Introduction - What's Live and Loud! All About?

I've always enjoyed live bootlegs - unofficial recordings of bands in concert, right from when I started buying them on tapes in Camden Market in the 1980s. Fasting forwarding nearly 30 years and the idea behind Live and Loud! was to take the very best live concert recordings I could find, marry that with the recording software I use for my own music, in order to remaster these recordings, make them sound as good as possible and broadcast them. Then make them available for free. You do sometimes find people charging for these still, but there are many available now (unmastered, usually) for free on the internet if you know where to look - so why pay for them.

I should stress these are not available commercially - either from me or from the original artist - no money is made out of this at all. And if a gig IS released officially, then I don't do it. I've come across a couple of live recordings I wanted to remaster and broadcast, then found they were being released officially.

Almost every show I do is what are called either "soundboard" recordings - taken directly from the mixing desk used at the gig on the night, or FM radio recordings - somewhere the gig was broadcast on local or national radio. A few gigs, if they are of special historical importance, make an appearance even if they were recorded from the audience. Depending how bad it is, I can fix tape hiss, noise, tape drop out, clicks, speed variations - and that's before EQing the sound to bring out the instruments as well as possible.  Depending on the quality of the original recording, these can often be made to sound almost like commercial recordings. The few audience recordings still sound much better than when I originally got them - even if they're not exactly "hi-fi" (ok ok , showing my age right there, I know).

Up until it took a break earlier this year, I'd done 50 Live and Loud! shows. 50 remastered gig recordings. Each show can take several hours to put together - but if you love music, like I do (even if I don't LIKE all music), then its worth it. Live and Loud! will be back in October 2014 and new shows listed here, so it seemed a good idea to list all the shows up to now, including links where its still possible to find the remastered show online. Might take a while to get them all up here - but I hope you enjoy.

Incidentally, if you notice some shows are missing, you're right. Show 4 is missing as that was a Duran Duran show which had the wrong date on it and also got re-remastered as I wasn't happy with the first job I did on it - it reappeared as Show 12. Also Show 14 was an Erasure show which someone who said he worked for Vince Clarke's management, didn't want to be made available - although he made sure he recorded the broadcast for himself, as I remember! Anyway, although his emails were a bit dubious to say the least, we erred on the side of caution and the Erasure show is no longer available.