I absolutely love Assorted Secrets 4, TT vol. 80. I wanted to particularly find this one a few years back because some of the songs from this installment were featured in the previous design of the official website and I missed those tunes. It was a bit hard to find, mostly because I couldn't remember the names of the tracks, so it was a bit of hell in the beginning, but now I am fortunate enough to have it on my hands. It is one of the best TT materials out there.
Vol 19., P a r i s '76 is a real intense trip! I especially love the CD 2 from this issue.
And vol. 38, Berlin 1987, is my favorite. Not only because it has an amazingly excellent sound quality, but because this is the real last live performance with Chris Franke and it also has a total playing time of around 2 hours and 5 mins. You can travel from city to city and listen to this entire jewel without having to repeat any single track. I've burned this into 2 CD's and seriously, the sound is so top-notch that it feels as if this had been officially released by TD. My speakers love every second of it, especially with the loudest volume possible.
Re-discovering my spool of Baumann years TTs has totally re-fired my enthusiasm for the group. It was, as has been previously said, a massive and generous labour of love. But I think those who missed out can take some comfort in the 2 Bootleg Boxes having nearly the cream of the crop - my only changes would be the Berlin concert (TT67) instead of Hamburg to illustrate the headlong awesome rock power of the Cyclone tour, and by means of some pretty tricky time-travel, fetch the Spanish Inquisition to ask the audience member in Bilbao 1976 to kindly stop clapping along.
There is so much brilliant unreleased TD, that, as a lifelong fan, it breaks my heart not to be able to hear it in it's full and proper sonic glory.
The TT and TL series was a supreme labour of love, and I salute both Heiko for doing it, and the band for allowing it, but I can't help but think that there are tapes.....really good quality tapes and digital recordings, of pretty much everything in the archives, and all it would take is a few dedicated fans / studio engineers with mastering skills to make so much of it available. I'm convinced that there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of fans who'd be delighted to pay proper money to buy it.
After all, even a major label like Virgin Records have done a pretty poor job with their 'official' retrospectives (wrong member names for periods, terrible spelling, poor audio quality.) I don't see that they care anything about the band nowadays other than to make a quick buck. And the bulk of the money goes to them, not the band.
THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON did something really great a few years back, and released a high quality series called FROM THE ARCHIVES on their website, featuring unreleased material from their (imo) best period around LIFEFORMS and DEAD CITIES and sold hundreds of thousands of downloads and CDs. The fan base was still there, 10>15 years on, and the money went to THEM, not any label.
With so many of us TD diehards, many pushing over twice as long as fans, the demand would make the effort more than worthwhile, especially if the royalties were split between the former members / writers. How nice it would be if Chris, Paul, Johannes, Ralf and Jerome etc were to get a share of this? All artists deserve to get paid, especially artists of their caliber.
Every once in a while TD officially put out a 'classic' archive concert recording (SOUNDMILL NAVIGATOR, ROCKFACE etc) and massively welcome they are too. Also, official TD compilations sometimes contain rare individual concert / previously unreleased tracks (ANTIQUE DREAMS etc) but the infuriation is immense as an 'official' track fades out, and, knowing what comes next on the bootleg / TT / TL recording of the period, the next superb track just isn't there!
All recording artists often have to deal with ridiculous legal insanity, constraints and copyright (especially soundtracks), and sometimes these get so bad that some pieces are simply lost forever, in the files of stupid lawyers in one company layer after another who wouldn't know a good piece of music if it hit them in the face.
Maybe we'll never, ever get to hear this music properly, and eternal shame be upon those circumstances (where oh where is OEDIPUS TYRANNUS in full!!?). But, for a very large amount of it, I think that if there's a will, then there's a way.
I would absolutely pay £10 / E 15 for each excellent quality concert and archive material CDs / Flac downloads.