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PINK FLOYD
Harsh Realities [no label, 2CD]
Live at the Centre Sportif de l’Ile des Vannes, Saint-Ouen, France; December 1, 1972. Good to fairly good mono AM radio broadcast; stereo tweaked.
This one’s really for the fans.
Thanks to Heywood/eckoes 2011 for originally sharing this at Yeeshkul!; and to floydart for keeping it alive at The Traders’ Den.
Uploader’s Notes:
In 1972, RTL was one of the most popular radio stations in Europe. Despite having their studio in France (they were the intended audience), they had an insanely powerful transmitter in Luxembourg to overcome the French legislation that banned private broadcasting at the time. Because of this, they could be heard all over Western Europe, even in Scotland during beautiful days. At the time, Pink Floyd were very popular in France. They knew it and toured extensively there. It’s nonetheless quite surprising that the band agreed to broadcast live one of their shows from there because they only dealt with the BBC for this before and after this show. Well, if you consider that RTL was sponsoring nine of their concerts in French-speaking Europe at the time, it’s not that surprising; maybe it was part of the deal. The show we’re talking here is the second from those nine dates. It’s their last live broadcast on any media ’til the 1989 Venice TV show (one of their shows was recorded in November 1974, but was edited prior to broadcasting many months later).
Concert:
That night was special in many ways:
- “Blues” jam, generally played as an encore in a few shows, is part of the concert.
- “Childhood’s End” make its live debut in that show. It was played sometimes that month and at a few show in March 1973 before disappearing completly from their setlist. In fact, it’s the very first time a song from the album “Obscured By Clouds” (released six months before) was played live.
- They played an entire proto “Dark Side Of The Moon” live on the airwaves, almost four months before its release. One can hear that “The Mortality Sequence” is on its way to become “The Great Gig In The Sky”, “The Travel Sequence” jam is still there and that some arrangements are not quite finished.
Recording:
Broadcast: RTL was an AM radio station. In Mono. The concert was professionally mixed, but the sound was compressed and low-pass filtered. Other AM recording from RTL from the early ’70s, even on their website, have an HF rolloff starting at 4.5 kHz and finishing at 6kHz. This ain’t no ideal broadcast condition for a concert, especially for the Floyd. Problem is that this concert has never been broadcast again, so that’s all we had. This means that the concert sounds pretty rough to the ears, it is quite difficult to make out the instruments. But there was also a strange strong buzzing noise near 6kHz that was broadcast along the concert (we never found what this “buzz” was).
Recording: Many recordings exists for this concert, every single one of them is incomplete. The most complete (and luckily the best sounding) source available is a 1st gen copy of an analogue tape recording, transferred to DAT and then recorded on a computer at 16-bit and 48kHz. Yeah, that’s right, there’s no direct recording of the broadcast available and no complete tapes exists too. Sad but true. This specific source is phase shifted, suffers from a lot of dropouts and tape cuts (due to this source being a copy of a recording), and is plagued with hiss and background hum. And that’s not all: the tape ran a little too fast.
Restoration:
Basics: the RTL tape was speed-corrected. Then, the show was converted back to mono by making both channels = right channel. This step also removed the phase-shifting problem altogether.
Edits: we went went through the tapes and fixed as many of the drop outs that we could find by attenuating or trimmimg them by hand. Sometimes, entire sections were duplicated (due to a tape-flip during the copy), so we ended up with a much shorter recording. We also replaced the first note of Us And Them that was cut off by the tape flip with a little piece from later in the song in order to have a solid start. What we end up with is something that sounds a lot more like the typical recordings of the period than it did before.
Until a complete tape of the show surfaces, this is by far the closest you can have to the original broadcast. We hope that RTL recorded the show in high-quality and that this tape will leak one day. Until then, this is the best we could do from what we got. It’s not perfect, it’s still a bit rough, but it’s much better than before in our opinions.
Many thanks to creamchesse, littlepieces, movement, goldenband for their technical suggestions and advices. Thanks to neonknight for providing the recording of the RTL tape. Thanks to meddler for the Speed Corrected Series of the Poitiers show and thanks to BrunO who provided you the tape. Special thanks to goa, RonToon, Orgone Accumulator and all the people from Yeeshkul! for their encouragement.
Click here for the complete notes.
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Thanks also to R Goodman for the artwork.
Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (224 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.
Please Do Not Hammer The Links. Due to the size of some of the files, please be very patient when downloading the tracks. It could be that the server was very busy. The tracks should still be around. Please try again later. Kindly email us at mybigo@bigozine.com if you encounter persistent problems downloading the files.
Disc 1
Track 101. Heart Beat Intro 2:14 (3.7MB)
Track 102. Breathe 2:41 (4.5MB)
Track 103. The Travel Sequence 6:23 (10.7MB)
Track 104. Time 5:37 (9.4MB)
Track 105. Breathe (reprise) 1:03 (1.8MB)
Track 106. The Great Gig In The Sky 4:23 (7.4MB)
Track 107. Money 6:17 (10.6MB)
Track 108. Us & Them 7:09 (12.0MB)
Track 109. Dave’s Scat Section 6:43 (11.3MB)
Track 110. Brain Damage 3:50 (6.4MB)
Track 111. Eclipse 1:43 (2.9MB)
48 mins
Disc 2
Track 201. One Of These Days 8:17 (13.9MB)
Track 202. Careful With That Axe, Eugene 11:13 (18.8MB)
Track 203. Blues 4:54 (8.2MB)
Track 204. Echoes 22:47 (38.3MB)
Track 205. Childhood’s End 8:41 (14.6MB)
56 mins
Click here to order Pink Floyd’s Discovery boxset.
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