Deep Purple
Birmingham, UK
June 24, 1971

Audience tape of unknown lineage.

Originally downloaded by me from Demonoid in May, 2012.

Restoration was done in April, 2013 using Adobe Audition 3 and iZotope Ozone 5.
It's been retracked, speed-corrected, dropout-patched, volume-adjusted and de-muddied.
Subjectively speaking, the tape has gone from a grade of "C" to a "B" or "B+".
(see notes below)


01. /Speed King (2:11)
02. Strange Kind Of Woman/ (4:20)
03. /Child In Time 6:40)
04. Demon's Eye/ (1:15)
05. Anyone's Daughter (4:58)
06. Paint It Black (3:56)
07. Mandrake Root/ (15:32)

Total time: 38:52

Sound quality is fairly good, though just a little distant. Instruments and vocals are all clear except during "Speed King", which is just a jumbled mess. There are several cuts. The tapes starts in the middle of the "Speed King" guitar solo. The last guitar solo in "Strange Kind of Woman" and the first round of verses in "Child in Time" are missing. Only the first verse of "Demon's Eye" was captured. And "Mandrake Root" cuts out after 16 minutes. Still, it's a good show and includes songs from the forthcoming Fireball LP that would not be played after 1971.

After putting the finishing touches on Fireball in June of '71, Deep Purple played this first of two English dates before heading off to the US for a month-long North American tour. "Strange Kind of Woman" had been released as a single in February. Although the Fireball LP would not be released until September, this show included other two tracks from that forthcoming album. "Demon's Eye" would be released only on the UK version of Fireball, replaced in America by "Strange Kind of Woman". However, this show is notable for it's rare inclusion of "Anyone's Daughter", an uncharacteristic song that Blackmore reputedly hated.

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Restoration notes:
Since the show was recorded in mono, I copied one channel into both tracks to eliminate differences between the two tracks.

I retracked the show to put all introductions at the end of the previous track.

The recording seems to have been made on a recorder with an auto-level volume control, the result being that softer and less musically dense passages, such as song introductions or, say, drum solos, would have their volume levels boosted while regular music volumes would be lowered. I've made volume level adjustments for that.

I also increased the overall volume level since the original levels were way too low. No compression was used however.

Using a tuner and guitar as a reference, I found that the original ran about 3% too fast. It now runs at the proper speed.

"Demon's Eye" had a 4/10 of a second dropout and "Mandrake Root" had a 3/10 of a second dropout. Both were corrected by patching in a matching section from elsewhere in the song.

The original was somewhat muffled and muddy. With iZotope Ozone 5, I used the Harmonic Exciter to brighten the high end and ever so slightly sharpen the bass. An EQ boost at 5kHz also opened up the sound, giving it an airier feel.

Ran the files through Traders Little Helper to fix sectory boundry errors (SBEs).

I don't like grading bootlegs since it's so subjective, but I'd guess this restoration raised the tape a whole letter grade, maybe from a C to a B.

Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.

Images for this show: