UB40 - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: Rock Goes to College, Keele University, Keele, Britain, 11-25-1980

Here's another UB40 BBC album. It's a concert from 1980. Once again, I'm renumbering and reorganizing. (Sigh!) So I'm posting this concert from 1980 despite having already posted three from after this.

You can thank the music blog Voodoo Wagon for this one. After I posted a 1985 UB40 BBC concert, the person behind that blog pointed out that I'd missed this concert. I looked into it and saw that I'd known about this concert some time ago, but I'd decided against posting it mainly due to sound quality issues. But thanks to technological advances with audio editing in recent years, I decided to give it another try. 

The first thing I did was combine two recordings together. The BBC broadcast this twice, in different forms. First was a broadcast called "Rock Goes to College." Then, over a year later, there was another one called "BBC College Concert." The first one had "King" and "Little by Little," but not "My Way of Thinking," "Burden of Shame," "Madam Medusa," and "Wildcat." So I did my best to put them all together, although I had to guess at the song order in some cases. Both versions had one song before some introductory comments by BBC DJ Richard Skinner, but different songs, so I ended up having two songs before those comments.

Then I tackled sound quality issues. First, I ran all the songs through the MVSEP program. There was a constant crowd noise through some songs, though not others. I got rid of that wherever I could find it, while leaving crowd noise between songs and of course cheering at the ends of songs. Then I ran all the songs through the UVR5 program to properly balance the lead vocals compared to the instruments. It turns out that was poorly mixed for all the songs, often being really low in the mix. The end result is I think this sounds noticeably better than before. 

Another problem is the first song, "King," began partway through the song, missing the first two minutes or so, roughly up until the vocals began. So I used the version I included in "Volume 1" of this series to fill in the missing section. I added a little crowd noise at the start to get that to better fit in, since I actually used a BBC studio session version. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in its title.

The music here remains officially unreleased. However, there's another UB40 BBC concert, from June 1981, that can be found on the deluxe edition of the band's album "Present Arms." I've decided not to include that one in this series since it is officially released, and the song list is pretty similar to this one, seeing as it took place only about six months later.

This album is an hour long.

01 King [Edit] (UB40)
02 My Way of Thinking (UB40)
03 talk by Pete Drummond (UB40)
04 Strange Fruit (UB40)
05 talk (UB40)
06 The Earth Dies Screaming (UB40)
07 talk (UB40)
08 Little by Little (UB40)
09 Burden of Shame (UB40)
10 talk (UB40)
11 I Think It's Going to Rain Today (UB40)
12 talk (UB40)
13 Tyler (UB40)
14 Food for Thought (UB40)
15 talk (UB40)
16 Madam Medusa (UB40)
17 talk (UB40)
18 Wildcat [Instrumental] (UB40)
19 talk (UB40)
20 Signing Off (UB40)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/oXE1XvEC

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/nx0pKDl9uIxiQaP/file

The cover shows lead singer Ali Campbell in concert somewhere in London in September 1980.