Get Your Leeds Lungs Out (Halcyon)
University Of Leeds, Leeds, England – March 13th, 1971
(58:24): Dead Flowers, Stray Cat Blues, Love In Vain, Midnight Rambler, Bitch, band introduction, Honky Tonk Women, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Little Queenie, Brown Sugar, Street Fighting Man, Let It Rock
The Rolling Stones’ show at Leeds University on March 13th, 1971 was at the end of their month long farewell tour before their move to France and the recording of Exile On Main Street.
This is the common excellent mono soundboard recording produced by Glyn Johns for broadcast over the BBC. It is still missing the first two songs “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Live With Me”.
It first surfaced on vinyl and has seen many releases on compact disc through the years including Get Your Leeds Lungs Out! (The Swinging Pig TSP-CD-030, Excitable Recordworks 4511.1 A/B, Masters Of Sounds MOS 008, Royal Sound Records RD 001, TMQ Smoking Pig 73033 1701 A/B), Charlie Watts Live At Leeds (Speed Records SR MI 3002A/B), Get Your Leeds Lungs Out!-Revisited (The Swinging Pig TSP-CD-215), Hell’s Stones (Lobster 033/3).
Others include Leed Guitars…TV Stars (Turd On The Run TOTR-002), Leed Stones: The Flamin’ Groupie (Speed Records SR MI 3002 A/B), Leeds ’71 (Royal Sound), Live In Leeds 1971 (Armando Curcio Editore 02), Rockstars In Concert (611711 2), The Rolling Stones Live (CDDV 5512), Sonic Barbecue (Beacon Island 2S717 A/B/C/D), Live In Leeds 1971 (Dizionario Del Rock DIR-02), Live In Leeds (Sister Morphine Morph 22), Dave Lee Travis Show 1971, and In Concert 1971 (Diamond Sound DS 004).
Some releases come with an additional mix of “Let It Rock” which, it is claimed, in true stereo. It really isn’t, just being the same mono track as the others.
Get Your Leeds Lungs Out, which gets its name from Jagger’s encouragement to the audience to sing along to “Honky Tonk Women”, is the second release on the brand new Halcyon label. It follows the same pattern as the first: an excellent and well circulated soundboard recording cleaned up and released with shiny packaging and sparkle stars embedded in the paper.
The sound on this is almost professional and flawless. The concert is legendary, hearing Sticky Fingers era Stones sounding tighter than the LP. There is a laid back feel the show with perhaps the lamest version of “Satisfaction” on record.
But “Midnight Rambler” is one of the better ones recorded. As with their Brussels tape, because there is no additional material from this concert it doesn’t add anything to the already long list of releases covering this show. However the sound on this is absolutely fantastic and is well worth investigating.
The Perth soundboard was released after this one under the title Happy Birthday Dear Nicky and Halcyon will continue to release classic shows. So far they have focused upon single disc soundboards but hopefully they will expand that in the future and become a legitimate rival to the Dog N Cat and Exile labels.
