jesus [Edit] (David Byrne)
27 talk (David Byrne)
28 I Wanna Dance with Somebody [Who Loves Me] (David Byrne)
29 Life during Wartime (David Byrne)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15274974/DavicByr_2001_RymnAuditoriumNashvilleTN__8-20-2001_atse.zip.html

The cover photo of Byrne was taken backstage at the Warfield in San Francisco in 2001.

Simon & Garfunkel - BBC Sessions (1965)

The vast majority of artists who performed BBC in the 1960s and 1970s were British, since BBC stands for "British Broadcasting Corporation," after all. But occasionally, artists from the US or other countries would be in Britain enough for some BBC sessions of their own. Simon and Garfunkel have enough material here for a BBC album, though just barely. 

In truth, only half of this features both Simon and Garfunkel, and that's from a single session that took place in July 1965. The first half features a session with only Paul Simon. Although American, he had been living in England for most of the previous two years, figuring he had a better chance of making it as a folk musician there than in his home country. He developed enough connections to have a single BBC session in January 1965. 

It was an odd one though. It was actually recorded for a religious radio show, even though the connections between his songs and religion was tenuous at best. I believe the six songs he recorded in a single session were then played on that show for one song per show slowly over spring 1965. It helped him gain popularity and more concert bookings, since he didn't have any albums in print in Britain at the time. (Simon and Garfunkel's first album "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." was released in late 1964, but only in the U.S.)

At the time, the partnership of Simon and Garfunkel was also tenuous, because Garfunkel lived in New York City while Simon lived in England. But every now and then, Simon would briefly visit the U.S. or Garfunkel would visit England, and they might play some concerts as a duo or do some recording in the studio. The BBC session in July 1965 was one such time when Garfunkel briefly came to England. At that time, they were still relative unknowns. They would only hit the big time in September 1965, when "The Sound of Silence" would be released as a single with a folk-rock arrangement and shoot to number one in the U.S. by the end of the year. At that point, Simon would move back to the U.S., and they would stick together as a duo to exploit their success. 

Unfortunately, it seems they didn't do any more BBC sessions aside from the one in July 1965. Perhaps by the next time they were both in Britain, they had become so famous that they felt they didn't need that exposure. 

Surprisingly, none of the performances here have been officially released. I'm particularly surprised that "I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound" has never been released, since it's a nice cover of a Tom Paxton song that it seems was never recorded by them in a studio. 

The sound quality in generally is very good, though there were a few problems. "A Most Peculiar Man" came to a sudden halt in the middle of the song. It seems Simon wasn't happy about something, and asked the recording engineer to play back the recording. If he went on to do a finished take, that hasn't been available to bootleggers. I patched in the second half of the song from the version he did on his obscure 1965 solo album "The Paul Simon Songbook." I also removed the few seconds of him talking to the engineer, since it didn't fit anymore.

"I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound" has "[Edit]" in the title because it suffered the usual BBC problem of DJs talking over some of the music. The version of "Anji" here is only a fragment that's less than a minute long. I'm guessing that it faded out as the radio program ended, and that's the only recording that survived. Even though much had some talking over it. I fixed both songs the usual way, by using the audio editing program X-Minus to wipe the talking.

Also, for some reason, to my ears, the sound quality of "A Church Is Burning" doesn't sound as good as the rest. But it's still pretty decent, just a bit more muffled.

This album is only 34 minutes long. Simon and Garfunkel did go on to play on other radio and TV shows. But those generally fell into two categories. One, they had short appearances where they tended to play the same famous songs that are probably overplayed enough already. The other are some longer appearances, with more song variety and banter between songs. I plan on posting a couple of the best such shows in full later on.

As an aside, while putting this album together, I also found a few other rare songs that I'd previously missed. So I've added those to the two "Rarities" albums I previously made. I also upgraded the volume balance between songs and mp3 tags for those.

01 I Am a Rock (Paul Simon)
02 Bleecker Street (Paul Simon)
03 talk (Paul Simon)
04 Kathy's Song (Paul Simon)
05 The Sound of Silence (Paul Simon)
06 talk (Paul Simon)
07 A Most Peculiar Man [Edit] (Paul Simon)
08 April Come She Will (Paul Simon)
09 I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound [Edit] (Simon & Garfunkel)
10 Sparrow (Simon & Garfunkel)
11 The Side of a Hill (Simon & Garfunkel)
12 talk (Simon & Garfunkel)
13 I Am a Rock (Simon & Garfunkel)
14 A Church Is Burning (Simon & Garfunkel)
15 Anji [Instrumental] [Edit] (Simon & Garfunkel)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700628/SIMNNGRFNKL1965_BBSessons_atse.zip.html

Given how famous Simon and Garfunkel are, I'm surprised that I haven't been able to find many good photos of them from 1965, especially in color. So instead I found a black and white publicity photo and colorized it. This could have come from 1964 or even earlier; it's hard to tell, but they definitely were on the young side with this one.

Alan Price & Georgie Fame - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1972-1973

NOTE: I first posted this album in February 2022. Since then, I found more songs, enough to split this album in two. Because most of the newly discovered songs are from 1969 to 1971, I split that album off and named it "Volume 1." This one has been renamed from just "BBC Sessions" to "BBC Sessions, Volume 2." If you're interested in this one, I highly recommend you get "Volume 1" as well.

Here's the link for that:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2022/12/alan-price-georgie-fame-bbc-sessions.html

Everything here is officially unreleased. There actually are only four songs from proper BBC sessions, tracks 10, 11, 13, and 14. But most of the rest, tracks one through eight come from a BBC TV show called "The Two Ronnies." This was mostly a comedy show, but they played one song a week for each of the eight episodes. It wasn't easy, but I managed to find all eight, sometimes by finding them in full length videos of the shows. 

The remaining two songs, tracks nine and 12, come from another British TV show called "The Morecambe and Wise Show." Those are from 1973. It seems the Price and Fame partnership quietly came to an end shortly after that.

They only put out on single as a duo in 1973, but their solo music careers continued. Price in particular had big success in 1973 with the "O Lucky Man" single and movie soundtrack. Two of the actual BBC studio sessions tracks, the last two songs here, feature just Price are are from his "O Lucky Man" project. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any more BBC sessions from Price or Fame in the years after this, either together or solo, so the series ends here.

