Welcome - About Live and Loud!

Live and Loud! began as a fortnightly internet radio show in 2012 taking old unreleased live concert recordings I could find and working to repair and improve them - fixing tape hiss, noise, tape drop out, clicks, speed variations, defects - before improving the sound quality by EQing the sound to bring out the instruments as clearly as possible. These are now made directly available to download for free to reach as many fans of the music as possible.

Depending on the quality of the original recording, these can often be made to sound almost like commercial recordings - but of course I can't guarantee that for every show. What I can guarantee is it will sound far better than the original files available which have been floating around the internet and on bootleg recordings for many years.

Almost all are either "soundboard" recordings (taken directly from the mixing desk used at the gig on the night) or old FM radio recordings. A few gigs, if they are of special historical importance, make an appearance even if they were recorded from the audience - these can also be made to sound better than ever.

Do your ears a favour and listen on headphones or good speakers to get most benefit - laptop speakers will always sound pretty poor by comparison.

All shows still available are listed, including a link to download the remastered show for free. If you want to support the site with a small donation, you can receive the shows as either separate MP3s or FLACs (your choice) - head over to the Rewards for Donations page and see how you can get a lot for very little!

If you want to email me, an email link is in my profile in a link in the side panel.

And finally... These are great fun to listen to but DO NOT replace original releases - support these artists and buy their music.
There is nothing you can go and buy in a regular record store here. If a gig is made available as a regular release, then it will be removed (as a couple have been already).

Sunday 18 December 2016

Show 87: David Bowie - Live In Cleveland - 25 November 1972


This is a remaster of a recording by someone from the audience on the night (update: that person has got in touch with some more details - see the comments section below). As such it might not be as clear as most of the gigs on the archive (especially the first track, where the sound engineer on the night took a few minutes to get things sounding ok).

2016 has been a bad year for many. It was also the year David Bowie passed away which affected me and many others more than I guess we would have thought, so I wanted to do something from him to close the year as a mark of respect. This gig catches him coming towards the end of his first proper US tour. The recording - recorded in the crowd, on tape,  over 40 years ago is a remarkable record of a great gig, with Bowie chatting in between songs. I spent more than a few hours on EQ'ing this but fortunately otherwise there wasn't too much to do.  There are a couple of instances where the song fades out and back in - these were on the original recording and have been left as is.

The original recording is in mono, so I took the opportunity to do a simulated stereo remaster as well, as a separate exercise. So now you have a choice, you can have it in remastered mono, or you can have the "stereo" version. Or of course you can download both.

The show is now available to download exclusively for free at these links:

Remastered Mono Version
Remastered Pseudo-Stereo Version

Both are 1 320 kbps MP3 file.

Or, if you would like to have separate tagged MP3s, or even lossless files in FLAC format, head on over to the Donations tab to see how you can obtain these for a very small donation towards the site costs.


Setlist
Hang On To Yourself
Ziggy Stardust
Changes
The Supermen
Life On Mars
Five Years
Space Oddity
Andy Warhol
Drive In Saturday
The Width Of A Circle
John, I'm Only Dancing
Moonage Daydream
Waiting For The Man
The Jean Genie
Suffragette City
Rock'n'Roll Suicide

Wednesday 7 December 2016

Show 86: The Human League - Live at Festival of Fools Amsterdam - 10 June 1980


This time it’s a welcome return to Live and Loud! for The Human League. There aren't many live recordings of the first incarnation of the band and I’ve been trying to track down this particular recording for some considerable time. And then within a month, I had 3 copies!

Unfortunately all 3 are quite flawed 1 way or another. Despite this being such a short recording (originally from Dutch radio), this may well have taken me the longest time to repair and restore! However, I think its been well worth it. It is, quite simply, now clearer and better than any other live bootleg of The Human League I've come across to date.

This performance, at a mixed arts festival in Amsterdam, was (I think!) the last to feature the original lineup. On that basis alone it needed a decent copy of it preserving; I hope this is it.**

The show is now available to download exclusively for free here as 1 MP3 file.

Or, if you would like to have separate tagged MP3s, or even lossless files in FLAC format, head on over to the Donations tab to see how you can obtain these for a very small donation towards the site costs.

Setlist
Dreams Of Leaving
Almost Medieval
Perfect Day
A Crow And A Baby
Marianne
Empire State Human
Rock 'n' Roll


** As it happens, it wasn't the last show as I believed back in 2016 when I did this - I've since come across 2 other bootlegs from June and July which are very poor quality recordngs of shows in London and Germany