Ralph McTell - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1970-1974

Here's an album of British singer-songwriter Ralph McTell performing for the BBC.

In late 2024, I posted a BBC concert he did in 1976. At the time, that was the only BBC material I could find. Now that I've found this, that other one has been renamed to "Volume 2." Here's the link to it if you want to redownload it with the changed cover art and mp3 tags and such:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2024/12/ralph-mctell-bbc-sessions-old-grey.html

The music for this volume comes entirely from the "Top of the Pops" BBC radio show. (As usual, I'm obliged to point out that was totally different than the BBC TV show of the same name.) Once again, this is all thanks to my anonymous source, who has given me material from this show that is so hard to find that in this case I don't think it even has been bootlegged until now. McTell's first album came out in 1968. The performances here began in 1970, with the first four songs. The next three are from 1971, then three from 1972, and the last three are from 1974. 

Ironically, this ends with "Streets of London," because that was his biggest hit by far, reaching Number Two when it was rerecorded and rereleased in 1974. I'm sure the BBC wanted to have him on more after that, and I'll bet they did. But that was the point where the "Top of the Pops" generally switched from broadcasting unique BBC performances to just playing the recorded versions. In fact, we're lucky to get some songs from 1974, because that transition mostly happened in 1973.

If you look at the song list, you'll see that eight out of the 13 songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. That's due to BBC DJ Brian Matthew's bad habit of talking over the starts and ends of songs. He started easing up on that around 1972, which is why most of those are from the first half of this album. As usual, I got rid of his voice using the UVR5 audio editing program.

The music here is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. Oh, and generally speaking, these are solo acoustic performances.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Daddy's Here [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
02 Eight Frames a Second [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
03 Spiral Staircase [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
04 Too Tight Rag [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
05 Lay Your Money Down [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
06 First and Last Man [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
07 In Some Way I Loved You [Edit] (Ralph McTell)
08 First Song (Ralph McTell)
09 Gypsy (Ralph McTell)
10 When I Was a Cowboy (Ralph McTell)
11 Let Me Down Easy (Ralph McTell)
12 Nanna's Song (Ralph McTell)
13 Streets of London [Edit] (Ralph McTell)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/poBXAEL9

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/UPKu7NqOjbVXKDL/file

The album cover is from some point in the early 1970s. But I don't know any details.