By the time the English Beat started their set, the crowd had grown to an estimated 130,000 people.
Dave Wakeling, one of the band's two lead singers, later recalled how their set began. "We could see this huge mass of people with three sets of PAs going off into the distance and then a hill, and people on them, and they were really far away. I'd never seen that many people in one place. My knees were shaking. So for the first couple songs I had to lock my legs to stop them from knocking."
Wakeling also had some later comments about Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak funding the festival as a whole. "It was an interesting gesture for the time. Of all the Apple folk, Wozniak did the thing that made you go, 'Wow.' However, it’s not that difficult to do something fantastic if you’re willing to lose $20 million." (In actual fact, Wozniak didn't lost $20 on the 1982 festival though he might have lost that much on both the 1982 and 1983 festivals combined. But the amount of the loss has never been publicly revealed.)
The band had trouble with the considerable dust though, like most bands at the festival. Blockhead, the band's keyboardist, later said, "We finally got the crowd clapping along and dancing during one song, and we thought it was great. Then we saw the dust cloud heading toward us. And there I was, wearing contacts." At times, bands were hard to see clearly, due to all the dust.
Very little from either US Festival has been officially released so far, but the English Beat is a partial exception. In 2012, the official album "The English Beat: Live at the US Festival, '82 & '83" was released. But as you can guess from the title, it's a combination of both their sets into one album. None of the songs are repeated. So what I've done is combine sources. I used the official source as much as possible, then filled in whatever was missing with an audience bootleg. It so happens the first few songs are from the bootleg, but the vast majority of the rest are from the official source. I think only the songs "Ranking Full Stop," "Big Shot," "Get a Job - Stand Down Margaret," "Spar wid Me," and "Jackpot" are from the bootleg. I also rearranged the song order some, since the album had some out of order.
I did my best to improve the sound quality of the bootlegged songs, removing crowd noise during the songs (but not the applause at the ends), and boosting the lead vocals some. However, the sound quality of the officially released material is still noticeably better.
This album is 51 minutes long.
By the way, note that the track numbering resumes where the numbering of the previous album left off, in case you want to hear all the sets from the first day of the festival together without pause.
025 talk (English Beat)
026 Ranking Full Stop (English Beat)
027 Big Shot (English Beat)
028 talk (English Beat)
029 Doors of Your Heart (English Beat)
030 talk (English Beat)
031 Twist and Crawl (English Beat)
032 talk (English Beat)
033 I Confess (English Beat)
034 talk (English Beat)
035 Get a Job - Stand Down Margaret (English Beat)
036 talk (English Beat)
037 Sugar and Stress (English Beat)
038 Spar wid Me (English Beat)
039 talk (English Beat)
040 Two Swords (English Beat)
041 talk (English Beat)
042 Hands Off... She's Mine (English Beat)
043 talk (English Beat)
044 Save It for Later (English Beat)
045 talk (English Beat)
046 Too Nice to Talk To (English Beat)
047 Mirror in the Bathroom (English Beat)
048 talk (English Beat)
049 Jackpot (English Beat)
https://www.upload.ee/files/17467869/VA-1982USFstvlDay0102TEnglshBet_atse.zip.html
alternate:
https://pixeldrain.com/u/WW1mFcJL
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/a2Nx6F0xfcjqw71/file
The cover photo is from this exact concert. Ranking Roger is closest to the camera. Dave Wakeling is second closest. I used the Krea AI program to improve the low-res image a bit.
Thanks so much!
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