40th Anniversary Limited Edition

Public Image Ltd - Banging the Door

I wasn't gonna do this one, but when I got into it I saw that I could improve a commonly circulating bootleg and put in a shape actually worth hearing, so here we are.

Normally I wouldn't bother with someone as insanely nutty as John Lydon, who speaks the language of division as fluently as anyone of our lifetimes, but why not? I actually like this band since high school.

I really can't blame dude when interviewers dwell endlessly on 1977 and don't seem to have absorbed the idea that homeboy's been in another band pretty much since then, and that this group makes the Sex Pistols look like The Bay City Rollers once you're past the surface swearing.

Full disclosure: This is probably the single post out of all 940 of them where I'd likely come to blows with the person being covered within five seconds of meeting them, but thankfully this will never happen and he's just a voice on a tape I've gotta balance with the other instruments better than the original twit engineers did.

It amazes me that a Public Image Limited concert was ever even played on the radio like this, but I guess 40 years ago things had not gotten so unadventurous on the airwaves now owned by a whopping 3 corporations.

So yeah, here's Johnny. Former iconic Punk manifesto on legs, devolved into a cranky old establishment figure like all the rest.

Well, at least the ones that still are alive lol. I miss Joe Strummer.

My friend was telling me he once did security for PiL, and Johnny spat and snotted all over the audience for the entire, horrifying hour.

Funny, in this set -- 40 years old today! -- he's acting all irritated and threatening to quit the stage if the punters keep spitting.

So anyway enough about that guy already, what did I do to the sound??? I hear you ask. What could justify this furious invective against the artist, that this concert would be worth upping?

Well, as someone once sang it's all about the bass. And how this tape's never had any audible trace of any since it's circulated, which is forever.

I dunno wtf happened with the Scotland Radio crew the night of this, maybe they had to many bagpipes for breakfast. But Radio Clyde sent this out in 1986 with barely any bottom, and I think of PiL as a Dub group... I mean the original bassist was Jah Wobble for crying out loud. No bass means no show, you know?

Once I cracked it apart with the AI stemtool and saw that yeah, the low end was there and just needed to be unearthed, I got it thumping with some of the gravitas and authority it's never had up to now. Here, see if I overdrove it into Total Bootsy Territory, OK? At least it's lost the wispy, trebly flavorlessness and it has some fucking balls now.

Public Image Ltd

Barrowland

Glasgow, UK

5.14.1986

01 Radio Clyde intro/Kashmir

02 FFF

03 Annalisa

04 Fishing

05 Poptones

06 Pretty Vacant

07 Banging the Door

08 Radio Clyde ID/Flowers of Romance

09 Bags

10 Tie Me to the Length of That

11 Round

12 Home/Radio Clyde outro

Total time: 52:34

John Lydon - vocals

John McGeoch - guitar & vocals

Lu Edmonds - guitar, keyboards & vocals

Allan Dias - bass

Bruce Smith - drums

24/96 transfer of an off-air capture of the original Radio Clyde FM broadcast

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, de/remuxed for better bass balance, repaired and remastered by EN, May 2026
375 MB FLAC/direct link

I will get back to the jazzier, less expectorant stuff in a few days, and we'll culminate the month with a serious bitches' brew cauldron of crazy, as I attempt to completely crash the internet in honor of the 100th b'day of The Chief. But I thought this 40th anniversary Limited edition was worth some sonic surgery, mad as I was that someone would broadcast this music in such a toothless way. Well, I suppose Anger Is An Energy after all, eh? May the road rise with you.--J.

Leitch Your Children: Donovan 80

Donovan - Hurdy Gurdy Man

In a post guaranteed to make even the most eternally youthful feel as old as canned goods from a WWII bomb shelter, we've got the 80th birthday of a real windcatcher here to end one week and start another.

This guy has had quite a life too.

This tape I worked on, from the mid Eighties, has a dozen moments in it where you can tell.

His between song patter alone is worth the price of admission, like when he's introducing one of his signature songs, Hurdy Gurdy Man.

