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.imagenetz.de/aLwYH

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.