A Tale Of Two Noise Floors

 

The Durutti Column - Live At The Venue London [VINI 1 UK 1983 24-Bit 176.4kHz FLAC]

A few weeks back, I posted my rip of the Kooky Discs / Durutti Label repress of Amigos Em Portugal, around the same time I had also ripped the label's 2016 remaster/repress of the limited & rare Live At The Venue London album. Some of you asked me to post this, but I resisted because I had real concerns about the source used for that release. The spectrogram cut off at around 16kHz with literally nothing above that frequency. I also noticed two noise floors, one of which was clearly an extremely crackly old record. Concerned that this 'new remaster' was in fact from a lossy rip of a dirty and worn original vinyl, I gracefully backed out and abandoned the idea.

The album was recorded raw from the desk at The Venue in Victoria, London on the 6th April 1982. It is just Vini Reilly and Bruce Mitchell on stage performing a nice set of Durutti classics from the first three albums, plus Party - which tells the tale of when our Vini took a girl to a party where she ended the night in bed with another man, this is strangely followed by a dedication to Vini's mum, Mother From Spain (written in a Barcelona hotel room). 

Reilly is a wonderful musician, perfectly augmented by Mitchell's unusual drum styles, however his lyrical content never really covers 'happy stuff', no more so than during his recollections of child abuse in the Catholic Church on Never Known. 

Now zip forward to today, and with a very nicely cleaned 1983 original pressing, I can at last deliver this record. Only 4000 were ever pressed and it is difficult to find a decent copy in the wild, so without further ado.....

A1 Party

A2 Mother From Spain

A3 Jacqueline

A4 Conduct

A5 Sketch For Summer

A6 The Beggar

B1 Never Known

B2 The Missing Boy

B3 Sigh Becomes A Scream

B4 Self Portrait

B5 Friends In Belgium