Example: "When I wrote this song, there were four Beatles, a Beach Boy.... and Mia Farrow."

He then goes on to describe sitting in the Maharishi's lair with George Harrison and a guitar, and how George volunteered a verse that he didn't end up putting in the final lyrics. "Would you like to hear George's verse?" he asks the audience, mystically.

The whole hour and a half is kind of a crash course in what it sounds like when an old hand places an audience into the palm of his, and keeps them right there.

So yeah! Do you feel old yet? Donovan -- last name, Leitch, father of Ione Skye, 1960s trippy folk boffin seen chasing Bob Dylan around England in Don't Look Back -- is 80 today.

As I write this I wonder what a hippie trippy Sixties icon like Don must feel about everything that's been going on in the world these days.

I'd imagine it's somewhat like how he must feel about that YouTube video I watched the other day, that ranked Hurdy Gurdy Man -- possibly the most benign, peacefeelingly psychedelic '60s anthem of all time -- as having the distinction of being the scariest use ever of a pop song -- the kids call these "needledrops" now -- in a major motion picture.

Anyway he was born this day in Glasgow in 1946 as a charter Baby Boomer, so in honor of that milestone I rebrewed this 90 minutes from the old Catalyst in Santa Cruz, using the infamous AI splitter tool to separate the vocal from the guitar a little better, because there was originally a lot of boomy bleed betwixt the two. Which I manually fixed over a whole day's work, because AI doesn't do that part... and I wouldn't trust it to regardless!

Donovan

The Catalyst

Santa Cruz, California, USA

11.13.1985

01 Josie

02 Isle of Islay

03 Catch the Wind

04 The Lullaby of Spring

05 Sunshine Superman

06 Brother Sun, Sister Moon

07 Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)

08 Happiness Runs

09 Lalena

10 Hurdy Gurdy Man

11 Donovan talks about Czechoslovakia

12 Living On Love

13 Mellow Yellow

14 Little Tin Soldier

15 There Is a Mountain

16 Jennifer Juniper

17 Atlantis

18 Season of the Witch

Total time: 1:29:05

disc break goes after Track 08

Tracks 01-13 & 17-18: late set

Tracks 14-16: early set

Donovan Leitch - guitar, harmonica & vocals

4-channel cassette masters, matrixing 2 channels from the soundboard and 2 stage mics

de/remuxed for slightly better balance, edited & remastered by EN, May 2026
506 MB FLAC/direct link

I'd like to think this was one of those shows I really improved sonically, and I feel I got it good and crispy minus the muddy lows, as they can often get with these guy-and-a-guitar singer/songwriter types. All throughout eternity, the crying of humanity etc etc.

I kid, I kid. Donovan is a survivor and like I was saying, he's led a lifetime most people would dismiss as exaggerated lore out of some sort of fictive fantasy, but which for him was just 1946 until this moment and beyond!--J.

there goes the roly poly man
he's singing songs of love

Some Like It Yacht: Christopher Cross 75

Christopher Cross - I Really Don't Know Anymore

We'll begin giving May its flowers with this guy, because why not? I've had a huge crush on him since I was a teenager, dare I confess.

Beyond my pathetic adolescent desires, he's written some pretty timeless tunes and is, if you don't know, an extremely underrated guitar player.

One time, Deep Purple came to San Antonio when he was a teenager, and Ritchie Blackmore got food poisoning, which prevented him from performing that night.

In a mythical rawk moment akin to that Quadropheniac time Keith Moon passed out from horse tranquilizers and Pete Townshend pulled a kid out of the Cow Palace crowd to drum with The Who, in stepped our hero, who knew the Purple set note for note and blew half of Texas away.

That was in 1970, way before he became, for a time at the turn of the 1980s, the biggest thing going.

Then there's the even-more-mythical Stratocaster guitar that he traded in for a Les Paul in the mid-1970s, which resurfaced as Stevie Ray Vaughn's preferred "Number One" instrument when he ended up buying it from the same Austin music shop a while later.

Those are just his claims to pre-fame, because at the end of the Seventies, he -- real name: Christopher Geppert -- got signed to a major label. Well, his band, for which he was the main, driving force, got signed.

