Cilla Black - BBC Sessions, Volume 2 (1966-1972)

Here's the second and last volume of Cilla Black at the BBC.

As I explained with Volume 1, Black's interesting music is generally the 1960s and early 1970s. That's the same for many other British female singers of that era. For instance, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, and Lulu faded in the mid-1970s too. In Black's case, she kept releasing records, but stopped having hits, and focused more on being an all-around TV entertainer.

By chance, unreleased BBC recordings stop around 1973, at the same time her hits stopped. Thank you to my musical associate Marley who was essential in finding most of the BBC recordings from 1969 and after. 

All but one of the songs here are officially unreleased. That one is an oddity, because it's actually a studio track that I snuck in there. That's because one of my favorite songs by her is "Step Inside Love," which was a big hit for her in 1968, but, strangely, it seems she didn't perform it for the BBC or other TV or radio shows. It's neat that the song was written by Paul McCartney (and even done as a lark by the Beatles during the "White Album" sessions), but it's a darn good song regardless of who wrote it. Instead of including the hit version, I found a rare demo version with McCartney backing her on acoustic guitar, found on the album "The Abbey Road Decade, 1963-1973."

During this time period, Black had a successful BBC TV show called "Cilla." A few of the songs are from that, but only a few. I'll bet there are many more songs from that show that would make interesting listening (including a version of "Step Inside Love," I would imagine), but I couldn't find that much, at least not at a reasonably high sound quality. So six of the songs here are from that, and the rest are from proper BBC studio sessions (not counting "Step Inside Love"). 

With those BBC radio recordings, there was the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. So I applied the usual solution of using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe the talking while keeping the underlying music. The songs where I did that have "[Edit]" in their names.

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 The 'In' Crowd (Cilla Black)
02 Alfie (Cilla Black)
03 Don't Answer Me (Cilla Black)
04 Step Inside Love [Demo] (Cilla Black with Paul McCartney)
05 Uptight [Everything's Alright] (Cilla Black)
06 Both Sides Now (Cilla Black)
07 It Feels So Good (Cilla Black)
08 The Look of Love - Walk On By (Cilla Black & Cliff Richard)
09 Surround Yourself with Sorrow [Edit] (Cilla Black)
10 Conversations [Edit] (Cilla Black)
11 If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind [Edit] (Cilla Black)
12 [They Long to Be] Close to You (Cilla Black)
13 Something Tells Me [Something's Gonna Happen Tonight] (Cilla Black)
14 Norwegian Wood (Cilla Black & Marvin, Welch & Farrar)
15 Make It with You [Edit] (Cilla Black)
16 The World I Wish for You (Cilla Black)
17 You, You, You [Edit] (Cilla Black)

Melting Pot (Dusty Springfield & Cilla Black)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16066080/CillaB_1966-1972_BBSessionsVolume2_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from the "Cilla" TV show, around October 1970.