Floyd BBC Atom Heart Mother

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Tom Stroud
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Floyd BBC Atom Heart Mother

Postby Tom Stroud » Thu Jun 05, 2008 8:19 am

Not a massive thing but it continues to niggle me so I thought I'd ask....

Can anyone point me in the direction of a decent copy of the Pink Floyd 1970 performance at the BBC Paris Theatre? The one with Atom Heart Mother?

These radio shows turn up in all kind of iterations - the original broadcast for Radio 1 (mono, with John Peels links) and syndicated Transcription versions (sold overseas, often in stereo with Peel cut out).

I've got a pretty fine version of the 71 broadcast but every version of the 70 show I find has been messed around with (edited sometimes and all in a horrible fake stereo).

Anyone know a good boot with the 1970 show in clean mono? Does it exist anywhere in stereo?

To open this up a bit, does anyone know when the BBC concerts (distinct from sessions which bar a few exceptions took a few years longer) actually went stereo?

Floyd in September 71 (Echoes etc) is; the Bowie show from June 71 (Kooks etc) is mono on the official CD. Anyone got that in stereo? Zeppelin in April 71 is stereo everywhere and they may even still have multis for that.

This did come up before - I'm pretty sure there's BBC live stuff on the Faces 5 Guys set that is mono but should be stereo.

Anyone know any more?

the 801
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Postby the 801 » Thu Jun 05, 2008 7:29 pm

I have two recordings of the July 16, 1970 Paris Theatre performance:

1. Westwood One's 'Superstar Concert Series', an edited version of the BBC broadcast featuring fake stereo Peel intros & clean mono Floyd performances of:

The Embryo
Green Is The Colour
Careful With That Axe, Eugene
If
Atom Heart Mother (edited)

2. Harvested's 'BBC Archives' (HRV 007), a mish-mash of fake stereo & mono Peel intros/outros combined with fake stereo/mono Floyd performances of:

The Embryo (fake stereo)
Fat Old Sun (mono)
Green is the Colour (fake stereo)
Careful with that Axe, Eugene (fake stereo)
If (fake stereo)
Atom Heart Mother (fake stereo)

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JWB
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Postby JWB » Fri Jun 06, 2008 3:43 am

That is an excellent question! I just downloaded the Harvested sets yesterday, and they're indeed shit. I'd like to hear the untampered mono broadcasts as well. If you do find them, let me know please!

Pink Floyd collectors have very bad taste when it comes to audio. Every Syd Barrett rarities set I've ever downloaded is heavily noise reduced and fake stereo'd shit. Luckily, I have a friend who is an avid Syd collector and he hooked me up with all the raw stuff, some of it uncirculated. Now I don't have to worry about Harvested or any of the other ham-fisted Floyd "bootleggers".

Tom Stroud
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Postby Tom Stroud » Fri Jun 06, 2008 5:33 pm

It would seem that transcription discs are the way forward. Not sure if any include a full length Atom Heart Mother though? And, yes, Fat Old Sun appears to have snipped out of most (if not all) rebroadcasts.

FLACs here of a Westwood One transcription CD that pulls in material from 1970 (mono) and 1971 (stereo).
http://qualityboots.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... eries.html

Neither show is complete but it's straight from the BBC tapes so not a bad place to start. According to the list here http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepage ... tm#SCSPF93
it looks like Westwood One (or the BBC) just reshashed the same selection of songs every few years.

I'm guessing from this (although perhaps wrongly) that the 1970 set wasn't mixed for stereo.

For all their puff and bluster about the work that went into them those Harvested discs are pretty bloody awful and yet they turn up everywhere.....

the 801
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Postby the 801 » Fri Jun 06, 2008 6:14 pm

Looks like Westwood One's edit combined with Harvested's 'Fat Old Sun' will give you exactly what you're looking for...

Tom Stroud
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Postby Tom Stroud » Fri Jun 06, 2008 6:22 pm

Up to a point, yes. Not sure about the version of The Embryo (they played it at both shows). Don't have the stuff to hand at the moment.

Certainly Atom Heart has got at least 4 edits in it - redoing that is the kind of thing you only want to do once. Hence the appeal for a good original mono source and the vain hope that some bootlegger out there had already done a good job of it.

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JWB
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Postby JWB » Mon Jun 09, 2008 11:03 am

Is there a good place to find Floyd's 68-69 BBC stuff? There appears to be a few Westwood One discs with this mateiral.

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JWB
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Postby JWB » Mon Jun 09, 2008 3:46 pm

I made my own remaster of the 1970 session today, utilizing the BBC disc linked to above, and the Harvested set to fill in the blanks. I'm pretty happy with the results, but the Harvested parts are lousy sounding and raped by noise reduction, compared to the BBC disc. These Harvested guys have no idea what they're doing. It's a pity that thousands and thousands of people have downloaded their garbage.

Does anybody know where I can get the 1970 bits "missing" from the BBC radio disc, in true mono and not destroyed by noise reduction? If I can find them, I might give it another go.

