Kid Creole & the Coconuts - Le Zenith, Paris, France, 9-10-1985

Sometimes, there are musical acts I really love but I just don't have anything I consider worthy of posting from them. That's been the case for Kid Creole and the Coconuts. I think they're great, and very underrated. And now, I've finally found something worthy to post from them. This is a full concert from 1985, which was when they were in their prime.

Normally, I'm not that into dance music just as something to listen to, because it's designed for dancing. But Kid Creole and the Coconuts did something unusual, creating dance music for thinking people, with interesting lyrics and musical creativity while still making you want to get up and shake your ass. In a better world, they would have been massive.

Their failure to become as popular as they should have been must have been due to a lack of promotion or bad luck or some other factors not related to the music, because they were very popular for a little while. In 1982, their third album "Tropical Gangsters" reached Number Three in Britain, going Platinum there. It put three songs in the Top Ten there. And while that was one of their better albums, all of their early albums were about equally as good. If you look at the crowd-sourced ratings at rateyourmusic.com, for instance, their first five albums (from 1980 to 1985) got roughly similar scores. So why did just that one do well, and only in Britain? In the U.S., they never got close to having a Top Forty single or album, despite appearances on Saturday Night Live, the Johnny Carson Show, and other appearances in movies and TV. 

If you haven't heard of them before, I strongly suggest you give this a listen. It's ideal music for partying and dancing, and yet the lyrics are often surprisingly deep and about unusual topics. If anyone knows of other musical acts that managed that combination successfully, I'd love to hear about them.

Anyway, this is an officially released album called "Live in Paris." But I'm posting it here for two reasons. For one, it seems to be very obscure. For instance, it's not mentioned in the band's Wikipedia page, or at their rateyourmusic.com page. That makes me wonder if it might be some kind of grey market release. The second is that I noticed the lead vocals were low in the mix, so I used the UVR5 program to fix that. So this now sounds noticeably better than the soundboard source. 

This album is an hour and 21 minutes long. 

01 Don't Take My Coconuts (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
02 My Male Curiosity (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
03 Table Manners (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
04 Mr. Softie (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
05 Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
06 I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
07 No Fish Today (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
08 Dear Addy (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
09 Stool Pigeon (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
10 Say Hey (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
11 Laughing with Our Backs Against the Wall (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
12 Mona (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
13 The Lifeboat Party (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
14 Endicott (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
15 Indiscreet (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)
16 Caroline Was a Dropout (Kid Creole & the Coconuts)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/f3VHw5wT

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/2xbfeiDvJyEp4gq/file

The cover photo shows the August Darnell, Casino, Oostende, Belgium, 21st July 1985