The album mostly consists of two BBC appearances, one from April 4, 1970 and the other from June 25, 1970. The April one actually comes one month before the BBC performance that makes up the vast majority of the first album in this series. But I wanted to keep each of the appearances together, and it worked out best if I arranged them this way.
The first four songs are from the April 4th appearance. The next song ("Border Song") is from a different appearance that took place just one day later. The three songs after that are from the June 25th appearance. The album then ends with one song from August 1970 and one from March 1971.
Once again, with these BBC performances, it's either feast or famine. Meaning we either have the song in great quality, or we don't have it publicly available at all. Six of the songs here have been released as bonus tracks to deluxe versions of his albums "Elton John" and "Tumbleweed Connection." The rest remain unreleased, but sound just as good, in my opinion. The April 4th and June 25th appearances are complete and in the correct order. But there were more songs played at the April 5th and August appearances that haven't even leaked to bootlegs.
I have two bonus tracks this time. Normally, I include a song as a bonus track due to borderline sound quality: it's not good enough as the rest, but it's not so bad to be totally discarded. In this case, both of the bonus tracks sound great. One, "Take Me to the Pilot," has even been officially released on one of those deluxe editions. The only reason they're bonus tracks is because they're other versions of the same songs elsewhere on the album. As I've mentioned before, I hate having two versions of the same song on one album, unless there's something drastically different about them.
I included the unreleased version of "Take Me to the Pilot" over the officially released bonus track one because I thought it's more different from the album version, and thus more interesting. It has more of a gospel feel, with a bigger role for the backing vocals.
01 Take Me to the Pilot (Elton John)
02 My Father's Gun (Elton John)
03 Your Song (Elton John)
04 Ballad of a Well-Known Gun (Elton John)
05 Border Song [Holy Moses] (Elton John with Hookfoot)
06 Country Comfort (Elton John)
07 Amoreena (Elton John)
08 Burn Down the Mission (Elton John)
09 Bad Side of the Moon (Elton John)
10 The King Must Die (Elton John)
Border Song [Holy Moses] (Elton John)
Take Me to the Pilot (Elton John)
https://www.upload.ee/files/15904984/EltonJn_1970_BBSessionsVolume2_atse.zip.html
The cover art photo comes from an appearance by Elton John at "Top of the Pops" in 1971. Although "Top of the Pops" was a BBC TV show, I haven't included any songs from his appearances on that show because they were always lip-synced.
Top of the Pops used lip-syncing in ita early days, but in 1966 they switched to live vocals, though often sung over a pre-recorded backing track.
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but I don't think that was always the case. Because I watched some Elton John Top of the Pops performances from the early 1970s on YouTube in the past few days. You can clearly see his lips move at different times than the vocals.
DeleteI just Googled this. Turns out the lip-syncing was common to at least 1991. Only then were live vocals over a backing track allowed.
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/05/jump-the-shark-top-of-the-pops
It was so bad that some artists parodied this by not coming even close to matching the recorded vocals during their Top of the Pops performances. You can find out more about this on Wikipedia too. For instance, the Cure mocked the forced lip-syncing on multiple occasions.
Thanks a lot I'm starting to see more clearly in the world of Elton's BBC sessions !
ReplyDeleteAlthough I'm wondering if The King Must Die isn't from May 1972...
I get "403 Forbidden" when I click on the link. Is there another way to get this (maybe a Google Drive link?) Failing that I'd be interested to know which version of 'Your Song' you've used. The April 4 1970 version should be a solo piano performance, but I've never been able to track this down although I know it does exist. Or did you just use the version added to the July 1970 session, which was merely the single recording with strings mixed out?
ReplyDeleteI managed to download it via a VPN. As I thought, that version of Your Song isn't the April 4th version, but just the de-mixed single version added to the July session after the song became a hit. The April 4th session was a John Peel "Concert" (without an audience) and opened with two solo piano performances (Your Song & My Father's Gun) before Hookfoot joined him for two full band performances.
DeleteDead link...can you re-up this one,please!
ReplyDelete