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).

Thursday, 23 December 2021

Show 173: Jean Michel Jarre - Docklands London - 8 October 1988

 

A quick request. If you plan on downloading this and putting it on your YouTube channel or your own bootleg page - I don't mind. But a credit to this website where you found it, and a link back to this page would be really appreciated. It helps me gauge which artists are popular - ie more chance of other restorations coming. Don't steal and take the credit. Thanks.

There are several recordings of Jean Michel Jarre at Docklands - including an official release including excerpts of the concert, with edited tracks. There are also 2 different FM radio recordings I know of - both have very strange sound mixes with delay and so on - I can only assume this was an anti piracy measure at the time. Both would be fairly pointless trying to improve. But a listener to Live and Loud! also sent me an audience recording on CD, which he kindly sent to me for appraisal.

It sounded as you might expect a cassette recording at a large outdoor event might sound! Rather thin, overly bright at times, muffled at other times; the music levels were up and down, crowd noise and fireworks sometimes overtaking the music, wind noise. Lots of wind noise. Consequently I spent the longest time I've ever taken on a restoration, splitting the work over several months. Removing booming wind noise alone was a painstaking (and rather boring) manual process that took many hours - but was worth doing as it was very intrusive. It's not gone completely in places but you will not hear 95% of it and now get far more of the music. 

Another thing I noticed in the original recording, which I'd forgotten when I attended the gig myself - there were long pauses sometimes between tracks. So I spared you 6.5 minutes altogether of audience noise and chatter taken from between tracks. Again, not gone completely - it just helps the concert flow better I think. Hopefully you won't always spot the edits!

For an outdoor audience recording I think this one has come up really well; I hope you enjoy it. But bear in mind with such variable sound quality, some tracks inevitably sound clearer now than others - sometimes the fireworks still get in the way and there are a couple of distorted drum hits during Ethnicolor which couldn't be fully fixed -  but it is still a good improvement over the original recording I started with and well worth your time.

So sit back, turn it up...and if you want to recreate the wet and windy 2nd night instead, turn a desk fan on while spraying water onto your face. Job done. ;-)

You can now download this restored show exclusively for free, right HERE as one 320kbps MP3 file.

If you would like to have separate, fully tagged 320kbps MP3s or lossless FLACs of the restoration, head on over to the Donations tab to see how you can obtain these for a very small donation towards the site costs. Absolutely no obligation to do so of course - you can take the file on this page absolutely for free - but every single donation does go towards this site and domain/storage costs.

Either way, enjoy the show! And if you like this recording, PLEASE spread the news and share the page link to anyone you think might be interested. Many thanks.

And finally... don't forget to SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEW FREE NEWSLETTER so you never miss news on which new gigs are going to be restored and uploaded here; any news will be delivered to your inbox and I guarantee you no spam - and of course you unsubscribe at any time.

Setlist
Part 1:Industrial Revolution
Industrial Revolution: Overture
Industrial Revolution (part 1-3)
Equinoxe 5
Ethnicolor

Part 2: Swinging 60’s
Computer Weekend
Magnetic Fields II
Oxygene 4
Equinoxe 7
London Kid

Part 3: The 90’s
Third Rendez-Vous
Tokyo Kid
Revolutions
Souvenir of China
Second Rendez-Vous
Fourth Rendez-Vous

Part 4: The Finale
September
The Emigrant

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