Last Night at the Lyceum (03/05/85)

I bought this one on tape from a record fair in Crawley in '85, not long before I first saw them live. It's a great set spanning the Zick Zack days, Fetisch, Tocsin, Der Wind from the Peel Sessions release (one of my favourites) and the then forthcoming Viva. Tracklisting:

(Intro)
Polar Licht
Boomerang
Tag Fur Tag
Der Wind
Eisengrau
Mondlicht
Autumn
---
Reigen
Nachtschatten
Morning
Jahr Um Jahr
Augen Blick
Paho
Zu Jung Zu Alt
Polar Licht

This is the first of my tapes to get the digitisation treatment. The quality isn't great and the cassette was in pretty bad shape (I had to un-knot it after the first attempt to play, hence the intro has been cut down a bit), but I buffed up the resulting file with Audacity and it's sounding much better (although the noise removal process has created a few artefacts in some of the intros - apologies).

[mp3 192kbps]

Hammersmith Clarendon, London W10 (07/07/83)

The excellent Kill Your Pet Puppy archive has posted a couple of X-Mal items: a rip of the Zick Zack Incubus 12-inch, and this partial live recording of a Fetisch-era gig at the Clarendon. Track listing:

Hand In Hand
Kaempfen
Geheimnis
Qual
Young Man
Incubus Succubus
Sehnsucht (part)

Nice work fellas!

Viva viva - ein neues Jahr!

Well, it's been a long time since I posted anything here, so it's time to make amends.

I've been very excited to find a few worthy X-Mal downloads appearing on mp3 blogs. From the "Mehr Licht! unbound" blog are these must-haves: The other Peel Sessions (1982, 83 and 84) and the Janice Long session (1986). Also available is a rip of the lovingly-compiled bootleg CDRs of all the X-Mal singles: Singled Out (also here).

I've finally got my act together to start digitising the few X-Mal bootlegs I own myself, so those will go up soon. Hopefully it will encourage others to share their live recordings. It would also be great to hear any demos (particularly those for "Devils", which are allegedly much more like the X-Mal of yore than the later slimmed-down soft-rock incarnation).

Since I'm about to start posting some mp3s, I'll quickly note my own perspective on the whole ethics debate. My view is that mp3 blogs are a great way to archive and share otherwise unavailable material with fellow fans, but I don't like copyright theft, particularly of material that's readily available elsewhere or might get an official re-release, so I won't be posting any of the official releases here.

If you're a fan of X-Mal and don't already have all the official releases, you can still buy the 4AD CDs ("Fetisch" and "Tocsin") from Amazon (or secondhand from Gemm), or - better still - get them cheaper, save resources and let the artists get a royalty by downloading them from eMusic.

The two later CDs ("Viva" and "Devils") are long since out of print, but still pop up occasionally on eBay.