Honeybus - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1967-1968

I recently posted four albums of stray tracks by the British band Honeybus. I just have two more albums by this band to post, and both of them are collections of BBC studio sessions.

I had been planning on posting Honeybus's BBC material regardless, but my task was made easier by the released of an official album in early 2023. All the performances here come from that album. 

That means the sound quality is generally excellent, though that's not always the case. There are a couple of dodgy sounding songs that were recorded over the radio by fans, but I've put those only as bonus tracks. You will see "[Edit]" in the titles of some songs, due to the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. As I usually do, I used the audio editing program UVR5 to wipe the talking but keep the underlying music.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I consider Honeybus to be a very underrated band. A big problem they had was that their record company only let them release one studio album in the seven years they were together (!), but they had three singer-songwriters, so many songs fell by the wayside. Thank God for these BBC recordings that save many songs from being totally lost. I've included some of those otherwise unreleased songs on the stray tracks albums, but I'm including them here too so one can have all their BBC recordings in one place.

I have an unusually large number of bonus tracks this time. Three of them are nice otherwise unreleased songs that are bonus tracks due to poor sound quality: "Goin' Back," "Looking Down," and "Warwick Town." "Goin' Back" is a cover of the well-known Carole King song. Unfortunately, not only does it have rough sound quality, there also was a big chunk in the middle that was missing, even though it was included on the recent official BBC album. The cut happened during the middle of the second verse. I tried to fix this, somewhat, by patching in an instrumental version of the rest of that verse, taken from elsewhere in the song. But still, there was nothing I could do to fix the missing vocals.

Two more of the bonus tracks actually sound fine: "Girl of Independent Means" and "Maxine's Parlour." The only reason they're bonus tracks is because the band played those songs twice for the BBC, and the versions aren't that different.

This album is 43 minutes long.

01 [Do I Figure] In Your Life (Honeybus)
02 Like an Old Time Movie [Edit] (Honeybus)
03 Arise Sir Henry (Honeybus)
04 Maxine's Parlour (Honeybus)
05 I Can't Let Maggie Go (Honeybus)
06 She Comes to Me [Edit] (Honeybus)
07 Ain't That Just Bonnie for You [Edit] (Honeybus)
08 Francoise [Edit] (Honeybus)
09 Scarlet Lady [Edit] (Honeybus)
10 How Long [Edit] (Honeybus)
11 Black Mourning Band (Honeybus)
12 She Sold Blackpool Rock (Honeybus)
13 Girl of Independent Means (Honeybus)
14 Incredibly Bad (Honeybus)
15 Would You Believe (Honeybus)

Girl of Independent Means [First Version] [Edit] (Honeybus)
Goin' Back [Edit] (Honeybus)
Looking Down (Honeybus)
Maxine's Parlour [1967 Version] [Edit] (Honeybus)
Warwick Town (Honeybus)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15565182/Honeybs_1967-1968_BBSessionsVolum1_atse.zip.html

I don't know when or where the cover photo is from, but I'm guessing it's from 1967 due to their "square" clothes. (It can't be from earlier, since the band was formed in early 1967.)