The Show
"Love For Sale" is the name of Boney M.'s second studio album and also the name of the concert-tour they went on after the release of that album. In the spring of 1977 a promo-concert was filmed in Hamburg (Germany) and during that concert the group performed the majority of the songs they had recorded in 1976 and 1977. Except for one (the fantastic "A Woman Can Change A Man") all of the songs from the Love For Sale album were presented and also 5 tracks from the previous album "Take The Heat Off Me" were shown
At that time euro-disco was the hitsound all over the world and Boney M. were the masters of it. It was a year before their commercial peak, but also the year before they started changing their sound from disco into biblical hymns, calypso-beats and nursery rhymes.
The Love For Sale Concert is a pure glamour-disco extravaganza and a great delight for all Boney M. fans and disco-lovers. It's a shame that it was only commercially released for a very short while on VHS-casettes (in a time that most people didn't have a video-recorder) and therefore it is very rare and most of the songs performed on that show haven't been seen by a lot of people, except for a few songs that made it onto the Boney M. Gold DVD.
A few years ago I found a mint copy of the show and I transfered it to DVD so the quality would remain great. I've watched the show a lot since then and every time I see it, it's as fabulous as the first time I watched it!
During the past few years the ABBA-fans have been treated with a lot of ABBA-specials that have been officially released on DVD (AbbaDabbaDoo, Abba in Japan and Abba in Switzerland) and all of those DVD's have remastered sound. I've watched these DVD's and they are fantastic: the remastered stereo-sound that has been put under the clips brings new live to the performances and makes them sparkling and fresh. Being a bit of an amateur sound- and video-editor myself I wondered if I could do the same with Boney M.'s Love For Sale Concert. After thinking about it for a while I decided to give it a try, because replacing the original mono-sound with the stereo-sound from the remastered cd's would definitely refresh this concert, but there would also be some obstacles...
The Remastering
As said before this is a promotion-concert and therefore most of the songs are performed in full-playback. Personally I'm very glad that they did that, because Boney M. always were stronger on their recordings than they were on stage. They did deliver some excellent live-concerts during their carreer, the one being recorded for Irish television in november 1978 being superior, but the records were produced so brilliantly with genious and very clever musical arrangements and multiple vocal overdubs done by Liz and Marcia that it was merely impossible to recapture that same sound on stage. A full live concert from 1977 was also recorded and has been released on the Fantastic Boney M.-DVD a few years ago and that's definitely worth the watch: songs like "Take The Heat Off Me" and "No Woman No Cry" are excellently performed, but the whole live-sound from that performance differs very much from Boney M.'s recording-sound.
The fact that the majority of the promo-concert was playback also made it suitable for stereo-remastering. First I had to re-edit all of the songs performed, because most of them were played a little bit faster on the show compared to the records and they used different edits and a lot of early fade-outs. Going through the tracklist I've noted the differences:
01. Love For Sale: the violin-played intro is left out (in fact: all of the string-parts from the records had been removed for this show, to give it a more 'live-feel', which is especially noticable on "Sunny" and "Daddy Cool" that are originally heavily arranged with strings, but also songs like "Take The Heat Off Me" and "Plantation Boy" got weaker from the lack of string-parts). The other thing they cut out of the song is the beautiful instrumental part from the middle. I later used this part as a loop that's playing through the menu of the DVD I created.
02. Take The Heat Off Me: early fade-out and Marcia switches between live singing and lip-synching during the verses.
03. Baby Do You Wanna Bump: a completely new version of this song was used for this show. It's got a different structure than all the versions that are available, so I had to recreate the whole song using lots of re-edits and I had to restructure many of the parts from the song to make a stereo-version.
04. Plantation Boy: finally a virtually complete song was performed; only a slightly early fade out.
05. Belfast: same here, the whole song was played.
06. Gloria, Can You Waddle: early fade out.
07. Have You Ever Seen The Rain: this was also a bugger, because instead of an early fade-out (which is easy to recreate) this song actually was longer than the album-version! I extended it using a part from the middle of the song and mixing it with Liz's mono-vocals from the show.
08. Sunny: no strings were used here (as said before), which takes all the sparkle and building-up out of the song. To add to the 'concert-feel' Liz's solo-parts were sung live, but her microphone wasn't on during the first verse, they sang live during what was originally an instrumental part and they added a cold ending. Lots of work to do! I decided to mix the stereo-version together with some of the original vocals from the show, because otherwise the performance would be out of sync.
09. Still I'm Sad: the humming-part after the second verse got removed and again an early fade-out.
10. Silent Lover: the whole song was played.
11. Motherless Child: the whole song was played.
12. Ma Baker: some parts at the end of the song were cut out.
13. No Woman No Cry: as before with "Sunny" Liz sang live during this performance and I used the same technique for the remaster: mixing the new stereo-sound with the mono-sound from the show. That was also essential here, because this song features some audience-participation and to leave that out of the new sound would be rediculous. Again they used a cold ending and therefore the very last part of the record isn't performed.
14. Daddy Cool: no strings (a flute-sound instead) and the omission of the intrumental part with the heavy bass-line near the end. I mixed the audience-clapping from the beginning of the song in with the stereo-sound.
So, those were all the re-edits I had to do to recreate the exact used versions from the show in stereo.
Re-editing and remastering normally isn't too hard for me; I've had some practice. The Love For Sale Concert however brought a whole new challenge: after I had re-edited the stereo-versions of the songs and made them the excact same length as the original mono-versions I noticed that a lot of the show was still out of sync. After a carefull examination I saw where the problem came from: for some reason some parts of the songs from the show have different tempo-changes compared to the cd-versions (sometimes even within 1 line!), something I had never seen before. To make the whole concert 100% sync I had to re-re-edit most of the songs very heavily. It literally took me weeks to get everything excactly the same as on the concert (to compare: normally when I remaster a videoclip it takes me about 15 minutes to get it stereo and sync). This really was a hell of a job and I nearly gave up twice, but: I got it done finally and the end-result was great.
I also made the sound from the original show a little higher and took the soundlevel from the re-edited cd-versions a bit down, so everything could be mixed together. I mixed all the applause from the audience and the group's "Thank You"'s in and then I put the new sound under the show and the whole concert had been remastered and was totally in sync. And like with the remastered ABBA-Specials the stereo-sound brought new live to the images, the Love For Sale Concert looked better and fresher than ever!
Here is a previewclip of "Sunny":
The DVD
After I had remastered the complete concert, all that was left to do was to make a dvd out of it. So I got a friend to make a nice picture for the dvd-menu and I imported the whole file into a dvd-creating software program. I added chapters that made it easy to skip through the songs and I added an instrumental part of "Love For Sale" as a loop to the dvd-menu. Then I burned the whole project to a disc and the dvd was finally ready!
When I put the dvd into my dvd-player for the first time I had connected my television-set with a dolby surround sound system and I turned the volume up really high. It was an amazing experience watching the concert like this: it felt like I was sitting front row in Hamburg in 1977 watching the best show ever!!!
Creating this dvd was a hell of a job, but it was definitely worth it!
Downloadlinks are in the comments.
