Labi Siffre - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1970-1972

When it comes to posting music at this blog, I have a lot of irons in the fire these days, different projects I'm working on. Probably the biggest and oldest one so far is posting BBC recordings. But more specifically, I particularly want to post the BBC recordings that seem to be currently unavailable to the public. I can do that sometimes thanks to an anonymous musical friend who has lots of extremely rare recordings of the "Top of the Pops" BBC radio show. That's the main source for this album, featuring British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre.

For many years, the only thing I knew about Siffre was his version of the song "It Must Be Love." This song he wrote was a hit for him in 1971, almost reaching the Top Ten in Britain. But I was much more familiar with the cover version by Madness, which made it all the way to Number Four in Britain in 1981, and made the Top Forty in the U.S. as well. But there's a lot more to him than just that one song. For instance, he had an even bigger hit much later, "(Something Inside) So Strong," which made it to Number Four in Britain in 1987, and he had two other hits in that country. Also, one 1975 song he did, "I Got The...", was sampled by Eminem's hit single "My Name Is," becoming an essential part of that song. But more than that, he put out many solid albums in the 1970s. He also had a secret weapon of being a much better guitar player than most other singer-songwriters from that time.

If you want to know more about him, here's his Wikipedia entry:

Labi Siffre - Wikipedia 

Here also is a review of his 1972 album, written decades later, that actually serves as a much better summary of his entire career than the Wikipedia entry:

Labi Siffre: Crying Laughing Loving Lying Album Review | Pitchfork

The music on this album comes entirely from "Top of the Pops" studio sessions. I believe that everything here has been very rare to the public until now, and it's all thanks to that anonymous friend I mentioned above. (I did recently notice there's one "grey market" release of these performances, but I couldn't find it so that wasn't my source.) Siffre put out his first album in 1970, and started appearing on the Top of the Pops radio show before the end of that year. 

As you can see from the song list below, 12 out of the 15 songs here were edited, with "[Edit]" in their titles. That's due to BBC DJ Brian Matthew, who annoyingly talked over the beginnings and ends to many songs, as he usually did back then. I got rid of that talking while keeping the music, thanks to the UVR5 audio editing program.

One nice thing about BBC studio sessions back in that era was that sometimes the musical acts would perform songs they didn't put on their albums. That's the case here. The songs "If Only You Were Mine," "You've Got a Friend," and "In the Morning" appear to be exclusive to these BBC sessions.

This album is a 42 minutes long. 

01 Make My Day (Labi Siffre)
02 Too Late [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
03 Rocking Chair [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
04 Thank Your Lucky Star [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
05 I Love You [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
06 A Feeling I Got [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
07 When You Find You Need a Friend [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
08 A Little More Line [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
09 If Only You Were Mine [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
10 Oh Me, Oh My, Mr. City Goodbye [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
11 It Must Be Love [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
12 You've Got a Friend (Labi Siffre)
13 'Cos You're You (Labi Siffre)
14 Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying [Edit] (Labi Siffre)
15 In the Morning [Edit] (Labi Siffre)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/pUXPxm2Y

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/8ohepi4RC6RcvcO/file

The cover photo is from an appearance on the "Top of the Pops" BBC TV show (not to be confused with the radio show of the same name) some time in 1972.