FF '00 20-1 (again!)

I was pleasantly surprised to find this whilst looking through my DATs for something else last night. I thought I only had the cassette copies I posted not so long ago, but here's the Fifty from 2000 nos. 20-1 from DAT; you may consider it rather anal to bother re-posting this so soon, just because it's a bit cleaner, especially as it's presented as an .mp3 anyway, but hopefully there may be some other purists out there who will appreciate the difference (or at least think they do, and that's all that counts, eh?).
Actually, I'm posting this to mask my utter frustration at being unable to post the Festive 50 from 2003 in it's entirety (also from DAT) because, after four hours of digitising, I found that I'd done so at the wrong sample rate, making John sound unpleasantly castrato (and what it does to Mark E. Smith's voice is just plain nasty). So Im going to have to do it all again, and I don't have the tapes with me today...blah, blah, woof, woof....
So here's part 1 and part 2.
Hopefully tomorrow I can try again with FF'03...

Xmas Special 2000

I got hold of a copy of 'Billy Bragg - The Complete Peel Sessions' the other day, and was slightly dissapointed to find that it wasn't quite complete. To be fair, I'm probably being a bit picky here, because one of my favourite sessions was actually part of an Xmas Special, so I guess it doesn't quite qualify as a session.
Anyway after much rummaging around in the increasingly dusty tape box, accompanied by some swearing (bad back, you understand), I managed to find my copy, so here it is.
And I think you'll agree it was worth the pain - along with Billy in the studio, we have David Gedge and Gary Numan (about whom John gets quite excited), and Peely is in fine form, playing a number of top tracks from past Festive 50's and well as the usual eclectic fayre.
On the down side, we are back in cassette days, and whilst the recording quality is pretty good for analogue tape moving at a poxy 1 7/8 ips, I was a bit tight on the pause button in places, so whilst there is a fair amount of John talking, some of it is rather rudely clipped, for which I apologise.
Of course if I'd known that he was only going to be with us for a couple more Festive 50's, I would have spent all my xmas money on tapes, and recorded his every broadcast breath, but then we all thought he'd go on for ever, didn't we ? Let's not get maudling now, I almost lost it listening to Billy singing a wonderful rendition of Brickbat a minute ago, and I am at work as we speak...
This recording does rather sound like two completely different programs, but I have both sides of the tape marked as being 'pre ff special '00', so I'll just have to take my word for it. Come to think of it, I'm sure there was at least one more track each from messrs Bragg and Numan, so maybe I have the rest on another tape somewhere - damn, more rummaging to do when i get home ....
Btw, whilst this recording is, IMHO, nigh indispensable, it's not, the 'something rather special' hinted at in my last post; that may be a long time coming, so no breath-holding, please.
Here's part 1
and here's part 2

Incidentally, I am barely able to contain my excitement atm, because I have just discovered that someone has finally built the piece of dream technology that have been waiting for, and once I get the Xmas bills paid off, i am almost certainly going to be buying one of these. Not only will this will be a great boon to organising my sprawling audio collection, but I'm hoping it will also simplify the process of digitising my Peel stuff to share here.

FF '02.

No chatter this time, just the goods - because I'm busy preparing something for you which is a bit different and, IMHO, rather special. Watch this space...

OK, today's offering is the Festive 50 from 2002: FM > DAT > Peak > .Ogg @ 256k. No Peel, just music because (and we've been through this before) they we're edited to make CD's for the journey to/from work. I think I still have the original of this somewhere, and if that's the case, I'll post it sometime.


Yer 'tis:

Disc1.pt.1
Disc1.pt.2
Disc2.pt.1
Disc2.pt.2
Disc3.pt.1
Disc3.pt.2

I've just noticed that Track 10, disc 2, The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song, which is not to be missed in my opinion, appears to be missing so here it is.

Have fun.