Elvis Costello - 1977-08-11 Bilzen

<<   1977-08-11 Bilzen

Elvis Costello & The Attractions
August 11, 1978
14th Bilzen Festival
Bilzen, Belgium

Lineage: 1980's tape trade unk gen > Nakamichi CR-5A (Azimuth Adjust) > MacBook Pro > Peak Pro XT > xACT 1.59 > Flac

01. Welcome To The Working Week (splice)
02. Blame It On Cain
03. I'm Not Angry
04. Waiting For The End Of The World
05. Night Rally
06. No Action
07. (I Don't Want to Go To) Chelsea
08. Miracle Man (tape drag)
09. The Beat (splice)
10. Less Than Zero
11. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
12. Lipstick Vogue
13. Watching The Detectives
14. Lip Service

Duration : 45:04

This one doesn't appear to have been here in the past and seems to not be too common of a show in the trading circles probably due to the quality, it's a rough recording of Elvis Costello's appearance at the 14th Bilzen Festival in Belgium.
The Festival ran from August 11th through August 14th and on the first night Elvis played on the same bill as The Damned and The Clash (headliner).
There appears to be no circulating tapes of The Damned or The Clash's set but I found a bunch of photos of both bands from that night but none of Costello.

I had to do some extensive work to coax out a listenable document.  Since this was an unknown generation tape I decided to do some re-mastering to see if I could make it listenable at all.  After transferring the raw tape I tried to do as much as possible without degrading the music, the vocals were buried and the bass was extremely high creating a muffled sound all topped off with a layer of hiss.  After not being to pleased with the results of working with the straight transfer and considering chunking the whole project, I decided I'd take a stab at each channel separately.  The left channel was not a total loss with most of Elvis's vocals and all instruments represented (fairly poorly but there), the right channel was pretty much bass and a layer of hiss.  I took the left channel only and made a mono file which took out the majority of hiss found mostly in the right channel, this allowed the left channel to be tweaked until I think I've got the best possible document of this night (at least from my tape).

A few other issues, a splice at the beginning of "Working Week", splice during "The Beat" and tape drag through most of "Miracle Man" and ending about 20 seconds into "The Beat".
Quality improves a bit after the first song.

I hope the Costello collectors out there without this show in their collections will at least appreciate the effort around this fairly rare outing. -- Mjk5510


Notes - 
- flac tags added since initial torrent