I just posted concerts by Al Stewart and the Faces prior to this one. All three come from the same 1970 Medicine Ball Caravan rock festival. I've given a long explanation about just what the Medicine Ball Caravan was. In short, it was a concert tour across the U.S., culminating in this lone concert in Britain, to make the raw material for a movie. The movie came out in 1971, but it was a flop for various reasons.
At the time of this concert, Mott the Hoople were not well known. They had released their first album, the cleverly titled "Mott the Hoople," in 1969. They were on the cusp of releasing their second one, "Mad Shadows," which would come out a couple of weeks later. But these albums only sold moderately, and would provide no hits. The band wouldn't become well known until 1972, with their big hit "All the Young Dudes," followed by more hits.
As far as I know, this is the only concert recording of this band with sound quality this excellent. There is a BBC concert from later in 1970, but even that one doesn't sound as good as this one. So this is a very big find for fans of the band.
I'm getting the impression that the recordings from this festival all share the flaw of having the audience recorded way too quietly. So just like I did with the Al Stewart and Faces sets, I used the MVSEP program to greatly boost the volume of the cheering at the ends of songs. It should have the appropriate level of audience reaction for a concert now.
So far, a Stoneground set from this festival has also been made public in recent days. I'm going to wait on posting that though, to see what else comes out of this festival before posting that, because we only have part of the set. There may be other partial sets I could pair it with, for instance. Besides, I doubt there would be a demand for the relatively unknown Stoneground like there is for some other bands.
On a somewhat different note, this is the first Mott the Hoople album I've posted, so here's the band's Wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mott_the_Hoople
This album is 42 minutes long.
01 talk (Mott the Hoople)
02 Darkness, Darkness (Mott the Hoople)
03 talk (Mott the Hoople)
04 Laugh at Me (Mott the Hoople)
05 talk (Mott the Hoople)
06 Rock and Roll Queen (Mott the Hoople)
07 talk (Mott the Hoople)
08 Thunderbuck Ram (Mott the Hoople)
09 talk (Mott the Hoople)
10 Half Moon Bay (Mott the Hoople)
11 talk (Mott the Hoople)
12 Keep A-Knockin' (Mott the Hoople)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/gRn6WHJW
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/nRUKP72tpNcC4BC/file
The cover image shows the band's lead singer Ian Hunter at Birmingham Town Hall in Birmingham, Britain, on December 26, 1970.
