Saturday, April 26, 2025

Joan Armatrading - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1973-1977 | Albums That Should Exist

Joan Armatrading - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1973-1977

Paul he say . . . not the most enlightening text from Paul but explains what he has done with past volumes and their re-numbering so do what he says and re download them all COLLECT THE SET! "If you think I've posted a "BBC Sessions, Volume 1" by Joan Armatrading, you're right. I first gave that name to a 1981 BBC concert she did. Then I found a 1977 BBC concert by her, and renamed the ones that came after that. Now, I've discovered a bunch of BBC studio sessions she did earlier in her career, so all the BBC albums by her after this got renumbered again. Sigh! Sorry. I wish I got all this right on the first go round.

In this case though, I had good reason for not posting the material in this album earlier, because most of it simply was beyond my reach.

I've known for some time that Armatrading performed no less than eight studio sessions for BBC DJ John Peel from 1972 to 1976, playing three to four songs each. You can see the details here:

Joan Armatrading | John Peel Wiki | Fandom

That should have been enough material for one BBC studio sessions album, maybe two. Unfortunately though, the vast majority of those performances either weren't saved and have been lost, or they only exist in some private vault. The only session I could find was the last one, from 1976. I also found a couple of performances she did in the 1970s for the BBC TV show "The Old Grey Whistle Test," but I decided that wasn't enough to make an album.

But in recent weeks I've been in touch with a musical associate who has been sending me lots of great material for the BBC radio show "Top of the Pops." It turns out that some of the otherwise lost performances she did for John Peel's show were rebroadcast on Top of the Pops. Those have been saved in pristine condition. I think this is a great find because it includes two songs she wrote, "Some Kind of Love Song" and "Freedom," which as far as I can tell not only are still officially unreleased and unbootlegged, but there's virtually no mention of their existence on the Internet (other than the fact that they'd been performed on Peel's show).

Please don't forget to redownload all the Armatrading BBC volumes after this one, since they are newly renumbered, with resulting changes to the cover art and mp3 tags. "

This album is 45 minutes long.
01 Child Star
02 talk
03 Gave It a Try
04 Lonely Lady [Edit]
05 Alice
06 Freedom
07 Some Kind of Love Song
08 No Love for Free
09 Down to Zero
10 Help Yourself
11 Kissin' and a Huggin'
12 People
13 Love and Affection
14 Steppin' Out

Really worth having and check it out Joan was/is awe inspiringly good

People - Joan Armatrading (Peel Sessions 1976)

From the Clancy Brothers to . . . .er, . . . . . . NICO : THE END

Nico - The End... (1974)

Zero hat gesagt "The End..." is the fifth studio album by German musician Nico. It was recorded in summer 1974 at Sound Techniques studio in London and produced by John Cale. It was released in November 1974, on record label Island.

It is one of the most entrenched visions in the rock critic's vocabulary; Nico as doomed valkyrie, droning death-like through a harsh gothic monotone, a drained beauty pumping dirges from her harmonium while a voice as old as dirt hangs cobwebs round the chords. In fact she only made one album which remotely fit that bill -- this one -- and it's a symbol of its significance that even the cliché emerges as a thing of stunning beauty. Her first album following three years of rumor and speculation,

"The End" was consciously designed to highlight the Nico of already pertinent myth. Stark, dark, bare, and frightening, the harmonium dominant even amid the splendor of Eno's synthesized menace, John Cale's childlike piano, and Phil Manzanera's scratchy, effects-whipped guitar, it is the howling wind upon wuthering heights, deathless secrets in airless dungeons, ancient mysteries in the guise of modern icons.

Live, Nico took to dedicating the final cut, a sparse but heartstoppingly beautiful interpretation of the former German national anthem, to terrorist Andreas Baader, even as the song itself conjured demons of its own from an impressionable Anglo-American audience. Nico later admitted she intended the performance in the same spirit as Jimi Hendrix rendered "Star Spangled Banner." But "Das Lied der Deutschen" -- "Deutschland Uber Alles" -- has connotations which neither tribute nor parody could ever undermine. It is only in the '90s that even Germany has reclaimed the anthem for its own. In 1974, it was positively leperous. Listen without prejudice, though, and you catch Nico's meaning regardless, even as her voice tiptoes on the edge of childlike, all but duetting with the little girl she once was, on a song which she'd been singing since the cradle. The ghosts pack in. Former lover Jim Morrison haunts the stately "You Forgot to Answer," a song written about the last time Nico saw him, in a hired limousine on the day of his death; of course he reappears in the title track, an epic recounting of the Doors' own "The End," but blacker than even they envisioned it, an echoing maze of torchlit corridors and spectral children, and so intense that, by the time Nico reaches the "mother...father" passage, she is too weary even to scream. The cracked groan which emerges instead is all the more chilling for its understatement, and the musicians were as affected as the listener. The mutant funk coda with which the performance concludes is more than an incongruous bridge. It is the sound of the universe cracking under the pressure.

But to dwell on the fear is to overlook the beauty -- "The End", first and foremost, is an album of intimate simplicity and deceptive depths. Nico's voice stuns, soaring and swooping into unimagined corners. No less than "Das Lied der Deutschen," both "Valley of the Kings" and "It Has Not Taken Long" make a mockery of the lazy critical complaints that she simply grumbled along in a one-note wail, while the arrangements (most of which were Nico's own; producer Cale admits he spent most of his time in the studio simply marveling) utterly rewrote even the most generous interpretation of what "rock music" should sound like. "The End" doesn't simply subvert categorization. It defies time itself.

Tracklist:

It Has Not Taken Long 4:11
Secret Side 4:08
You Forget To Answer 5:07
Innocent And Vain 3:51
Valley Of The Kings 3:57
We've Got The Gold 5:44
The End 9:36
Das Lied der Deutschen 5:28

John Cale produced to The Doors cover . . .what more d’ya want!??