It seems that most of the songs on this album were never put out on singles or albums by the Price and Fame duo. A few were done here and there during their solo careers, but I think most are unique to these versions.

Note that when I split the album, as mentioned above, most of the songs I had prior to the split ended up on this album. But four of the songs here are new: "Don't Hit Me When I'm Down," "Street Lights," "Poor People," and "Sell, Sell, Sell." I also moved four songs to "Volume 1," where they fit chronologically.

This album is 38 minutes long.

01 Sweet Little Rock and Roller (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
02 Fool's Paradise (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
03 [There's] Always Something There to Remind Me (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
04 Bony Maronie (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
05 Bye Bye Love (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
06 Matrimony (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
07 Delilah (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
08 Listen to the Melody (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
09 Saturday Night Fish Fry (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
10 Don't Hit Me When I'm Down (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
11 Street Lights (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
12 You Are My Sunshine (Alan Price & Georgie Fame)
13 Poor People (Alan Price)
14 Sell, Sell, Sell (Alan Price)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16373059/ALANPRCEGEORGFM1972-1973BBSssionsVolum2_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is from an appearance on the "It's Lulu" TV show in 1973.

Gerry & the Pacemakers - BBC Sessions (1963-1966)

To be honest, I'm not much of a Gerry and the Pacemakers fan. Until I made this, I only knew a few of their hits. But I'm planning on posting just about all the 1960s artists that have enough material for BBC albums, so I got to get to know their music better making this. I have to admit that I'm fairly impressed. For one thing, lead singer Gerry Marsden actually wrote many of their songs, including their big hits "Ferry Cross the Mersey" and "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying." For another, they actually could rock. You can see that here with lots of covers of famous rock hits mostly from the 1950s, such as "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" and "Slippin' and Slidin'."

The band's most successful years were 1963 and 1964. But weirdly, their BBC recordings here are mostly from 1965 and 1966, with only three from the tail end of 1964. I assume that's because earlier sessions didn't survive. That assumption is strengthened by the fact that many of the biggest hits aren't represented by any BBC versions. So I've supplemented the BBC stuff with some versions done on various TV programs, most especially the Ed Sullivan Show. Luckily, between the BBC and TV versions, all their major hits are included here.

All the BBC recordings come from an official live album called "Live at the BBC." The others are all unreleased. The sound quality is excellent throughout, though the BBC versions sound a bit better. 

As is usual for recordings from this time period, the BBC DJs sometimes talked over the music. I'm surprised there are only five cases like that here (marked with "[Edit]" in their names), which is a lot less than average for these years. Also like usual, I fixed those using the audio editing program X-Minus.

This album is 62 minutes long.

01 A Shot of Rhythm and Blues (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
02 How Do You Do It (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
03 You ll Never Walk Alone (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
04 Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
05 I'm the One (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
06 I Like It (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
07 Dizzy Miss Lizzy (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
08 Slippin' and Slidin' (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
09 Ferry Cross the Mersey (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
10 Why Oh Why (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
11 You You You (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
12 Baby You're So Good to Me (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
13 I'll Be There (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
14 Slow Down (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
15 My Babe [Edit] (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
16 It'll Be Me [Edit] (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
17 You Win Again (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
18 Reelin' and Rockin' [Edit] (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
19 Hallelujah I Love Her So [Edit] (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
20 Walk Hand in Hand (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
21 Chills (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
22 La La La (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
23 Shop Around (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
24 Girl on a Swing (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
25 Guatanamera [Edit] (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
26 A Fool to Myself (Gerry & the Pacemakers)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15118274/GerryntPace_1963-1966_BBSessions_atse.zip.html

The cover photo was taken backstage during an appearance on the British TV show "Thank You Lucky Stars" in 1964. There is a song here from that show, but it was a different episode.

Tom Jones - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1966-1967

Here's another album of Tom Jones at the BBC.

I don't have much to say this time that I didn't say for Volume 1. Like that, this is all unreleased material. This time, all but the first three songs come from actual BBC sessions. Those first three come from a concert in France that was broadcast on French TV (and can be found on YouTube). That fills in a couple of songs he surprisingly didn't play at the BBC, especially "What's New Pussycat."

Just like Volume 1, there are a bunch of songs where the BBC DJ talked over the starts and/or ends of the songs. But as I like to do, I used the audio editing program X-Minus to wipe the talking while keeping the underlying music.

As I mentioned last time, Jones originally was much more of a soul and rock singer. But then in late 1966, he had a huge number one hit in Britain with "Green, Green Grass of Home," and he sang a lot more ballads and other show biz-type stuff after that. One can see that transition here, with that song plus some other similar ones. But still, the vast majority of the songs are the soul and rock stuff that he loved the most.

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 Stop Breaking My Heart (Tom Jones)
02 Untrue Unfaithful (Tom Jones)
03 What's New Pussycat (Tom Jones)
04 Not Responsible [Edit] (Tom Jones)
05 Stupidity (Tom Jones)
06 Once There Was a Time (Tom Jones)
07 Sticks and Stones [Edit] (Tom Jones)
08 Summertime (Tom Jones)
09 Green, Green Grass of Home (Tom Jones)
10 Livin' Lovin' Wreck [Edit] (Tom Jones)
11 Shake [Edit] (Tom Jones)
12 He'll Have to Go [Edit] (Tom Jones)
13 Detroit City (Tom Jones)
14 I [Who Have Nothing] [Edit] (Tom Jones)
15 Barefootin' [Edit] (Tom Jones)
16 Do It Right [Edit] (Tom Jones)
17 Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings (Tom Jones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700836/TOMJNS1966-1967_BBSessonsVolum2_atse.zip.html

The album cover photo shows him at a concert in 1966.

Deep Purple - BBC Sessions, Volume 5: 1971-1973

Here's the next album in my long series of Deep Purple at the BBC.

This one is a very long stretch to call a BBC album, as there are no songs performed at the BBC on it! However, everything here is from other TV or radio appearances, so it still fits the general concept, in my opinion. It seems that famous BBC DJ John Peel soured on Deep Purple around 1970. He'd previously supported them and gave them key early exposure. But he disliked their hard rock direction they took from the 1970 album "In Rock" and onwards, and criticized them publicly about it. So that probably has a lot to do with the band not playing for the BBC music after 1970. (They did do one live show in 1972, which will be the next album in this series.)

As a matter of fact, even as Deep Purple surged in popularity in 1971 onwards, it seemed the amount of TV and radio shows they did to promote their music dropped dramatically. This is about all there is, as far as I can see, not couldn't any lipsync stuff. I can only guess that maybe they thought such promotional efforts were uncool or unnecessary because they were so well known by then. 

The first four songs are from TV shows in Germany and Denmark, with each song come from a different date. For "Demon's Eye," there was a DJ talking in German over the solo section, but I cleaned that up in the usual way I take care of BBC DJs talking over the music. However, the sound quality in that section is worse than the rest.

The last three songs come from a concert in the US. For some reason, three of the songs were broadcast on TV, so the sound quality for those are excellent. The rest of the concert has been bootlegged, but the quality is much worse, so they're not included here. Luckily, this captures most of their best known songs from this time period, including the classic "Smoke on the Water." 

Also, everything here comes from officially released albums, though they're scattered over a bunch of different albums. Everything sounds top notch, except for the one section of "Demon's Eye" mentioned above.

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 Demon's Eye [Edit] (Deep Purple)
02 No No No (Deep Purple)
03 Fireball (Deep Purple)
04 Highway Star (Deep Purple)
05 Strange Kind of Woman (Deep Purple)
06 Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple)
07 Space Truckin' (Deep Purple)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15109497/DeepP_1971-1973_BBSessionsVolume5_atse.zip.html

The album cover uses a promotional photo from 1972.

Various Artists - Dead Man Walking - The Concert (Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, 3-29-1998)

Here's something I stumbled across the other day. I've owned the "Dead Man Walking" movie soundtrack since it first came out in 1996. I think it's great. It's rare for movie soundtracks in that all the artists wrote songs specifically about the movie after seeing an early cut of it, and that it's a great list of artists, including the likes of Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, doing excellent songs. I didn't know until I came across this that there was a concert that took place two years later. It was meant to bring more attention to the same issue as the movie and the soundtrack, namely, the moral issue of capital punishment.

There's good news and there's bad news. The bad news first is that the concert was over four hours long, and most of that isn't here. I found a bootleg of the full performance, and unfortunately the sound quality is too low to be enjoyable, in my opinion. The good news is, much of the concert came out on DVD (only, no album), so the sound quality is great.

In 2025, three years after I first posted this album, a set Tom Waits did for the concert, which wasn't included on the DVD, somehow was leaked to the public with excellent sound quality. So I've added that in as well. It seems to have been the longest set of the night. I found a blog post by someone who attended the concert in order to figure out where to put the Waits songs relative to the others in the concert. It turns out he did most of his set in the middle of the show, but also did the final song at the end, so that's how I have it. 

Note that this final song, "Innocent When You Dream," included the other stars on stage. However, I've watched the video of this, and they generally just stood around not doing much, maybe adding a little backing vocals, and that's it, so I haven't included them in the artist credits for the song. But Bonnie Raitt showed up for this last song as well. That was a surprise, since she wasn't billed as a performer. In fact, she just sat in the audience and watched most of the concert. But she did play some slide guitar which can be heard on this last song, so I did include her in the credits for it.

However, some music still is missing from this concert. Michelle Shocked played four songs, and none of those are here. Furthermore, Steve Earle played three more songs than what's here, Lyle Lovett played one more, and Ani DiFranco played two more. I'm guessing Shocked wasn't included due to some kind of licensing or rights issue, and the other songs were cut to keep the DVD a reasonable length.

All the musicians here did a good job, but the main reason I'm sharing this is Eddie Vedder's set. Personally, I'm not a really big Pearl Jam fan. However, I thought the two songs he contributed under his own name to the "Dead Man Walking" album were excellent. I like those better than almost anything else he's done in his long career. Both songs were written by Vedder, but performed with the famous Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a remarkable blend of Western music with Indian music that worked really well.

Luckily, all of Vedder's set is included here, and rightfully so, since it was the highlight (and closing act) of the concert. He started with a Cat Steven song done just solo acoustic. Then he had a little bit of accompaniment on the next song. However, the main event was the last two songs, with were those same two songs he did for the "Dead Man Walking" soundtrack. Unfortunately, in the time between the release of that album and this concert, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died. However, he was very capably replaced by his nephew Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and a famous musician in Pakistan in his own right. The two songs are much longer than their album versions, almost ten minutes apiece, and they took the world music collaboration to the next level.

The DVD was about ten minutes longer, but I cut out a bunch of talking. In particular, actor Tim Robbins, who directed the movie, had some long talking sections that I felt didn't have much relistening value. For instance, he had one section where he listed jokey and obviously made up song titles that didn't make the soundtrack album. All that got cut. But any talking between songs by the musicians here was kept.

This album is an hour and 38 minutes long.

UPDATE: On November 17, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. As mentioned above, I added the Tom Waits songs, increasing the album length by over half an hour.

01 talk (Steve Earle)
02 Ellis Unit One (Steve Earle)
03 Promises (Lyle Lovett)
04 L.A. County (Lyle Lovett)
05 talk (Lyle Lovett)
06 Lungs (Lyle Lovett & Steve Earle)
07 Walk Away (Tom Waits)
08 talk (Tom Waits)
09 Gun Street Girl (Tom Waits)
10 talk (Tom Waits)
11 The Fall of Troy (Tom Waits)
12 talk (Tom Waits)
13 A Little Rain (Tom Waits)
14 Goin' Out West (Tom Waits)
15 Big Black Mariah (Tom Waits)
16 Jesus Gonna Be Here (Tom Waits)
17 Yesterday Is Here (Tom Waits)
18 Crime for Crime (Ani DiFranco)
19 Up Up Up Up Up Up (Ani DiFranco)
20 talk (Ani DiFranco)
21 Fuel (Ani DiFranco)
22 Trouble (Eddie Vedder)
23 talk (Eddie Vedder)
24 Dead Man (Eddie Vedder)
25 The Long Road (Eddie Vedder & Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
26 The Face of Love (Eddie Vedder & Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
27 Innocent When You Dream (Tom Waits with Bonnie Raitt)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Wn5C3B4Z

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/1dHOsxfGFmNoQIm/file

I couldn't find any good images of many of the artists together. Since Eddie Vedder was the big star and musical highlight of the show, I went with a photo of him. This is from when he was the only one on stage, playing "Trouble" by Cat Stevens. Oh, and I used the actual logo from the concert at the top, but I inverted the colors so it would match the black background of the rest of the cover.

