1981-09-29 Les Bains Douches, Paris, France/Source 1

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Notes

Absolutely excellent quality audio. This is reportedly sourced from France Inter's master reel. There is no DJ chatter whatsoever, which is stupendous because the FM broadcast has the DJ blabbering all over it.

The mixing can be a little weird throughout this recording. Dave's vocals are often rather low in the mix, and in fact Dave comments after Photographic to "turn the voice up". The only minor flaws are some slight dropouts during the very beginning of New Life and very slightly distorted bass during Television Set, which sounds like tape oversaturation.

Between some songs, you can hear an audience member shouting; this was previously covered up on the FM broadcast by the DJ chatter. For example, after Big Muff, he seems to complain that the song is an instrumental. At the start of Just Can't Get Enough, Dave says the song is "... for the heckler down there". It seems that perhaps Dave was quite irritated at this individual, because toward the end of the concert, he begins What's Your Name? by saying "tonight we're gonna end on "Pretty Boy" ... for a change", which makes it sound like the encore wasn't going to be performed. Nonetheless, DM performed the encore of Television Set.

Boys Say Go! was not present on the audio provided to DM Live. The song has been seamlessly patched in using the FM broadcast master reel recording originally shared by "letsgo" on DIME, and which can still be found as Source 2. Very fortunately, there is no DJ chatter around this track, so the recording remains pristine and free of DJ interruption. Quality of this track is still extremely good and free of dropouts; it's only a little hissy and has slightly diminished frequency response compared to the pre-FM source, but this is barely noticeable. Furthermore, a mono FM broadcast 1st gen cassette recording can be found at Source 3 as it is more musically complete than Source 2.

A million thanks go to J.T. for supplying this brilliant recording, and to "letsgo" for sharing his FM broadcast master reel recording that was used to add in the missing song.

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

  1. [3:14] Play Any Second Now
  2. [3:34] Play Photographic
  3. [3:03] Play Nodisco
  4. [4:14] Play New Life
  5. [3:27] Play Puppets
  6. [4:01] Play Ice Machine
  7. [4:16] Play Big Muff
  8. [2:19] Play I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead
  9. [3:15] Play Tora! Tora! Tora!
  10. [3:47] Play Just Can't Get Enough
  11. [2:36] Play Boys Say Go!
  12. [4:40] Play What's Your Name?
  13. [3:31] Play Television Set
  • Total time: 45:54

Lineage

  • France Inter master pre-FM reel -> unknown transfer -> WAV 48khz -> in Audacity 3.0.2: Boys Say Go! from master FM broadcast reel (Source 2) patched in with stereo channels swapped to match pre-FM, normalized to -0.1dB and any DC offset removed -> WAV -> FLAC level 8 (16/44), dithering enabled and using foobar2000's "Resampler (dbPoweramp/SSRC)" component
  • Generation: master

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