Belle & Sebastian - Live Cover Versions, Volume 2: 2002-2004

Belle and Sebastian had a neat habit of playing cover versions in concert back in the early 2000s. (They don't do that so much anymore, since they have so many originals to play instead.) But there are two things they did that were unusual. One, they picked some really interesting and unexpected songs to cover. Two, they typically only played them once.

This second thing is a big problem here, because only three of the songs here have been officially released. (All three of them are from a BBC album.) So if a song only gets played once in concert, the chances of it getting recorded well on a bootleg are small. It's a lucky thing if it gets bootlegged at all. I've found compilations of dozens and dozens of cover versions played in concert by Belle and Sebastian. The problem is, the vast majority of them have unacceptably poor sound quality to my ears. So this is my collection of just the ones that sounded good enough to me.

Even then, I had to make a couple of drastic edits. Note that for the song "Good Vibrations," most of the first verses and chorus was missing on the bootleg source that I found. So I edited it to start cleanly with the beginning of the second verse. I think that's much better than not including the song at all.

It's too bad so many songs didn't make it for sound quality reasons. I hope the band made their own recordings and will release some of them one day. But what's left on this album is still a lot of fun. Look at the rest of the song list - everything from Burt Bacharach to the Supremes to Sly and the Family Stone to Kraftwerk. They even did great versions of songs in Portuguese and French!

I explained more in the write-up for Volume 1 how it is that I found more songs that I'd previously missed. But note that all the songs with "[Edit]" in their titles are ones that I'd missed due to sound quality issues. However, I was able to use audio editing programs like X-Minus to fix most of the flaws, making them acceptable to my ears. As an example, the lead vocals to "Stayin' Alive" were too quiet compared to the instrumentation, so I boosted them.

Here are the original artists for each song:

01 Oliver's Army [Edit] - Elvis Costello
02 So You Want to Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star - Byrds
03 Darlin' [Edit] - Beach Boys
04 Stayin' Alive [Edit] - Bee Gees
05 Baby Love - Supremes
06 The Model [Das Modell] - Kraftwerk
07 Lucifer Sam - Pink Floyd
08 Runnin' Away - Sly and the Family Stone
09 My Little Red Book - Burt Bacharach / Love
10 The Train from Kansas City - Shangri-Las
11 This Guy's in Love with You - Burt Bacharach / Herb Alpert
12 Good Vibrations - Beach Boys
13 Comment te Dire Adieu - Francoise Hardy
14 The Boy with the Thorn in His Side - Smiths

And here's the usual song list:

01 Oliver's Army [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
02 So You Want to Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star (Belle & Sebastian)
03 Darlin' [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
04 Stayin' Alive [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
05 Baby Love (Belle & Sebastian)
06 The Model [Das Modell] (Belle & Sebastian)
07 Lucifer Sam (Belle & Sebastian)
08 Runnin' Away (Belle & Sebastian)
09 My Little Red Book (Belle & Sebastian)
10 The Train from Kansas City [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
11 This Guy's in Love with You [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
12 Good Vibrations [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
13 Comment te Dire Adieu (Belle & Sebastian)
14 The Boy with the Thorn in His Side (Belle & Sebastian)

This album is 40 minutes long.

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602300/BellenS_2002-2004_LivCoverVersionsVolume2_atse.zip.html

I wanted to use a photo of the entire Belle and Sebastian band playing in concert in the time period of this album. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good ones. But I did find a good one of band leader Stuart Murdoch singing as part of the band at Wembley Arena in 2004, so I used that.