I still have mountains of BBC material to post, so here's a bit more. The British band Big Country have done several concerts for the BBC. I'm not a really big fan of the band, but I do really like a few of their hits, such as "Wonderland," "Fields of Fire," "Look Away," and "In a Big Country," so I figure they deserve at least one concert here. I picked this one because I thought it's from a good time period, and has worthy sound quality. They were the most popular in the first half of the 1980s, and this contains all of their most famous songs from that time.
This concert remains officially unreleased. It's from the BBC TV show "The Old Grey Whistle Test." They devoted a full hour to showing this concert. Unfortunately, the show ended about a minute before the last song, "Fields of Fire," finished. You can find the full video on YouTube and see where it fades out. However, it turns out there's a complete version of the concert that has only been released on DVD. A commenter named Santaci kindly pointed this out to me and then converted the audio and sent it to me. I then was able to add in the missing portion of the song. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in the title.
In terms of sound quality, I thought the vocals were a bit low in the mix, so I used the audio editing program UVR5 to boost the vocals relative to the instruments. Otherwise, everything sounded fine.
This album is 57 minutes long.
01 talk (Big Country)
02 Wonderland (Big Country)
03 Where the Rose Is Sown (Big Country)
04 talk (Big Country)
05 Remembrance Day (Big Country)
06 I Walk the Hill (Big Country)
07 talk (Big Country)
08 Look Away (Big Country)
09 Chance (Big Country)
10 The Teacher (Big Country)
11 talk (Big Country)
12 In a Big Country (Big Country)
13 Inwards (Big Country)
14 Harvest Home (Big Country)
15 Fields of Fire [Edit] (Big Country)
The cover photo of the band is from the yearly Knebworth Festival in Britain, on June 9, 1986.
Great band. I remember seeing them live several times in the eighties.
ReplyDeleteIt's unreleased on CD, but the whole show is on the DVD in the 'At The BBC' boxset. It will be good to hear your version.
ReplyDeleteI did not know that. I was aware of an "At the BBC" CD, but that doesn't have any of this concert on it. If you have the DVD, and you could send me the audio of the last song, that would be great. Then I wouldn't have to use the Frankenstein version where I put two different performances together.
DeleteOK, I'll look into ripping DVD audio, always a school day.
DeleteSantaci, did you have any success with that? I never heard back from you.
DeleteAfraid no success, I tried using Nero Disc to Device and got a message: 'unable to send, disc is damaged'. It plays OK in preview, and at the end of FoF the band leave the stage one by one until there's just a few seconds of drums, so I assume it's a disc protection thing. Do you have recommended software that could get round this?
ReplyDeleteBummer. Thanks for trying. If it were my computer, I'd use the program Audacity (which is free, no strings attached), and simply record what's being played through the computer at the time. But that can be kind of tricky to find out how to do if you've never done it before. Maybe someone else has a suggestion?
DeleteRight, I couldn't get Audacity to work, but the vob files could be converted to flac using Nero Recode, but Fields of Fire was in two VOB files. I've cropped them to just the song, where do I send them.
DeleteFiles shared in Dropbox to email beginning thompson22, let me know if you get them and if they are suitable.
DeleteThanks. I got the files, and they sound great. I'll work on merging that in, and then I'll repost the link. I'm glad you overcame the conversion problems.
DeleteI just updated the files and credited you in the text. Thanks again!
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