Tom Jones - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1964-1966

I'm not much of a Tom Jones fan. He's done some good stuff over his long musical career, but also tons of cheesy, show biz stuff. A couple of weeks ago, it never would have even occurred to me to post any of his music. But it turns out her performed quite a lot for the BBC. In fact, there are three albums' worth of material just from 1964 to 1968. Then he had a TV show from 1969 to 1971 where practically every big name musician you could think of guested and sang duets with him. I'm going to post all that stuff.

After listening to his BBC material, I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. I did some reading on him as a result, and it turns out his original musical passion was to belt out soul and rock music like his musical heroes Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. For the first couple of years he tried focusing on that, but he didn't have big hits other than "It's Not Unusual." Then his management suggested his tone down his music and image. He put out "Green, Green Grass of Home" in late 1966. It was a massive hit in Britain, spending seven weeks at number one. He ran with that success, and did a lot more music in that vein. 

But his real passion remained the more soulful material. In fact, when he first came to the US in 1965, he played at the Apollo Theater in New York City, a famous soul concert venue with all black audiences. The audience was said to be shocked that he was white. But he won them over so thoroughly that he got a standing ovation lasting many minutes.

Especially on this first album, you get a lot more of that Tom Jones, and not much of his cheesy, show biz side. He does songs made famous by the likes of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles, and Little Richard, and does them well. So if you like that kind of thing, don't overlook this.

None of his BBC material has been officially released, which is a shame. The songs with "[Edit]" in their titles had the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music, and I applied the usual treatment of using the audio editing program X-Minus to wipe that talking clean while keeping the underlying music.

It's both sad and funny to me that the BBC apparently ignored Tom Jones when he first started releasing music in 1964 because they considered him too sexually appealing. It wasn't any specific lyric in a song on anything like that; they rejected him as a whole. It was only when his had a huge hit with "It's Not Unusual" that the BBC relented due to overwhelming popular demand (well after it had peaked) and started booking recording sessions with him. 

As a result, there's only one song from 1964 here, a version of his first single "Chills and Fever," and that's from a non-BBC TV appearance. Everything else is from the BBC, with the exception of "Whatcha Gonna Do," which is from a performance on the "Ed Sullivan" show in the US.

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 Chills and Fever [Edit] (Tom Jones)
02 Can I Get a Witness (Tom Jones)
03 It's Not Unusual (Tom Jones)
04 Once upon a Time [Edit] (Tom Jones)
05 Lucille (Tom Jones)
06 Little by Little [Edit] (Tom Jones)
07 Bama Lama Bama Loo (Tom Jones)
08 Whatcha Gonna Do (Tom Jones)
09 Spanish Harlem (Tom Jones)
10 Whatcha Gonna Do about It (Tom Jones)
11 With These Hands (Tom Jones)
12 What'd I Say [Edit] (Tom Jones)
13 In the Midnight Hour [Edit] (Tom Jones)
14 Thunderball (Tom Jones)
15 Treat Her Right (Tom Jones)
16 The Rose [Edit] (Tom Jones)
17 The Key to My Heart (Tom Jones)
18 Long Tall Sally (Tom Jones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700834/TOMJNS1964-1966_BBSessonsVolum1_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is of Tom Jones in concert in 1965. I don't know the exact date or location.

The Alan Price Set - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1967-1969

Here's the second half of what Alan Price did at the BBC in the 1960s.

For the first album, about half of the songs came from an official album. In this case, only the first two performances have been officially released. Generally speaking, the songs are from proper BBC sessions. There are two exceptions though. "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear" and "Rip It Up" are from the German TV show "Beat Club." And the last two songs are from the BBC, but a BBC TV show instead of radio shows like all the rest.

By chance, most of the songs here were plagued with the problem of BBC DJs talking over the starts and ends of the songs. Heck, even one of "Beat Club" songs had a DJ talk in German over the beginning of it. But, as I usually do, I used the audio editing program X-Minus to wipe the DJ talking while keeping the underlying music.

Note that during this time Price was quite taken by the songwriting of Randy Newman who was still unknown and hadn't put out any albums yet. So there are a few Newman covers here (including one he otherwise never did, "1941"). Also, like the previous BBC album, there are a number of songs here that he never recorded in the studio. Those include: "Take Me in Your Arms and Love Me," "I Was Made to Love Her," "Rip It Up," "The Letter," "Satisfied Street," "1941," "I Keep Forgettin'," "Here, There and Everywhere," "Walk on By," and "Still Searching for Love." So, like last time, that's about half of the songs.

This album is 51 minutes long.

UPDATE: On January 1, 2023, I updated the mp3 download file. I added the songs "Falling in Love Again," "I Can't Turn You Loose," and "Walk On By," which I'd previously missed. A different version of "I Can't Turn You Loose" is on Volume 1.

01 Take Me in Your Arms and Love Me [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
02 I Was Made to Love Her [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
03 Lover's Law [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
04 Shame (Alan Price Set)
05 Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
06 Rip It Up (Alan Price Set)
07 The Letter [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
08 Don't Do That Again [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
09 Satisfied Street [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
10 Don’t Stop the Carnival [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
11 The Time Has Come [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
12 When I Was a Cowboy (Alan Price Set)
13 1941 [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
14 I Keep Forgettin' [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
15 Falling in Love Again [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
16 I Can't Turn You Loose [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
17 Walk On By (Alan Price Set)
18 Here, There and Everywhere (Alan Price Set)
19 Still Searching for Love (Alan Price Set)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16373056/ALANPRCE1967-1969BBSssonsVlum2_ztse.zip.html

The album cover uses a photo from 1967.

Them - BBC Sessions and Live (1965-1966)

Them only existed as a band led by Van Morrison for a short time, 1964 to 1966. Unfortunately, as chance has it, very few recordings of what they played live has survived. I've cobbled together what little there is here. In doing so, I had to combine their BBC sessions and concert performances to get enough material for one album. Even then, it's only 35 minutes long. 

Furthermore, it includes three versions of "Gloria" and three versions of "Here Comes the Night." Normally, I'm against including multiple versions of the same song on one album. But I figure I'd put out everything, since there's so little of it. If you don't like the multiple versions, just delete one or more of them.

I've sorted the music here chronologically. It comes from five sources. Songs one to three and six to eight are apparently Them's only two brief BBC performances. It's nice to have these alternative versions with studio quality sound, but it's unfortunate that they played "Here Comes the Night" and "Gloria" both times. Note that these suffer from the typical problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. But I applied the usual X-Minus editing to wipe those vocals while keeping the underlying music.

The fourth and fifth songs come from the 1965 NME Pollwinners concert. I recently posted that concert in full, including the Them portion, but it's good to have it here with the other material by the band. This is probably the best glimpse of what they sounded like live. Instead of just playing short versions of their hits as expected, they stretched out with a six minute version of "Turn On Your Love Light." Apparently this was more typical of what they did when they played in small clubs, often stretched songs out with lots of soloing, and even sometimes improvising songs on the spot. ("Gloria" is said to have originated from one such on stage creation.)

Tracks nine and ten are from a live performance in Paris that was shown on TV. Too bad there isn't more of it.

The last three tracks are rather curious. A Belgian TV show filmed Them in concert in 1966, and you can still find this footage on YouTube. Unfortunately, they only showed parts of songs. Each of the three songs here range from about a minute to almost two minutes. Still, I figure this much is better than nothing. If you know the name of the instrumental, please let me know. If you watch the YouTube video of this, you'll see it's Van Morrison wailing on the saxophone during that song.

I made a couple of edits to the last song, "I Put a Spell on You." The first line was missing from the recording. So I found a spot later on in the song where he said the line and patched it in. Also, the song came to a very abrupt end. Rather than making the song even shorter by fading it out, I patched in a bit more from the solo, maybe five to ten seconds, and faded that out.

Note that the making of this album can be partially credited to the blogger Prof Stoned. He has collected everything Them ever did and put it on his blog, with the best sounding versions. So all I had to do was select from that. Unfortunately, there were some other recorded TV performances by the band, but they were lipsynced, so I didn't include those here.

01 Here Comes the Night (Them)
02 Gloria [Edit] (Them)
03 All for Myself [Edit] (Them)
04 Here Comes the Night (Them)
05 Turn On Your Love Light (Them)
06 Gloria [Edit] (Them)
07 One More Time (Them)
08 Here Comes the Night (Them)
09 Mystic Eyes (Them)
10 Gloria (Them)
11 Dimples [Incomplete] (Them)
12 Unknown Title [Instrumental] (Them)
13 I Put a Spell on You [Incomplete] [Edit] (Them)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700742/THM1965-1966_BBSessonsLve_atse.zip.html

The cover uses a promo photo of the band from 1965. The version I found had a really messed up color balance, with a kind of wash of orange over the whole thing. I used Photoshop to tweak it and hopefully make them have plausibly human skin tones.

Mary Hopkin - Temma Harbour - Non-Album Tracks (1968-1970)

Currently, I'm focusing most of my efforts with this blog on posting BBC material. But in some cases, as with Mary Hopkin here, I feel it makes sense to post stray tracks albums first, then the BBC stuff. So here's the first of several.

Hopkin has had a strange music career. In 1968, at just the age of eighteen, she appeared in a talent show broadcast on British TV. Word of her performance got to Paul McCartney, and he hooked her up with an obscure and recently written song that he'd heard performed in a night club called "Those Were the Days." It was a global smash, going on to sell at least eight million copies. 

She was very successful for a couple of years, but she withdrew from the pop music scene around 1972. Probably, she was overwhelmed by such success at a young age. She's continued to record and release music since then (and is still going at the age of 71 as I write this in 2022), but with a way lower profile. She's only rarely released music (although a lot more came out decades after they were recorded), and has almost never appeared on TV or played concerts. 

During her popular heyday, she only released two albums, "Post Card" in 1969 and "Earth Song/Ocean Song" in 1971. But she easily could have released two more, dropping stray tracks all over the place. For instance, with the exception of "Those Were the Days," she tended to not put the songs on her singles on her albums. This album has four A-sides and two B-sides, including the big hits "Goodbye" (written by Paul McCartney) and "Temma Harbour." 

Hopkin comes from Wales. Before she was discovered by McCartney, she made two obscure EPs in which all of the songs were sung in Welsh. I listened to them, and I think they're mainly for people who understand Welsh. Nearly all the songs are versions of famous songs, like Guantanamera and Somethin' Stupid. So I've only included one song from those EPs, which is a cover of a more obscure song from the 1950s.

Four more songs here are officially released. Two of them are from an obscure movie soundtrack. The remaining five unreleased songs generally come from live performances from TV or concerts. But one oddity is "Somewhere Along the Morning." This song is a bit under a minute long. That's because it was used for a Coca Cola commercial. But unlike most commercials, there's no plug for the product whatsoever; it's just a nice, though short, song.

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 Gwrandewch Ar Y Moroedd [Listen to the Ocean] (Mary Hopkin)
02 Somewhere Along the Morning (Mary Hopkin)
03 Morning of My Life (Mary Hopkin)
04 Turn, Turn. Turn [To Everything There Is a Season] (Mary Hopkin)
05 Goodbye (Mary Hopkin)
06 Sparrow (Mary Hopkin)
07 Que Sera, Sera [Whatever Will Be, Will Be] (Mary Hopkin)
08 Fields of St. Etienne (Mary Hopkin)
09 Lontano Dagli Occhi (Mary Hopkin)
10 Where's Jack (Mary Hopkin)
11 Last Moments (Mary Hopkin)
12 Plaisir d'Amour (Mary Hopkin)
13 Both Sides Now (Mary Hopkin)
14 In My Life (Mary Hopkin)
15 Temma Harbour (Mary Hopkin)
16 Night in the City (Mary Hopkin)
17 Yesterday (Mary Hopkin)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15121689/MaryHop_1968-1970_TemmaHarbr_atse.zip.html

The album cover is based on a cover for the Temma Harbor single. However, I rearranged things so the picture in the middle could be made much larger. She was signed to Apple Records, and I thought the record company logo added period charm. So I kept it, but moved it to a corner and shrank it so it wouldn't get in the way of the picture.

The Alan Price Set - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1966-1967

I've got a ton of BBC material to process and post here. I'm not doing them in any special order, just kind of randomly picking from the pile. Thanks to these BBC recordings, I'm learning about some artists that I'd never paid much attention to before. 

A good example of that is Alan Price. He was the organ player for the Animals, and is responsible for the famous organ sound on "The House of the Rising Sun." But not long after that, in 1965, he left the band for a solo career. It turns out he was a capable lead singer (with a voice that sounds a bit like Eric Burdon's of the Animals) and a sometimes songwriter, so it was easy to see why he went solo. He went on to have some hits in Britain into the early 1970s. But he didn't make an impact in the US, and since I'm American, I'd pretty much missed his solo career.

These BBC recordings are good for highlights of his early solo career. There are versions of all of his hits from that time, plus album tracks and some songs I don't think he released. I don't know his music well enough to name every song done exclusively for the BBC, but I checked and confirmed that at least these ones are exclusive: "Baby Work Out," "When a Man Loves a Woman," "Shake," "I Take What I Want," "Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody," "Goin' Out of My Head," "Knock on Wood," and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." That's half the songs here! Most of those are famous soul songs.

You'll note some of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. That's the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. I applied the usual solution of using the audio editing software X-Minus to wipe the vocals clean while keeping the underlying music.

Some of these are from a rare archival album, and others are unreleased. But the sound quality is excellent and essentially the same either way.

This album is 42 minutes long. I have enough material for a second volume, which will be coming soon.

01 I Put a Spell on You (Alan Price Set)
02 Baby Work Out (Alan Price Set)
03 The Walk [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
04 Hi-Lili Hi-Lo (Alan Price Set)
05 Take Me Home [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
06 When a Man Loves a Woman (Alan Price Set)
07 Shake [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
08 I Can't Turn You Loose [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
09 Tickle Me (Alan Price Set)
10 I Take What I Want [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
11 Critic's Choice [Instrumental] (Alan Price Set)
12 Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
13 Goin' Out of My Head [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
14 Knock on Wood [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
15 Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood [Edit] (Alan Price Set)
16 The House That Jack Built (Alan Price Set)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16373052/ALANPRCE1966-1967BBSssonsVlum1_atse.zip.html

The album cover pictures Alan Price in 1966. I don't know the details though.

Deep Purple - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: In Concert, Paris Theatre, London, Britain, 2-19-1970

Here's the next in my series of Deep Purple BBC albums.

This one is different from the three previous ones in that it's a complete, though somewhat short, live concert. It was broadcast on the BBC, with DJ John Peel serving as the host. Peel soured on the band shortly after this, finding their new music too loud and bombastic. But you can hear him talking between most of the songs here, and he sounded approving.

This concert has been officially released several times, the first time as part of an album called "Deep Purple in Concert." My version doesn't differ from the official one, but I've posted this here so I can present everything the band did for the BBC in their prime years.

The concert is 55 minutes long. There are only five songs because there's a lot of jamming. The last three songs are all over 10 minutes long.

01 talk (Deep Purple)
02 Speed King (Deep Purple)
03 talk (Deep Purple)
04 Child in Time (Deep Purple)
05 talk (Deep Purple)
06 Wring That Neck [Instrumental] (Deep Purple)
07 talk (Deep Purple)
08 Mandrake Root (Deep Purple)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Pe5XRemP

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/vL0peLhDgHQdPor/file

For the cover art, I took a screenshot of a YouTube video of the band playing on the TV show "Doing Your Thing." I had to resort to doing that because I couldn't find any really good color photos of the band on stage in 1970. February 2025, I updated the image with the help of the Krea AI program.

The La's - Cocktail - Non-Album Tracks (1988-1991)

I just posted one album of stray tracks by the La's. There's enough material for a second strong set, so here it is.

As I mention in my previous La's post, the band's leader Lee Mavers never wanted to release the band's one album, 1990's "The La's," because he was unhappy with the production, and has never come up with a follow-up album. Since about 1992, he's pretty much disappeared. It turns out that at some point around then, he developed a bad heroin addiction. Apparently, after some years he quit drugs entirely, which is very good to hear. 

But it seemed to derail his music career. There have only been a few hints that he's done anything new in the years since. There are some bootleg recordings, but their sound quality is so terrible that I'm not including anything from them. He did get the La's back for two short tours, one in 2005 and another in 2010, but they pretty much played the exact same songs they played in 1990. There are rumors and hints that he's been tinkering away on some great stuff, but who knows if that's true, and if that'll ever come to light if it exists.

So that leaves us just with the music from the band's late 1980s and early 1990s prime. Most of the songs here didn't come out at the time, although there are a couple of B-sides. Two of the songs here, "Tears in the Rain" and "Callin' All," also appeared in the first volume of the band's stray tracks. I've included these versions because they're significantly different from the versions on that other volume, but just as good.

Six of the songs here remain officially unreleased. Three of them come from what is called "The Kitchen Tapes," where in 1989, Mavers and the rest of the band went through songs that might go on their next album. This was recorded in the producer's kitchen, I think, so the sound is a bit rough, but still decent. There were a bunch of other songs, but most of them either were done better on other occasions or were mere fragments of ideas and aren't worthy of inclusion. For one of these songs, "Go Go Daddy," the band played parts of the song over and over, since it seems they were learning it as they went. So I edited that one down considerably to make it a more coherent song. The other two from this source, "Our Time" and "Tears in the Rain," also got some minor edits just to clean things up a bit.

Speaking of edits, I took this version of "Fishing Net" from YouTube. A poster there found a rough sounding live recording of the song and did some tinkering to make it sound better. It sounded better to me, so I used that one. It sounds quite good now. 

By the way, the La's weren't entirely Lee Mavers' band. He had a right hand man of sorts in John Power. Two of the songs here, "Alright" and "Follow Me Down," were written and sung by Power, though they're very much in the style of the others. In 1992, Power got tired of waiting for Mavers to stop obsessing over the same songs on "The La's" album and move on to these new songs. He quit the band and started his own band called "Cast." They had a big hit in Britain in 1995 with "Alright." 

This album is 41 minutes long. I've given it the title "Cocktail" because there's a reporter who claimed to talk to Mavers in the 1990s and was told his planned follow up album was going to have that title. Who knows if that's true, but it's as good as any other title, so I've used it.

01 I Am the Key (La's)
02 That'll Be the Day (La's)
03 Our Time [Edit] (La's)
04 Tears in the Rain [Slow Version] (La's)
05 Go Go Daddy [Edit] (La's)
06 Clean Prophet (La's)
07 Over (La's)
08 Fishing Net [Edit] (La's)
09 Rebound [Edit] (La's)
10 Callin' All [1990 BBC Version] (La's)
11 When Will I See You Again (La's)
12 Alright (La's)
13 Follow Me Down (La's)
14 Swashbuckler [Instrumental] (La's)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700798/TLAS1989-1991_Ccktail_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover to the single for "Timeless Melody." It's very similar to the cover for "The La's" album, except with a female eye closed instead of open. It seems there were several different versions with different colors. I liked the orange one the best. I enlarged the eye a bit and changed the text.

