Alan Bown - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1966-1969

Next up with my big BBC project is Alan Bown. If you don't know who Alan Bown is, I'm not surprised. I didn't know of him until this project. In short, he was the leader of a British band that went by several names: The Alan Bown Set, The Alan Bown!, and finally just Alan Bown. For simplicity's sake, I'm just using "Alan Bown" across the board. But just as Spencer Davis was not the main guy in the Spencer Davis Group (that was Steve Winwood), Bown was the trumpet player and not the lead vocalist or main songwriter, so it's a bit odd to me that the band was named after him. 

Alan Bown never had a big hit, though they came close a couple of times. However, they developed enough of a following to put out five albums and a bunch of singles while the band was together from 1965 to 1972. The band went through all the same musical changes many British bands went through at the time. They started out rooted in blues and jazz. That morphed into soul, then psychedelia, then progressive rock. If the band is remembered for anything these days, it's probably for the fact that Robert Palmer was the lead singer for a while. But the band has enough material for two BBC volumes, and Palmer won't show up until Volume 2.

Here's the Wikipedia link if you want to know more:

The Alan Bown Set - Wikipedia

The first three songs aren't actually from BBC recordings. They're taken from a relatively obscure 1965 live album called "London Swings: Live at the Marquee Club." But I wanted to include them because none of the band's 1965 BBC recordings survive, and I wanted something to document that period. The song "Emergency 999" wasn't well known at the time, but later caught on as a Northern Soul favorite. 

Everything else here is from BBC studio sessions. Only one of those songs is officially released though. "Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies" came out on a various artists compilation focused on BBC recordings called "Shapes and Sounds, Volume 2." But the vast majority of the unreleased songs come from pristine transcription reels and so have excellent sound quality.

You may notice that aside from the first three songs, which aren't actually BBC recordings, every single song has "[Edit]" in their titles. That's because in every single case, BBC DJs talked over the music. But I did my usual thing of using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe that talking while keeping the underlying music.

Actually, one of those didn't have a BBC DJ talking over the music: "Story Book." But it has "[Edit]" in the title for other reasons. The sound quality of that one was so poor that when I first posted this, I only included it as a bonus track. But within 24 hours, musical friend MZ surprised me by making some improvements, and it sounded a lot better. I noticed the vocals were still low, so I used X-Minus to boost them. The combined results were good enough for me to remove it from being a bonus track, but the sound is still somewhat rougher than the others.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 It's Growing (Alan Bown)
02 Emergency 999 (Alan Bown)
03 I Need You (Alan Bown)
04 Do the Boomerang [Edit] (Alan Bown)
05 Gonna Fix You Good [Edit] (Alan Bown)
06 Headline News [Edit] (Alan Bown)
07 Penny for Your Thoughts [Edit] (Alan Bown)
08 Technicolour Dream [Edit] (Alan Bown)
09 My Girl the Month of May [Edit] (Alan Bown)
10 Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies [Edit] (Alan Bown)
11 Toyland [Edit] (Alan Bown)
12 Love Is a Beautiful Thing [Edit] (Alan Bown)
13 Story Book [Edit] (Alan Bown)
14 Magic Handkerchief [Edit] (Alan Bown)
15 All Along the Watchtower [Edit] (Alan Bown)
16 Still as a Stone [Edit] (Alan Bown)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15900486/AlanBwn_1966-1969_BBSessionsVolume1_atse.zip.html

A couple of days after I first posted this album, I redid the cover with a different photo I found while looking for a good photo for Volume 2. This one come from a Facebook page for the band. A band member who was actually in the photo suggests it dates from 1966 or 1967.