The English Beat - BBC Sessions, Volume 1 (1979-1980)

I recently posted a stray tracks album for the English Beat. I'm following that up with two albums of their BBC sessions. Here's the first one. (And, as I mentioned before, I understand they're just called the "Beat" in Britain, but I'm an American, where they're called the "English Beat," so that's what I call them.

This is a very straight-forward album. The band put out an album in 1980 ("I Just Can't Stop It") and another one in 1981 ("Wha'ppen.") Decades later, each of those albums were released with lots of bonus tracks, and those included the complete BBC sessions from those time periods. So this is just a collection of those particular bonus tracks.

One interesting thing though is that the first five songs come from a John Peel BBC session when the band was just starting out. They had a meteoric rise, from forming their band to having hit singles and a hit album in just nine months. I read an interview with lead singer Dave Wakeling where he said the John Peel session was touch and go, because the band had just written most of the songs and hadn't done them in the studio yet, and they had to rise to the occasion to remember the chord changes and so forth. But the results sound fine to me.

This album is 38 minutes long.

01 Tears of a Clown (English Beat)
02 Ranking Full Stop (English Beat)
03 Click Click (English Beat)
04 Mirror in the Bathroom (English Beat)
05 Big Shot (English Beat)
06 Hands Off... She's Mine (English Beat)
07 Rough Rider (English Beat)
08 Twist and Crawl (English Beat)
09 Mirror in the Bathroom (English Beat)
10 Too Nice to Talk To (English Beat)
11 New Psychedelic Rockers (English Beat)
12 Monkey Murders (English Beat)
13 Walk Away (English Beat)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15112084/TEnglishB_1979-1980_BBSessionsVolume1_atse.zip.html

I had a hard time finding good photos of the band from 1979 or 1980. So in the end I decided to use the cover to their single "Mirror in the Bathroom." I cropped out the outer edges where the name of the single was included, and added in some text of my own.