In typical music biz fashion, the label marketed his first record -- which became as big as anything current at the time -- as if the name of the band was his real name.

In the grand tradition of advertising/promotion becoming real life, it stuck... and Christopher Cross was born.

You know what happened next. For about 3 years he was at the top of the charts with a handful of songs that have become standards, with Steely Dan famously asking him to play on Gaucho (he declined, totally intimidated). He was also -- in 1980, when his first LP had more top ten hits on it than Star Wars had imitation spinoffs -- the only artist up to that time ever to have swept the Grammys, and held that (OK, somewhat dubious) title until Billie Eilish did it more recently.

Then, speaking of dubious music doings, MTV -- which was hungry like the wolf for profits from the then-new music video revolution -- blew up, and the industry moved on to people with more perfect faces, who were wearing a whole lot more makeup and waistlining a little less paunch.

Of course being let out to pasture by the vile, venal music biz didn't deter him from forging a career that started in what then was called AOR -- now it's got another name some of its most frontline artists despise -- and progressed into different areas all his own making. Right now he's out with Toto on a big summer tour, like a hot Yacht Rock SWAT team.

Here he is at the absolute pinnacle of his popularity, out showcasing his 2nd record Another Page at the historic, sold-out Budokan in Tokyo.

Christopher Cross

Nippon Budokan

Tokyo, Japan

2.2.1983

01 Never Be the Same

02 Deal 'Em Again

03 Poor Shirley

04 Think of Laura

05 Say You'll Be Mine

06 Mary Ann

07 Sailing

08 Minstrel Gigolo

09 Baby Says No

10 Talking In My Sleep

11 I Really Don't Know Anymore

12 Nature of the Game

13 Love Found a Home

14 No Time for Talk

15 Words of Wisdom

16 The Light Is On

17 All Right

18 Long World/band introductions

19 Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)

20 Ride Like the Wind

21 Beach Boys medley (Surfin' USA/I Get Around/Do You Wanna Dance/Fun, Fun, Fun) 

22 Ride Like the Wind (EN extended guitar remix)

Total time: 1:45:19

disc break goes after Track 11

Track 21 is from Nakano Sunplaza, Tokyo JP 11.7.1980

Track 22 is remixed to feature the playout guitar solo 

that was buried and prematurely faded on the original 1979 "Christopher Cross" LP

Japan personnel:

Christopher Cross - guitar & vocals

Rob Meurer - keyboards & vocals

Stephen Barber - keyboards (Tracks 01-20)

Jeff Sova - keyboards (Tracks 01-20)

Andy Salmon - bass & vocals

Tommy Taylor - drums & vocals

James Fenner - percussion

Hank Hehmsoth - keyboards & vocals (Track 21 only)

with

Toshiyuki Honda - tenor & alto saxophones

Tracks 01-21 are sourced from the 2024 bootleg silver 3CD set, limited to 100 copies, 

entitled "Japan Tour 80-83" on the Empress Valley Supreme Disc label (EVSD-1501/2/3), 

which themselves seem to be sourced from off-air FM captures -- from original NHK-FM broadcasts -- 

of indeterminate (but likely master cassette) origin

Track 22 is from the original 24-track multitrack stems from 1979, remixed by EN December 2024

remastered for unity by EN, April 2026
686 MB FLAC/direct link

A word about the last bonus track: it stems (pun intended) from this Rick Beato video I saw a couple of years ago that was all about how the ripping, facemelting guitar solo at the end of dude's signature hit Ride Like the Wind -- legendarily penned on a wild LSD trip --  was criminally buried in the final mix of the song. So, a couple of days later, I tracked down the multitrack stems for it, and remixed it to amp up just that very playout solo... and, as it turned out, Rick Beato knew exactly wtf he was talking about.

I've got a pretty mighty May mashed up over here at Bliss Bottoms, but let's keep the Yacht behind the horse and begin it by celebrating songwriter extraordinaire Christopher Cross -- born this day in 1951, and still out there Sailing.--J.