The La's - Callin' All - Non-Album Tracks (1985-1988)

In my opinion, the La's were one of the best bands of their era, the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yes, their music had a 1960s vibe to it, but what's wrong with that? What mattered most was that the songwriting was excellent. Even though they didn't sell tons of records back in the day, their music still has a popular audience, showing how quality can endure.

The big problem with this band, though, was how little music they released. There was only one album, the 1990 album also called "The La's." The band's main singer and songwriter Lee Mavers is still alive and still said to be working on a follow-up album. It's been freaking 32 years as I write this in 2022! I'd be extremely shocked if he ever put out anything new.

That said, there are many more quality songs from the band back in the heyday than what they put on that album. In fact, I have enough for two stray tracks albums. Here's the first one.

Despite the fact that the band only released one studio album, there have been a ton of archival releases in the decades since they broke up. But most of the stuff isn't that interesting, because it tends to be slightly different versions of the same batch of songs over and over. 

Plus, early on, there were a bunch of songs by a different band member, Mike Badger. Unfortunately, his songs simply weren't that good, in my opinion. He was kicked out of the band in 1986 (even though he'd started it) and the band became a vehicle for Lee Mavers and his songs from that point on. I've avoided the Mike Badger songs, as well as song early Mavers ones that also weren't that good.

After cutting all that, there still are many good songs from the band's early years that have generally been overlooked because they didn't come out on a studio album at the time. I should mention that I've named this album "Callin' All" even though there are at least two official archival albums with that same name because apparently there was a plan to release a double album of songs around 1988. That never happened, due to Mavers never being happy with any of the produced versions, a problem that continues until today. But that leaves me with the ideal album cover for music from this time period.

All but one song here have been officially released. That one song, "Callin' All," has been officially released in multiple versions. But I liked this unreleased version the best. It's a studio recording, so the sound quality is as good as the others. Six of the songs are from B-sides and the rest came out on archival albums much later.

You may note that I've edited the two songs with "[Edit]" in their names. In both cases, I felt the songs had some problematic or dull parts, so I edited those out. However, even after being cut down some, "The Way We Came" is still over eight minutes long. It's still clearly the La's, but it's in a different and slower style than their usual stuff.

This album is 48 minutes long, not including the bonus track. 

As I mentioned above, I found enough material for the stray tracks albums from this band. I'll post the other one dealing with the years 1988 to 1991 soon.

The bonus song "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is a cover version of the famous Rolling Stones hit. It's a bonus track in part due to somewhat poorer sound coming from a concert recording. But also, it doesn't fit well with the other songs. Still, I thought it was interesting enough for at least bonus track status.

01 Moonlight (La's)
02 Open Your Heart (La's)
03 Get Down Over (La's)
04 Tears in the Rain (La's)
05 Callin' All (La's)
06 Knock Me Down (La's)
07 Endless (La's)
08 It's Not Impossible [Edit] (La's)
09 The Way We Came [Edit] (La's)
10 Come In, Come Out (La's)
11 Who Knows (La's)
12 Man I'm Only Human (La's)
13 All by Myself (La's)\

Jumpin' Jack Flash (La's)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15266644/TLas_1985-1988_CallnAll_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used a cover of the "There She Goes" single. Except I made a few changes. I enlarged the picture of the band, about doubling it in size. And I enlarged the text, as well as changing the words to fit the album title name.

Deep Purple - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1970

Here's the next album of Deep Purple at the BBC. In my opinion, the band was hitting its stride at this time, moving more into hard rock with the "In Rock" album in 1970.

All but one of the songs here come from official album "BBC Sessions 1968-1970." The one exception is the last track, "Mandrake Root." This also comes from an official source, but a lesser known one, and something that only came out on DVD, "Rock Review 1969-1972." The reason for the difference is that last song is the only one that wasn't actually performed at the BBC. Instead, it was done for a French TV show. I've included it to get all the other songs the band did on TV or radio that weren't also done for the BBC. It so happens there simply aren't many of those, at least not with excellent sound quality.

You may note three songs have "[Edit]" in their names. Generally speaking, by 1970, the BBC DJs were ending their bad habit of talking over the starts and ends of the songs they were playing, but as you can see they still did that for those songs. As usual, I used the audio editing program X-Minus to wipe out the talking while keeping the underlying music.

This album is 43 minutes long. There aren't as many songs as before because the songs were getting longer. "Mandrake Root" in particular is 14 minutes long.

01 Bloodsucker [Edit] (Deep Purple)
02 Living Wreck [Edit] (Deep Purple)
03 Black Night (Deep Purple)
04 Grabsplatter [Instrumental Version of I'm Alone] (Deep Purple)
05 Into the Fire [Edit] (Deep Purple)
06 Child in Time (Deep Purple)
07 Mandrake Root (Deep Purple)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15109453/DeepP_1970_BBSessionsVolume3_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is of the band performing for the Top of the Pops BBC TV show in early 1970. (I didn't include that exact performance on this album because they lipsynced the vocals.)

Kirsty MacColl - Acoustic Radio Shows (1993-2000)

First off, note that I've made changes to all the Kirsty MacColl stray tracks albums that I've posted so far. For some of them, I merely improved the volume balance between songs, and updated the mp3 tags to the new format I'm using. But for three albums, I've added songs that I only recently became aware of. For the album "Sun on the Water," I added two songs from an obscure various artists compilation that I'd previous missed. For "You Still Believe in Me," two unreleased songs emerged in 2021. And for "Real," four more unreleased songs emerged in 2021. So, if you're a fan of her music, don't miss those.

Moving on to this album, there is a nice but little known official album called "What Do Pretty Girls Do" that compiles MacColl's BBC appearances from 1989 to 1995. All of the songs on that were done in an acoustic format, so I find those versions a nice contrast to the fully produced album versions. But it turns out MacColl did some other acoustic versions for radio appearances in the 1990s. They all remain unreleased since they weren't done for the BBC. This collects them. Many of the songs here are also on "What Do Pretty Girls Do" in similar acoustic versions, but there are a good number of songs that are unique here.

The songs here are compiled from six radio shows. with five of those in the US. There were a few cases where the same songs were played on more than one of these shows, although not that many. In cases where there were two or more versions of one song, I only included one version. 

I'm especially delighted to include the last two songs, "Nao Esperando" and "England 2 Colombia 0." These are from her 2000 album "Tropical Brainstorm," which is my favorite album of hers. That album is heavily influenced by music from Latin America, especially Brazil. As such, one would think the songs wouldn't work in a solo acoustic format. But that's how she plays those two songs, and they work well, with the help of a bit more instrumentation, though no drums.

The song "Miss Otis Regrets" has "[Edit]" in the same because I edited it. This version was almost acoustic, but had some drumming on it. I used the X-Minus audio editing program to remove the drums.

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 Can't Stop Killing You (Kirsty MacColl)
02 Bad (Kirsty MacColl)
03 Children of the Revolution (Kirsty MacColl)
04 My Affair (Kirsty MacColl)
05 Last Day of Summer (Kirsty MacColl)
06 There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis (Kirsty MacColl)
07 Don't Come the Cowboy with Me, Sonny Jim (Kirsty MacColl)
08 Fifteen Minutes (Kirsty MacColl)
09 Still Life (Kirsty MacColl)
10 Miss Otis Regrets [Edit] (Kirsty MacColl)
11 Free World (Kirsty MacColl)
12 Caroline (Kirsty MacColl)
13 They Don't Know (Kirsty MacColl)
14 Roll Um Easy (Kirsty MacColl)
15 Nao Esperando (Kirsty MacColl)
16 England 2 Colombia 0 (Kirsty MacColl)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15260706/KirstyMacC_1993-2000_AcoustcRadioShws_atse.zip.html

Since this is an acoustic album, I wanted a cover photo showing MacColl playing an acoustic guitar. I found a good one, which I used here. But it so happens it's from the Fleadh concert in London in 1995. I've posted that concert in full. If you compare the cover photo of that one to this one, you'll see she's wearing the same outfit.

Deep Purple - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1969-1970

I'm currently prioritizing the posting of Deep Purple BBC albums so I can get to other BBC albums by other artists, so here's another one of those from them.

My favorite Deep Purple line-up by far is the Mark II one, which is the one responsible for "Smoke on the Water" and most of their other best known songs. This is mostly made by that line-up. However, the first two songs were done by the Mark I line-up, since they were recorded in June 1969 and the Mark II line-up had their first concert in early July 1969. (The different between the line-ups is very noticeable, since they had different lead singers.)

All but three of the songs here come from the official album "BBC Sessions 1968-1970." Of those three, "Paint It Black" comes from a Dutch radio show, and is the only officially unreleased performance here. "Hallelujah" was done for the German TV show "Beat Club," and comes from an obscure compilation of Beat Club performances. "Kentucky Woman" was played in concert, and comes from the official live album "Live in Montreux 69." I included that one because the song was played for the BBC but the recording was lost, and the sound quality is on par with the rest of the album.

Note that three of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. In the first two cases, that was because BBC DJs were talking over part of the songs. For the third case, "Hallelujah," a German DJ talked over part of the song during the "Beat Club" TV show. In all cases, I used the audio editing program X-Minus to wipe out the talking while keeping the underlying music.

By the way, the song "Jam Stew" needs a bit of explanation. This was done as an instrumental in the studio, and that version was later released as a bonus track to the "In Rock" album. But this version actually does have lead vocals and lyrics, so this particular version is also known as "John Stew."

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Hush [Edit] (Deep Purple)
02 The Painter [Edit] (Deep Purple)
03 Ricochet [Early Version of Speed King] (Deep Purple)
04 The Bird Has Flown (Deep Purple)
05 Paint It Black - Drum Solo - Paint It Black [Instrumental] (Deep Purple)
06 Hallelujah [Edit] (Deep Purple)
07 Kentucky Woman (Deep Purple)
08 Speed King (Deep Purple)
09 Jam Stew [John Stew] (Deep Purple)
10 Hard Lovin' Man (Deep Purple)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15109449/DeepP_1969-1970_BBSessionsVolume2_atse.zip.html

I believe the cover art photo dates from 1970. I had a hard time finding a really good photo of the band from 1969. But this is the Mark II version of the band in the photo, featured on all but two tracks here.

Iwan Fals - Ngalor Ngidulnya, Volume 2 (2021)

A few days ago, I posted Volume 1 in this series. I have several more to go, so here's the next one already.

If you don't know who Iwan Fals is, beware that he's an Indonesian musician who sings all his songs in the Indonesian language. So if that's not your cup of tea, you should skip this.

My Volume 1 post explained more about who he is and why I'm posting his music. Assuming you know all that, this is a reminder that this series is basically his version of the home concert recordings lots of musicians have done during the pandemic lockdown phase. He has regularly done one song a week, playing them in solo acoustic format (sometimes with harmonica). All these performances are unreleased, unless you count him posting them for free on YouTube.

It seems when he started this series, he tended to do a lot of his most famous songs early on (famous in Indonesia, that is). With this being Volume 2, these generally are all still well known songs. It's too bad if you can't speak Indonesian, because his lyrics are excellent. Although he does lots of romantic songs, he also does many social commentary ones. Take the first song here for instance, "Isi Rimba Tak Ada Tempat Berpijak Lagi." This song laments the cutting of the tropical forests in Indonesia. But the song came out in 1982, putting him ahead of most public consciousness on this issue, especially for Indonesia.

This album is 54 minutes long.

01 Isi Rimba Tak Ada Tempat Berpijak Lagi (Iwan Fals)
02 Sapuku Sapuku Sapu Sapu (Iwan Fals)
03 Tarmijah dan Problemnya (Iwan Fals)
04 Tak Bitu Lagi Lautku (Iwan Fals)
05 Ambisi (Iwan Fals)
06 Antara Aku, Kau dan Bekas Pacarmu (Iwan Fals)
07 Galang Rambu Anarki (Iwan Fals)
08 Obat Awet Muda (Iwan Fals)
09 Sumbang (Iwan Fals)
10 Kereta Tiba Pukul Berapa (Iwan Fals)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16064272/IwanF_2021_NgalrNgidlnyaVolum2_atse.zip.html

As with Volume 1, the cover art was made from taking a screenshot from one of the YouTube videos of these exact performances.