Mike Cooper
1968-08-07 London, England BBC Broadcasting House Studio S2 John Peel's "Night Ride" (M1-FM)

DimeTravel brings you "British Blues BOOM! Volume 07"

01. Maggie Campbell
02. Leadhearted Blues

Total Time ::: 5:55

::: Very fine mono off-air recording. Check samples for feast or famine.
::: Warts: Some dullspots weren't totally fixable. #1 is missing the first few notes.
::: Peel only had the 1st hour of Night Ride in Aug '68. Len Grant, the poet, was the other session artist for this date.
::: If you don't know Mike's work, get busy. One of the founders of the UK 60's country blues revival (from whence this session came), who then forged an incredible body of new style music in the early 70s for Dawn Records - a unique amalgam of folk, rock & free jazz - "Trout Steel" indeed! And those are only the first few years... Still out there pioneering today.
::: Uploaded with a SERIOUS PLEA. Surely some other folks have this & other sessions by Cooper from different tapers. Other Cooper sessions float on MP3. Perhaps the guy who taped off the air in the early 70s on his parents hi-fi system with the built-in radio & cassette deck could get in touch with me? Mike lost your email address & the music is wonderful but the MP3 thing is really a shame. It would be very much appreciated if some more could surface. Much obliged!
::: Garner lists this as Mike's 1st Peel session (of 9 Top Gear & Night Rides PLUS another 7 shows for Drummond, etc). Both surviving session trax here were recorded 4 months later for Mike's debut album (Pye Records), "Oh Really?". Garner says the session was 5 trax & also included "Divinity Blues", "The Way I Feel" & "Tadpole Blues". However, Peel suggests, after what is presumably the 1st song, that there are "at least 5 more numbers from Mike Cooper" on the show. I have 40 seconds of an instrumental that is NOT "Divinity Blues", seemingly the same session but from a different reel, at a radically different pitch & with slight speed issues), but with no intro or outro, I couldn't verify it was actually Mike - so left it off this upload.

Recording Information ::: unknown receiver & reel-to-reel recorder -> off-air master* mono reel (in poor shape) -> 1st generation Maxell XLII-90 cassettes, Dolby B on.

Playback 2011-07-18 ::: 1st generation Maxell XLII-90 cassettes on Nakamichi BX-300 cassette deck, Dolby on, azimuth adjusted for individual tape, heads cleaned & demagnatized -> Tascam CD-RW900SL professional CD recorder -> CD-RW, no track splits -> computer -> EAC secure mode (logs made) -> wav file.

Remastering 2015-04-xx wav -> Audacity [normalisation to remove DC offset, channel/phase alignment, fades, manual one-at-a-time glitch, bump, pop, click, dropout & dullspot repairs, volume adjustments, pitch (speed) fix #1 -5.1% & #2 -4.8% with single pass per song after frequency analysis & with pitchpipe verification, NO equalisation] -> CD Wave (track splits) -> flacs (Trader's Little Helper) -> yr ears. First uploaded week of 2015-04-11.

Line-up ::: Mike Cooper - acoustic guitar, vocals.

Nothing here ever commercially released to my knowledge. If I'm wrong, please advise & I'll take the offending trax offline.

DimeTravel 101 ::: Thanks to the original taper, & trader (The Reel Master from Manchester! - who did run copies for me while he had the reels borrowed) ::: Corrections welcome ::: Mike Cooper - what can you say? A king among men & musicians. What a load of listening & experimentation he's brought to & continues to bring to the world. This show fragment came from The Reel Master, who, being a long-time Fairport Fanatic, tracked down these reels circa 1990 due to their Fairport content. He was able to borrow the guys collection, which had been stored less than ideally, and were apparently not in the best of shape, some of the reels were dying. The taper was no hi-fi nut, but just loved music enough to tape off the radio, turning off the machine when what was playing didn't interest him, seemingly trying for session material. The result is often haphazard, and sessions are often missing tracks and many tracks are cut. The best thing for me was the guy taped some Night Ride programmes. Top Gear was fairly religiously recorded by tape zealots, but Night Ride programmes seem woefully under-represented in the world's archives, which is a real shame, as it was the show where Peel could tiptoe out onto the end of the smaller branches and broadcast some truly weird stuff. In any case, The Reel Master was kind enough to run all the reels for me. Thanks to BC, who took it upon himself to do an in-depth analysis of their contents. Sorting out the reels was intense research indeed & the results compiled in written form, about 12 pages, single-spaced typed with artists, song titles, session or album determinations, DJs, unrecorded song titles that were originally broadcast between the surviving material, and importantly, about 30 different programme dates (many paritals) - a huge undertaking! Anyway, thanks to them all, the original taper, The Reel Master, BC, and... most of all, the musicians. Listen, enjoy, show appreciation, share, give, spread peace. Yers truly, Knees

Support the artist! http://www.cooparia.com

Do whatever you want with it except sell it, 'cause that ain't cool!