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

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Notes

An excellent soundboard recording, reportedly sourced from the master reel-to-reel tape used by France-Inter. Unlike previous versions, this one is free from the DJ chatter that plagued earlier FM broadcast variants, particularly from DJ Bernard Lenoir.

Throughout the recording, the mixing can sound somewhat weird. Dave's vocals are often low in the mix, which he even addresses before performing Nodisco by asking to "turn the voice up then, can't hear me." Minor imperfections include slight dropouts at the beginning of New Life and slightly distorted bass during Television Set, likely due to tape oversaturation.

Between some songs, an audience member's shouts can be heard, previously masked by DJ chatter in the FM broadcasts. For instance, after Big Muff, the individual seems to complain about the song being an instrumental. At the start of Just Can't Get Enough, Dave dedicates the song "...for the heckler down there."

Dave's irritation with this person is apparent when he introduces What's Your Name?, when he says that "tonight we're gonna end on "Pretty Boy" ... for a change," implying the encore might be skipped. However, they did proceed with the encore performance of Television Set.

Boys Say Go! was strangely absent from the audio initially provided to the DMLiveWiki. This track has been seamlessly patched using the FM broadcast master reel recording originally shared by "letsgo" on DIME. This source is available as Source 2.

Fortunately, there is no DJ chatter on this track, preserving the pristine quality of the recording. Despite having nore hiss and a slightly reduced frequency response compared to the main pre-FM source, these differences are barely noticeable.

Although superceded, a mono recording of the FM broadcast, sourced from a first-generation cassette recording, remains available at Source 3, which is more musically-complete compared to Source 2.

A million thanks go to J.T. for supplying this superb recording, and to letsgo for sharing his master reel of the FM broadcast recording, which was used to integrate the missing audio.

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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