Tom Stroud
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Postby Tom Stroud » Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:37 am

You beat me to it!

I had a play with Atom Heart.... but couldn't get anything I was happy with. I'm still holding out for a decent mono tape.

There must be one somewhere. Probably on some 80s CD that has long been ditched by most people in favour of the Harvested "remasters".

JWB - do you have a preferred version of the 71 show?

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JWB
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Postby JWB » Tue Jun 10, 2008 2:58 pm

I haven't tackled '71 yet.

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Jeff T.
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Postby Jeff T. » Fri Jun 27, 2008 10:00 pm

There is a new listing over at Woldgang's Vault for you Floyd fans!!!

http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/dt/p ... ign=080627

Might be something of interest even to the die hards being that we are talking about a full 2 hours and 10 min. AHM period seizure inducing set from the Fillmore in 1971.

I have not played this yet nor looked it up on the sites to see if it is a previously released TMOQ or Amazing Kornyfone knockoff. And of course TAKRL would not have had this out in a 3 LP box set.

But it looks good so far.

JohnS
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Postby JohnS » Wed Aug 06, 2008 10:28 am

BBC radio's Stereo broadcasting, certainly for rock/pop shows on Radio 1, didn't really start until the late 70s, and even then it was only for one-off shows like concerts, rather than round-the-clock. I can remember the 'Radio 1... in... stereo' jingles getting played a lot round about 1979/1980, like it was a big deal.
'Sight And Sound In Concert' was a popular show where gigs were screened on BBC TV with a simultaneous stereo broadcast on Radio 1, with opening instructions to tune in your FM radio for stereo sound while you watched(!) (Radio stations were still broadcasting on MW frequencies along with FM, only the latter being able to handle stereo signal)
Older studio sessions and concerts, if taped for retransmission/syndication, were often mixed into stereo, but not encountered as such by the listener until stereo FM broadcasting became the norm from the early 1980s.
But I'm pretty sure that BBC radio (studio) sessions from the late 60s and very early 70s will only ever available in mono - that was the format they would have been broadcast in at the time, and stereo would have been too much in the distant future for any producer to prepare stereo mixes or even archive session tapes in such a way as to facilitate stereo mixing at a later date. They'd have been locked down to a mono mix, and any multi-track sources wiped.

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Postby lukpac » Wed Aug 06, 2008 3:00 pm

Small tangent, but anyone know what the deal was with the Stones' Camden Theatre tracks? The left and right channels were broadcast on two frequencies, right? That's an amazing sounding recording - I wonder if the entire show still exists, or just the 4 songs that were broadcast.
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD

Tom Stroud
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Postby Tom Stroud » Wed Aug 06, 2008 3:53 pm

Re: the Stones thing - it was part of a stereo test broadcast. One channel on FM radio, the other via the TV (at a time when nothing else was being shown). Apparently there were instructions in Radio Times showing listeners how to position their speakers in advance. Bad news is that *is* the show. They only played four songs. Long John Baldry doing the introductions; another act (Georgie Fame?) making up the time. It was an expirement that was never returned to. Apparently it's the experimental nature of the show that meant that the tape survived. It does sound great - much better than the typical BBC sessions of that era.

Anyone interested in BBC sessions should try and get hold of Ken Garner's In Session Tonight book, published in 1992 celebrating 25 years of Radio 1. It's a complete overview of Radio 1 sessions and includes some back history with the Light Programme / Saturday Club. A lot of the material was reworked in his book about the John Peel sessions (published last year).

Yes, generally sessions were taped and aired in mono. When Transcription Services started selling stuff to the US in syndication the US FM stations wanted stereo so some producers found ways to use stereo studio facilities in Kensington instead of mono Maida Vale. There's a Bowie / Ronson set at the start of CD2 of the EMI BBC set that was taped in stereo; also some early Roxy Music sessions were taped in stereo.

Lots more concert material originated in stereo though - much earlier than sessions. BBC Paris studios (in London, not France) were stereo and gave us the 1971 stereo concert released on the Led Zepp BBC set. The Floyd Echoes debut concert was also stereo in 71. See post #1.

The story is that Jimmy Page helped mix the Zepp show from multitracks although I'm not sure if it's true and they weren't taped straight to stereo. He certainly oversaw the editing of the broadcast though.

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lukpac
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Postby lukpac » Wed Aug 06, 2008 4:25 pm

Tom Stroud wrote:Re: the Stones thing - it was part of a stereo test broadcast. One channel on FM radio, the other via the TV (at a time when nothing else was being shown). Apparently there were instructions in Radio Times showing listeners how to position their speakers in advance. Bad news is that *is* the show. They only played four songs. Long John Baldry doing the introductions; another act (Georgie Fame?) making up the time. It was an expirement that was never returned to. Apparently it's the experimental nature of the show that meant that the tape survived. It does sound great - much better than the typical BBC sessions of that era.


Huh. This just lists the 4 songs, but I could have sworn I've seen an hour of material listed before. Maybe in Karnbach. I'll have to look later.
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD