THE CLASH - 1985-05-11 Newcastle (Back to Basics) - upgrade

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Chuck Mangione
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THE CLASH - 1985-05-11 Newcastle (Back to Basics) - upgrade

Post by Chuck Mangione »

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-deta ... ?id=634361
THE CLASH

Saturday, 11 May 1985 afternoon

The Station
Swinburne Street
Gateshead NE8 1AX
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
UK


FLAC master, 3 November 2018, by elegymart:
Analog audience recording (stereo): unknown mics/recorder > unknown low analog generations > vinyl boot LP (probably "Back to Basics"; Garageland Records, Ltd. GLP 001; France, 1986) > analog audio cassette > 1985-86 US US Maxell XLII 90 (Type II CrO2) analog audio cassette {from the Stonecutter Archives} > Sony TC-WE435 (azimuth adjustment) > Roland R05 (24/96) > Cool Edit Pro 2.0 (audio cleanup, convert to 16/44) > SHNtool (fixed SBE) > CD Wave (track splits) > TLH (WAV > FLAC8).
Created this text file.


Total running time [45:18]
-----------------------------------------------------
01 introduction [0:53]
02 Movers and Shakers [2:54]
03 Cool Under Heat [3:03]
04 The Guns of Brixton [2:22]
05 Spanish Bombs [2:53]
06 Police on My Back [2:58]
07 Jimmy Jazz [3:45]
08 White Man in Hammersmith Palais [4:07]
09 Straight to Hell [4:52]
10 Clash City Rockers [3:16]
11 I Fought the Law [2:55]
12 Brand New Cadillac [2:08]
13 White Riot [2:50]
14 Bankrobber [3:04]
15 (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone [3:10]


Band line-up:
Joe Strummer – vocals
Paul Simonon – acoustic guitar, vocals
Nick Sheppard – acoustic rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Gregory "Vince" White – acoustic guitar, backing vocals
Pete Howard – percussion


Notes:

Courtesy of the Stonecutter Archives is this glimmer of light from the final sad days of the Clash. It comes from their brief busking tour with Strummer leading the band as they armed themselves with acoustic guitars and popped up throughout England playing for whatever money was given to them.

This show has been misidentified as having taken place in Sunderland probably because they played there the day before and later in the evening on this date. The venue has also been wrongly attributed to busking at a Gateshead tube station, but the Station refers to a former police station at the old Town Hall, where a music collective had set up shop. At some point the boys were trailing the Alarm and busking outside their shows, and not because they were paying respect to the group, but because they felt they were a watered down carbon of the Clash. And then of course, there were probably the Topper and Mick loyalists who pondered whether this final lineup of the band under the dictatorial sway of Bernie Rhodes had any right to even call themselves the Clash.

This set has been on dime several times before (2006, 2010, 2012, and 2016 to be exact), so it won't be new to most of you. However, most if not all of those were sourced from boot CD releases like "Acoustic Daze" (3D Reality 3D-CL-064; 1995) which incorrectly attributed this to Sunderland, "Friday Night Saturday Morning" (Redline RL8923; Italy, 2003), and "Unplugged At 'The Station' Pub" (Back To Zero BTZCD-012; Japan, March 2005).

This pre-dates those discs and comes off a 2nd gen tape of the vinyl boot which was the source of the subsequent CDs and it's a clean one at that. In contrast, the 2006 upload required some speed-correction work, the 2012 upload had a corrupt track, etc.

That doesn't mean this is a masterful recording by any means, but it's still a precious look at that odd moment in Clash history when they almost sounded like David Peel and the Lower East Side. Like the Jeff Buckley mini phantom tour, one wonders how anyone was in the know to be at the ready to record these, and also be enough of a Clash fan to sing along to the lyrics of "Straight to Hell." The conjecture here would be that the Clash had already been busking around in the days before and started out elsewhere in Newcastle earlier in the day before they arrived at the Station. So it's possible word of mouth got around, someone grabbed a recorder, and then searched high and low around Sunderland and Newcastle until they spotted the band busking.

There are flaws in the master like the taper messing around with the auto gain at the start of "Guns of Brixton" and "Spanish Bombs" and other things that are the nature of off-the-cuff audience recordings, which either make this more intimate or annoying, depending on your tolerance for such anomalies.

To quote the "Back to Basics" vinyl boot: "This is not a high-fidelity album. The historical importance of this album transends [sic] fidelity of sound."

Enjoy,
elegymart

https://mega.nz/#!p0g30arC!_8wbr7CHc6X7 ... JS0d1AAhj4

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