Hall & Oates - BBC in Concert, Town and Country Club, London, 9-5-1990

Opinion on the American duo Hall and Oates is mixed. They've sold many millions of records and have millions of fans, but some think they're overly commercial and cheesy. Personally, I think they had a lot of great singles, but I haven't gotten into their music more than that. But still, I found a concert they did for the BBC, and I liked it enough to want to share it here.

Hall and Oates put out their first album in 1972. They steadily grew in popularity, peaking in the early 1980s, when they were a hit-making machine. They had five Number One hits in the US, and many more hits as well. Their hit-making years pretty much came to an end in 1990 when their song "So Close" made it to number 11 in the US charts. After releasing their 1990 album "Change of Season," they took a seven year hiatus, and have had a lower level of commercial success ever since.

If you want just one live concert recording from this, I think this is the ideal time. Unfortunately, that 1990 album gets low ratings. But this bootleg only contains two songs from it: the hit "So Close," plus a cover of the classic soul song "Starting All Over Again." So basically, this concert is filled with their earlier hits, and they did the vast majority of the big ones. They also did "Everytime You Go Away," which they wrote but was a big hit for Paul Young instead. On top of that, they finished with two soul covers, "Hot Fun in the Summertime" by Sly and the Family Stone, and "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye. Neither of those were ever officially released by the duo.

The sound quality is excellent, just as you'd expect from a BBC recording. There were only two snags. One is that the volume of the talk between songs was sometimes quite low. I easily fixed that by boosting the volume of just those bits. The other is that the song "Wait for Me" only went for about 30 seconds before fading out. So rather than having that frustrating snippet, I removed that song altogether.

 This album is an hour and 44 minutes long.

01 talk (Hall & Oates)
02 Out of Touch (Hall & Oates)
03 talk (Hall & Oates)
04 Family Man (Hall & Oates)
05 talk (Hall & Oates)
06 Say It Isn't So (Hall & Oates)
07 How Does It Feel (Hall & Oates)
08 talk (Hall & Oates)
09 Kiss on My List (Hall & Oates)
10 Starting All Over Again (Hall & Oates)
11 Everytime You Go Away (Hall & Oates)
12 So Close (Hall & Oates)
13 I Can't Go for That [No Can Do] (Hall & Oates)
14 talk (Hall & Oates)
15 Sara Smile (Hall & Oates)
16 She's Gone (Hall & Oates)
17 Rich Girl (Hall & Oates)
18 Maneater (Hall & Oates)
19 talk (Hall & Oates)
20 Adult Education (Hall & Oates)
21 You Make My Dreams (Hall & Oates)
22 Hot Fun in the Summertime (Hall & Oates)
23 What's Going On (Hall & Oates)

https://www.imagenetz.de/kvEBu

I couldn't find any really good color concert photos of the duo in 1990. So I used this one from December 1988, in Tokyo.